For Australia, today was about The Apology. A speech made in parliament, by the prime minister, apologising for years of mistreatment and hurt inflicted upon aboriginal families over the hundred years leading up to 1970. The Stolen Generations. Families separated so that their children wouldn't "have to" grow up aboriginal.

There's a lot of history there, a lot of justifications at the time and after the fact, for why these actions were carried out. What hasn't happened in the intervening years, until today, is that the government said "sorry". Today, the Rudd Labour Government delivered the apology and, importantly, used that word. Sorry. A word that the previous government and Prime Minister refused, unambiguously, to use.

The apology itself was quite well written. It reads well and will be a good statement for the future. The delivery of the apology, the speech, wasn't as great. To me, Kevin Rudd is not a good public speaker, his oratorical style is not particularly inspiring or commanding. Still, today's event was a ceremony, a time to put the text on record and see the man bearing the leadership say the words. The delivery doesn't diminish the significance of the moment. The text and the fact that the apology was delivered will outlive the video.

Sadly, the event was diminished by the bipartisan nature, when opposition leader Brenden Nelson stood up to deliver his apology. His apology was very close to "I've been told I should say sorry and I'm sorry I have to be here. I didn't do it." He completely missed the point. This wasn't a wiping clean of the slate, or an assigning of blame to individuals. It was an acceptance of the consequences of a national policy that has caused long-term damage to the native inhabitants of this land. Trying to spin the impact as Nelson did was unworthy of the moment. Better that he said nothing at all, given that his party, with a dozen years in government, of which he has been a senior member for many years, did previous little in the past, certainly not up to the point of apologising on behalf of the nation (the previous prime minister, John Howard, once expressed "personal regret" that events happened, but that wasn't what people wanted to hear from somebody acting as the nation's leader).

I am highly cynical of the effectiveness of federal politics and not a particularly fervent citizen; it's simply a fact of life that I have to be a citizen of one country. Heavens knows I am not a Kevin Rudd fan and suspect his government will not be a lot better than the Liberals over the coming years. However, acts like today (at least the apology portion), are a good reminder of why I'm also not entirely ashamed to be Australian. For the federal government of the day to finally get over this hurdle, acknowledge that they are the current bearers of the mantle of responsibility and accountability, whose predecessors implemented some exceedingly poor policy with negative impacts right down to today (social workers now find it hard to intervene in genuine cases because of the resemblance of these actions to those precipitating the Stolen Generation)... for that to eventually take place, is a huge step. That was the partisan-less moment of the day, not the opportunity given to the opposition to also speak. There will be people calling for monetary compensation and other sorts of retribution. However, that's not going to correct history. Working out direct and indirect consequences and trying to right them is terribly difficult and a large cheque cannot do it. There will be debate about what could have been for months to come, I'm sure. Not everybody, whether of European, Asian or Australian aboriginal descent, will agree with what happened today. But all of that is by the wayside. The point is that this quite reasonable step, this thing that was made into an insurmountable mountain by previous governments refusal to step up, has been addressed and can now become something that happened and is not the elephant-size roadblock in the room.

I didn't really know what to expect today when I woke up to watch the speech (I am not a morning person; it required an effort). However, I decided to watch because it was something I'd wanted to see happen for many years. I remember discussions around tables when I was at University back in the late 80's about why the government of the day didn't have the spine to address the issue, I'm glad I watched this morning. The media audio grabs and summary cannot do justice to watching it in full and it was a rare moment when I was proud of what the government was doing. I don't know what the effects of today will be in five or ten years time. Maybe we'll be no better off, nationwide, than now. Maybe things will change. It's time for everybody to stop relying on the past as a crutch, a cross or a weapon and address the situation as it exists today.

Topics: home, life, politics, thinking, writing

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How did I not know this? Jasper Fforde, one of my favourite humorous fiction writers — and he of the slightly strange website — offers online, DIY book upgrades for his novels! Valuable typo and fact corrections. Funny, too.

