Saturday, April 30, 2022

Before the Fall: a very short review

Noah Hawley is perhaps best known for his work in television: first Bones, then the extremely well-received Fargo.

It turns out that he's also written a number of novels. I was looking for something simple to take along with me on a cross-country plane trip, and I ended up with his Before the Fall

Hawley developed his skills as a screenwriter and you can really feel it in his writing. Before the Fall opens with a BANG! and the first 50 pages fly by before you can catch your breath.

The rest of the book careens along like Mr Toad's Wild Ride, but Hawley has a natural sense of pace. Each time I felt my attention about to flag, he'd drop another shoe and hook me for another few chapters.

Overall, the book delivers on its promise: it's an enjoyable time-filler, keeping you just intrigued enough to see it through to its satisfying conclusion.

One detail, though: I think I mentioned I picked this up for a plane trip?

Uhm, perhaps not my most well-considered choice, as the entire book is about a plane crash.

Heh. Serves me right.

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

What does Google have against "exposed"?

I was writing a document using Google Documents, and I wrote:

[Activity X] exposed problems with [Program Feature Y]

Google flagged "exposed" as an undesirable word, and said to me:

Word Choice: These synonyms may make your writing flow better. Try using:
  • uncovered
  • revealed

Elsewhere in my document I wrote:

The precise timeframe for this ...

and Google flagged "precise" as an undesirable word, and said to me:

Word Choice: These synonyms may make your writing flow better. Try using:
  • specific
  • exact

What the heck is up with Google?

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

California COVID progress

From what I can tell, the California state-wide COVID-19 website has now switched to twice-a-week updates.

For many months, the site was updated seven days a week, with only occasional omissions for major holidays.

Sometime last fall, the site switched being updated only five days a week, taking Saturday and Sunday off and bundling those results into Monday's update.

This week, when I look at the website, it says:

Data is updated on Tuesdays and Fridays.

I suppose this is probably progress, as the state presumably feels that it's no longer important to update the site as frequently.

P.S. I think nobody makes the attempt to say "Data are updated..." anymore. I am showing my age.

Release notes done well

In computer industry parlance, Release Notes are a mechanism for communicating change.

A software system typically undergoes a series of development cycles, with the result that, every so often, a new version of the software is released. Each release generally contains a compendium of bug fixes, as well as some number of new features.

For a small piece of software, or for a piece of software that is frequently released, release notes can be boring and mostly inconsequential, simple recitals of bug fixes which are often only of interest to the handful that encountered that particular bug.

For a large and sophisticated piece of software, a long time may have elapsed between releases, and a large team may have been working on the software, and so the scope of the change between releases may be hard, and challenging to communicate.

A common approach is to have a summary listing, embedded with myriad links to details, for example the Linux Kernel release notes tend to follow this format. Another classic example is the Java release notes.

Now, Unreal Engine is a very sophisticated piece of software which is nearing its 25th anniversary.

Unreal Engine 4 was released in 2015. Unreal Engine 5 was released in 2022.

That's a long time, and that's a large piece of software, and so the technical communication challenge is immense.

So it's lovely to see what a stunning job has been done with the Unreal Engine 5 Release Notes.

Although the overall format is very similar to the Linux Kernel release notes, being a single immense listing of changes, each with their own hyperlink to background material with further details, what a difference the presentation makes! The Unreal Engine 5 release notes are lavishly illustrated, with animated GIFs and other illustration techniques throughout.

Of course, this material is not for the novice reader; you have to be prepared to encounter sentences such as

The Shader Complexity view mode shows a heatmap of shader instruction counts per pixel, encompassing all rendered objects. Nanite's existing Material Complexity view mode shows a heatmap of the number of unique materials on Nanite geometry only per 8x8 tile, which is a useful metric for determining material coherency in the Nanite pass.

But my oh my, if this is the sort of stuff that gets you up in the morning, browsing the Unreal Engine 5 documentation will provide many hours of glorious exploration of new and fascinating ways to make computers work magic.