Coredump

I just got home from an all-nighter at the office. There’s still no electricity here, as in most parts of the metro. (Thank goodness for generators and redundant power backups at work.)

When I got out of the office building this morning and while riding a cab back home, I got a clear picture of the onslaught typhoon Milenyo had caused: shards of thick signage plastics, broken glass, leaves, branches (and tree trunks!) littered the main street. The steel scaffolding of a huge billboard fronting Club 650 fell over the steak restaurant there. Even the large Chikka billboard that towered over the Ortigas-C5 flyover was humbled by the typhoon. In my place here in Pasig, trees were uprooted and roofs flew off houses. The tarpaulin billboards that served as backdrops to the countless factories in the area were shred to pieces.

Too bad I don’t have a phone-camera (camera phone?) like Migs does — all these would have made good web copy. But I’m glad I didn’t get to receive Milenyo’s wrath first-hand. I was cooped up in the office since 3:00 PM yesterday with half our team. (Good thing there weren’t too much load coming from our Ireland and China teams, or we would have had a different kind of storm then.) And I’m thankful, too, that my family in the province were spared. I wouldn’t have known what to do had Milenyo hit the province instead.

(In the midst of all these, some things still worked — mobile phones, for one. Since I didn’t have electricity at home yesterday morning before going to work, my wife would relay typhoon tracking updates from TV through SMS. I also coordinated with other team members through text, and I got to compose a few offline mails using the remaining battery life on Mathilda. Heck, I even got to play a mean game of DotA — heavy graphics and audio at that — before she finally protested. {So, yes, richard, Dell can do that. ;)})

Found this through the Full Disclosure list:

A clever exploit in a little-known Google service could be used to launch phishing attacks, by imitating Google services — hosted on Google’s own servers.

Google has taken down the service.

I was rummaging through my backup CDs — yes, I keep those, despite the fact that there’s always FTP. (Torvalds)

A bit of a backgrounder: I used to be an editor for the school publication back in college. In fact, I was with the national secretariat of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines from 1996 to 1998. During my stint with the CEGP, we give journalism training to other student writers. This was a part of my notes on editorial writing. I’ve had notes on other topics: editorial analysis, publication design and features writing. Only, those aren’t in my known backups. But they’re in there somewhere.

I borrowed copiously from Vergel Santos, my dad’s former editor in the now-defunct Today, who gave a particularly refreshing and unconventional talk on writing way back in 1997.

Some notes on news writing

Definition.

• “History in a hurry.” (Nick Joaquin)
• Derived, presumably, from the cardinal directions, hence, coming from all sides, everywhere.
• “Fresh info of something recent; new or strange.” (Webster)

Types.

• Verbal. Grows out of speeches, interviews, press releases, documents. “Stories you listen to.”
• Visual. Elements that are concrete, explicit. Involves human struggle, action. Typically sports and police stories. “Stories you can see.”

Structure.

• Conventional. Inverted pyramid.

  

  Most of the time, this still works but is considered passe. It came from when reporters used to call in their stories. (Aside: my dad spent some of his time filing his stories this way.) Sometimes, the transmission gets cut off so it was necessary to put everything important in the first few paragraphs. (Another aside: also, back in the days of literal cut-and-paste, it’s often okay to just cut off the end parts of the columns to fit the copy in the page, hence the publication term, “copyfitting”.) With the advent of fax machines and emails, complete stories can reach the desk on the fly and intact. Another reason why this is considered almost obsolete is that it is too mechanical to order the importance of paragraphs in a story — it goes against the natural flow of thought.

• New. “Hour glass” configuration.

  

  This is more flexible and solves the problem of natural flow. As always, the lead is at the core of every news story. A reporter cannot cram all the salient facts in the lead to drive the point in, so a lead support is used to back it up. The lead support can consist of as many as two to three paragraphs. Details can then follow, going through the natural motion of the story. Background material can be inserted to prop everything up and add spice to the rest of the article.

  The point is to take care of the important points first: what happened? (lead); why? how? (lead support); what does it mean? what makes it unique? (detail). Write a story as if you’re telling it to a friend, a neighbor or a colleague.

Elements. What makes news news?

• Immediacy. Something that just happened, is happening, or is about to happen.
• Proximity. Anything that directly or indirectly affects the audience, their families and friends, neighborhood or community. Not just physical but psychological. Mental as well as linear. How close is it?
• Consequence. Significance of the story for the readers. What will this bring about? What’s it to me? Closely related to immediacy and proximity.
• Prominence. Well-known people, events, places (remember Loren Legarda’s PEP Talk?) by virtue of achievements or notoriety.
• Conflict. The struggle between good and evil is always a central element in every human conflict: the criminal versus the victim; the landlord versus peasants; Lucio Tan and the Estrada regime versus striking PAL workers [NB: The age of this article shows.]; repressive school administration policies versus students.
• Suspense. Piling up of action to an unpredictable climax.
• Oddity. Anything strange, rare, unfamiliar, novel.

Lead. The “core” of a news story.