(Via Maureen Johnson, who has written an amusing explanation about upgrading novels from draft to revised status.)

Topics: funny, writing

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Dear Lazyweb,

Is there a reputable style guide for Unix-style man pages online anywhere? I haven't been able to search out anything that looks worthwhile.

C'mon Debian project! This is just to sort of detail I would have expected you guys to have taken care of writing.

Since I'm still too lame to have comments, responses via e-mail will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Malcolm

Topics: software, writing

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Very quick entry today, since I'm crazy busy on stuff that I don't really want to be doing but have to get done anyway (a.k.a real life).

Over at John Scalzi's blog he has a thoughtful piece up about the words in Joan Osbourne's 1995/6 pop hit One of Us. I am complete agreement with his main point and, somewhat unexpectedly, have found myself thinking about it a bit more in idle moments today.

The comments are worth a read as well. More than one person doesn't really like the song, although when they explain themselves, it seems they don't like the rendition (are they fans of the Prince version?). Ignore the comments about word counts and deadlines if you aren't a regular Whatever reader: the guy is meant to be on a deadline and promised "not much blogging" for a few weeks. Barely one week in and out pops a 1000-word piece (maybe he didn't have time to make it shorter).

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the video Scalzi linked to, like a few of the comment writers. However, I like the tune for this song and I think it would make a good instrumental. I don't dislike the words, either. The original recording is a bit harsh in the sound for my taste and the video does nothing for me. I prefer the smoother instrumentals in the re-recorded version (also with vocals by Joan Osbourne) that was used as the title song in Joan of Arcadia — a series, by the way, that takes the point Scalzi was trying to make and runs with it to a much greater extent.

Oh (bonus feature!), if you're not in the mood for contemplative writing but have ever parented a child, known somebody who has a child, or have seen a picture of a child on television, this Scalzi piece from last week is fairly amusing.

Topics: music, writing

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A section heading from Wikipedia's style page on weasel words:

Offhanded references to the sky being often-blue will not necessarily demand a citation

Take that nit-pickers!

(Why do I always feel that "weasel words" should be followed by "...and the weasels who use them"? I may have some prejudices here, of course.)

Topics: funny, writing

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I need to improve my writing. I'm fairly sure my writing quality has regressed in the last few years and it's annoying me. So here goes...

Hi, my name is Malcolm and my writing sucks. I'm going to work on that.

You have been warned. Best to unsubscribe from the RSS feed now (no, wait... come back! Both of you!), this could get ugly.

Topics: writing

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Last month, I had a rambling post about the focus of development that started out with a diagram from the Creating Passionate Users website. If that diagram alone did not convince you to regularly read that site, maybe this will help...

Kathy Sierra had a post a few days ago about how to get users to read the manual, but it was more than that. The piece talks about why product documentation should really help you (the user) solve problems, not specifically use the product (although obviously it would ideally explain how to use the product to solve problems). Clear in hindsight, but sometimes needs to be spelt out like this.

Topics: software, writing

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Whilst researching a particular algorithm this morning, I followed a link from Google to the Algebra of Programming Research Group at Oxford University. More specifically, to the minutes of their weekly(?) meetings.

One of the authors of these minutes, Sharon Curtis, has an interesting writing style for these sort of notes. This is a group who discuss fairly complex algorithms and give examples in Haskell — in other words, not exactly targetting a "person in the street" audience. I assume the notes are mostly for internal consumption and, yet, I couldn't stop reading them. They are interesting, fairly understandable out of context and are scattered with throwaway lines that you normally don't find in such writing, but which is not at all distracting or out of place. A few examples:

• (talking about a particular algorithm representation using matrices) "If you represent a matrix as a list of lists, the proof that transposition is its own inverse is a pig (not least because it isn't true, on account of ragged lists)." (2 Dec, 2005)
• (after discussing a hat colour guessing problem) "With thoughts of suicidal hat-wearers in our brains, we all trooped off." (28 Oct, 2005)
• (talking about Sudoku algorithms) "Are the students going to understand this? What we'd like to do is show them how to treat the data structure as a whole, not just cell-by-cell. 'Wholemeal programming', said GJ. [...] It was suggested that repeated prunings would be a good idea: 'prunes go with wholemeal programming'" (14 Oct, 2005)
• "RSB has a problem with an usherette in a cinema. No, not like that. An imaginary usherette." (7 Oct, 2005)
• "Room 441 bore a distinct resemblance to a shingle beach today, because on arrival, RSB was busy putting pebbles in buckets." (30 April, 2004)

A nice way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday morning.