In a lead, facts must be at the maximum, words kept at a minimum. (Fifteen to 20 words standard; one sentence, one paragraph.) More sentences mean more words; more words, more relationships; more relationships, more effort to the reader; a greater chance of misunderstanding by the reader; the sooner he will just quit reading. KISS: keep it short and sweet.

• Conventional. Summary or capsule lead (5Ws, 1H).
• Grammatical.
  • Subject - emphasis on individuals, events, places, objects.
  • Phrase - prepositional (to).
  • Clause - conditional (if), causal (because), substantive (what), concessive (although), temporal (after, before).
• Teasers.
  • Quotation - direct or indirect, often forceful.
  • Allusion - coining a literary phrase, for example.
  • Staccato - build-up of action.
  • Question - posing something to be answered in the succeeding paragraphs, or not at all.

Tips.

• Use natural language. Be comfortable with the reader: try to establish rapport, but don’t get too chummy — be reserved, not aloof. Use simple words: avoid heavy phraseology — you are writing for the reader, not for your editor nor yourself. Take pains in explaining terms, if jargon is unavoidable. Know the nuances of the language — remember, words are weapons. Mind your grammar, use appropriate tensing.
• Edit your own work. Cut ruthlessly. Read your story. Then cut some more. (Aside: In the editorial office of the Assumption College’s publication, I read this sign: “Macro-edit, then micro-edit.”) Less verbal fat, more contextual muscle.
• Establish meaning, context and perspective in your story. These can be inferred from the detail and background aspects. But don’t keep your readers guessing. Get to the point, and quickly.
• Remember your ABCs: accuracy, brevity and coherence.
• Attribute. If possible, reveal your source at the onset of the story to establish credibility and authority. Or, for effect, delay the introduction of the source until the later paragraphs. Protects against libel, too.
• Assume your reader knows nothing of the story. Convince him that it will affect him and everyone around him. Make your story significant. Make it interesting, but don’t dumb it down. Do not put on a condescending tone, “preach to the choir”, nor proselytize.
• Cover everything. Gather facts conscientiously and present them clearly. Avoid generalizations and speculations — reserve that for opinion writers, pundits and your readers.
• Take sides. Objectivity comes from the careful presentation of facts — nothing more. Take all sides of the story, but always emphatize with the aggrieved party.

In Pinoy Tech Blog, I've written about my experiences so far with Google Hosting. My new email/IM address, im[spam_me_at]iandexter.net, is hosted by Google. I get to have the same coolness of GMail, among other things.

Google is becoming so pervasive in my computing life. I’ve installed Google Desktop on Mathilda, which runs on Windows XP. The Desktop app is something similar to Mac's widgets (but, of course, Mac's are better ;)). It's got gazillions of "gadgets" you can add. Right now, I have a to-do list, a scratch pad, a nifty lookup console for Google Talk and GMail, photo slide shows from Mathilda's storage and from web feeds, a system monitor, a WiFi signal monitor, a battery meter, and a slick digital clock.

Using Google's patented search technology, I can look for content on Mathilda and from the web with just a couple of presses of the Ctrl key. The search bar is pretty slick, too, dynamically listing search results as you type in the keywords.

Desktop can also search across computers, if you allow it. Of course, the indexes would have to be copied to Google servers and transmitted to your other computers. I haven't used this yet, but since I already have Desktop on my other computers, I'm planning to. Soon as I learn how to do it.

Other Google tools I've tried: Google Talk, Google Web Accelerator (not that much improvement in my surfing, though), and Google Earth. On the web, I've tried out Notebook, Spreadsheets, Page Creator, Calendar, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and other Google beta products and services.

Now if only Google would give me an Adsense account. Better yet, hire me.

I haven’t gotten around to uninstalling Windows XP Media Center on Mathilda. In fact, I may not want to. See, I’ve come to — gasp! — like Mathilda’s utterly backward (Windows? Shame on me!) but totally slick Media Center UI. But I’m still a Linux guy, so there has to be a compromise. So…

Mathilda, meet Evey. Evey runs on Ubuntu Breezy. She’s a VMWare Server instance, of course — a clone, actually, of a readily available image from the VMWare Community site. I’m doing things on her that will give her a personality all her own. For one, she’s now my staging server for testing Drupal themes. A quick sudo apt-get install whatever will morph her into a full-blown Linux sys-ad platform.

Mathilda and Evey work well together. I’ve alloted half of Mathilda’s RAM to Evey, and they’re sharing it very well. I haven’t installed an SMP kernel on Evey yet, but I’ve prepped her up to recognize the Core Duo, too.

(If the anthropomorphism is getting to your nerves, please don’t. I’m used to naming my boxes. My previous desktop was Iris. My test servers at work are Hiraya, Mithi, Padme, Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn. In my previous work at PhilRice, the servers were Maui, Sabel, and Ligaya (named after the branches). When I was in NIA, I had an HP/Compaq Proliant ML370 named Leia (srv-win2k-dc-01 was just too boring). My first PC — an XT machine with a whopping 16MB RAM — was called Chico, after the now-defunct Pinoy clone brand.)