Topics: software, writing

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[Warning: relatively old guy reminiscing. Anybody under 25 should just move along.]

My friend John periodically points to other writing he has done that is published elsewhere (in his day job as the Greatest Science Journalist In All Of New Mexico, he writes for a living and his blog is not his only outlet). Recently, he pointed to two older contributions he made to the GNOME community: one on Open Source leadership and one about somewhat arbitrary style choices in technical writing.

On both occasions, I caught myself thinking "I remember that; those were interesting times". A recent post by Luis Villa about the World Cup (this post ) reminded me that the last time the World Cup was on, we were just about to release GNOME 2.0 and the IRC channels and mailing lists were very active with everybody fixing last minute bugs, writing documentation, etc. I could clearly remember spending a weekend in at my workplace at the time working out a fool-proof build order so that John could put it in the release notes. Seems like forever ago, but it was only four years.

This morning it happened again. Looking for something totally unrelated and fumbling around inarticulately on Google, I stumbled across the online Changelog for expect. Scroll down to July 6, 1996 and there is one of my earliest documented contributions to Open Source. Prior to that I had, I think, sent in some build patches and one possible memory leak report to the Pari/GP project, which I was using in some post-graduate study I was doing at the time. Expect was useful in the same situation: I could use it to script the running of some very long searches I was doing on a number theory problem.

The thing is, it all seems so recent. I can clearly recollect spending a morning trying to build expect on my home Linux box. Discovering some problems (the 2.0 Linux kernel was reasonably new at the time, so this wasn't unexpected in hindsight) and working out how to patch the autoconf script to make things work. I also sent Don Libes, the maintainer, a couple of documentation fixes. Maybe six hours later, back came a grateful email and my patches went in (I don't remember the Pari fixes being quite so quickly acknowledged). But this was ten years ago this week. Where has the time gone?

By comparison, the period from early 1993, when I first started using Linux until, say, mid-1996 when I was relying on Linux for the bulk of my computing work at home, seems much longer.

I can remember struggling for a couple of weeks to get Linux working initially, around March 1993; according to one email summary, kernel 0.99.6 was March 1993 and 0.99.7 was the following month. Version 0.99.6 sounds very familiar, so I'm going to claim that as my first Linux kernel. I may be out by six weeks or so, but it was around that period and I remember regularly updating throughout the never-ending 0.99 series of kernels in 1993 and early 1994. Just getting a good copy of each of the floppy disks home from the university was a challenge. Everybody getting started on Linux at that time has similar stories: you would make copies of the two (initially) or three or four or seven disks you needed; haul them home; discover that disk two didn't work; copy it again the next day; remember to haul it home; get as far as disk five this time; rinse, wash, repeat...

By the time 1996 came around, Linux was a relative breeze. You could get reasonably cheap CD readers and buy archives from Walnut Creek. Slackware was pretty straightforward to install (it was good from day one, but it had become huge and useful over the years). Slightly smaller user base meant that not all packages ran without some modifications, which led to things like the expect story, above.

Lots of water under the bridge in the meantime. Lots of lessons learnt, many no doubt forgotten. I am by no means a long-time user or contributor of Free Software or Open Source, but in these days where I am regularly interacting with people who were still in Primary School (or, in some cases, diapers) when Linux first hit the FTP sites, I have to be amazed sometimes at how far things have come; and how fast.

Topics: software, writing

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