Single-tasking rules with new text editors

Maybe it's a longing for a simpler time, or the realization that your computer is loaded with distractions, but lately I've been seeing lot of text-editing programs designed to narrow your focus.

Multitasking is out now. Welcome to the wonderful world of single-tasking.  

I've been reading about the Darkroom program for Windows, and Writeroom for the Mac. Then there's WriteMonkey and PyRoom, two other programs that do absolutely nothing but give you a background to type your words on. Almost nothing to play with on any of these programs.

The big question here is, what fun is that? It's not like you can adjust your margins, change fonts, or add fancy graphics here. Your screen looks absolutely barren; even the desktop icons and Freecell game are blanked out.

I use PyRoom (which is pictured here), a text tool that shows you nothing but a green box on a black screen. My text shows up in green in that box. No formatting, no toolbars, no dancing paper clips -- just the text in a box.

When I wrote for the Fontana Herald-News, we used the old Harris typesetting system, which was ancient even in the late 1980s. PyRoom reminds me of the terminal I typed on back then. The only real difference was that there was a string of commands at the top of the screen, which were for setting the type and meant nothing to me, the writer. I was limited to eight characters for the file name (which we called a "slug" back then.

I was quite productive on these old-school screens because, well, there was nothing else to do but write. I'm easily distracted, so it's probably a good thing I don't have an Internet connection at home or I'd get nothing done.

Much as I've tried to multitask, I always do my better work when I'm going the opposite direction. That means when I write, I write. When I design the page, I design the page. Those two disciplines used to be -- and still should be -- kept separate. That's why I do most of my writing on a plain-vanilla text editor instead of something like OpenOffice or Microsoft Word.

With PyRoom you can set the background to a variety of color schemes, but I stick with the default green-on-black. And I understand with WriteMonkey you can even set the sound to give you the clacking of a typewriter; how cool is that? Other than that, your commands are pretty minimal with these programs. Here's the help file with PyRoom:

---------
Control-H: Show help in a new buffer
Control-I: Show buffer information
Control-P: Shows Preferences dialog
Control-N: Create a new buffer
Control-O: Open a file in a new buffer
Control-Q: Quit
Control-S: Save current buffer
Control-Shift-S: Save current buffer as
Control-W: Close buffer and exit if it was the last buffer
Control-Y: Redo last typing
Control-Z: Undo last typing
Control-Page Up: Switch to previous buffer
Control-Page Down: Switch to next buffer
---------

While Darkroom is a Windows program and Writeroom is ported to the MacIntosh, PyRoom has no real preference. It's written in the Python programming language, so it should work with all operating systems. It's also free. 

I wasn't sure I'd like using such a stark text editor, but the more I use it the more I like it. And I get a lot more done when I'm using it.

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Can't go outdoors? See weather virtually

You know about those frequent computer users, be they writers, gamers, cubicle residents, and programmers. They spend hours squinting at an LCD screen to the exclusion of everything else. For some, computers have become a handy alternative to real life.

If you have to go to a weather site to find out if it's raining outside, then you're just the person I'm talking to.

I read this piece in FilePlaza about YoWindow, a program that makes it unnecessary to even go outside. Seriously. According to the article, it brings the outdoors inside.

From FilePlaza:

... a beautiful landscape changes over time, reflecting the actual weather. It's like watching the weather out your window. Watch the weather with pleasure!

Ugh, no thanks.

Admittedly, I spend a lot more time at the computer than a grown man should. But my favorite at-home workstation is out on the front stoop, with the laptop and a cup of coffee. If the weather is rough I'll sit in a chair by the propped-open front door. My favorite online place is a college campus nearby, outdoors, where there's plenty of scenery (yeah, that kind, too).

I guess YoWindow would have a special value to the office worker who is chained to his cubicle. I've never had one of those jobs, and I'd rather have a battery acid enema than work under those conditions. Even when I worked in newsrooms, I took every excuse to go outside and hunt up my stories in person.

So, if you're one of those folks who is indoors all the time and has a skin pallor that you can only get when raising mushrooms, you might want to take a look at YoWindow.

Or, better yet, find an excuse to go outside and enjoy the real deal.

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Facebook security issues? It's the ducky's fault

Gee everybody's so friendly on Facebook ... probably too much so.

Two Facebook users, Daisy Felettin and Dinette Stonily, sent out friend requests to 100 Facebookers each, chosen at randon though concentrating on their own age groups. Between the two of them, 95 people decided to become their friends.

Except Daisy and Dinette don't exist. They were created by the IT firm Sophos to show how easy it is to convince Facebook users to reveal personal information to total strangers.

Daisy (using a photo of a rubber duck as her avatar), is known to Facebook users as a 21-year-old woman, while Dinette Stonily presented "herself" a, a 56-year-old with a photo of two cats as her avatar.

Daisy concentrated on younger Facebook users, and came away with 46 new friends. Of these 46, she got full birthdates from 89 percent of them, family/friend data from 46 percent, a town or suburb from 50 percent, a full address from four percent, and a phone number from seven percent.

Older Facebook users, when dealing with Dinette, were also quick to become friends. Of the 100 approached, 41 became friends -- but another eight approached Dinette of their own accord and befriended the cat-loving phantom. And of the 49 new friends, Dinette got full birthdates from 57 percent of them, family/friend data from 31 percent, a town or suburb from 43 percent, a full address from six percent, and a phone number from 23 percent.

Check out their names again. They're based on anagrams for "false identity" and "stolen identity."

Ugh. There are a lot of people who shouldn't be running computers.

At Sophos, they call this experiment the “rubber duck attack.” There's a purpose behind the goofy moniker, as it shows how you can gather someone’s personal info without any technical expertise, simply by working within the social network’s rules.

I can't stand Facebook. I'd rather not waste my time with it. I was ready to shut down my account when some friends -- real friends, as in people I know and like -- started contacting me there. For many of these friends, that's the online way to keep up with one another.

OK. It goes like this. Not everyone who says he wants to be your friend is really your friend. Got it? You wouldn't invite some random person into your living room just because he says he wants to "friend" you, as they say in Facebook. But then y'all already knew that.

Here's something revealing: The 46 people befriended by Daisy have an average of 220 Facebook friends, while Dinette's 49 new pals have an average of 932 Facebook friends.

I'm tired of belaboring this point: Nobody has that many friends. 

Sophos (the duck people) offer their own social-networking security tips:

• Don't blindly accept friends. Treat a friend as the dictionary does, namely "someone whom you know, like and trust." A friend is not merely a button you click on. You don't need, and can't realistically claim to have, 932 true friends.
• Learn the privacy system of any social networking site you join. Use restrictive settings by default. You can open up to true friends later. Don't give away too much too soon. 
  
• Assume that everything you reveal on a social networking site will be visible on the internet for ever. Once it has been searched, and indexed, and cached, it may later turn up on-line no matter what steps you take to delete it.
  

And watch out for potential friends bearing rubber ducks.

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After rough start, Firefox marks fifth birthday

I never would have expected this. Firefox is five years old.

Despite its promise from the jump, Firefox spent its beta period without any real identity. Literally.

At first no one was really sure what to call it. For a while it was known as Phoenix, then Firebird. I believe the developers had to come up with a fast name change because there's another piece of software called Firebird, and branding is a big thing in the computer world.

With such an inauspicious beginning, it's amazing to see that the product survived, let alone developed a reputation as a stable browser.

To further confuse things, Firefox is open source, meaning you can take the code, tweak it, build something else from it, and rebrand it. This was done with Debian Linux, as the Firefox brand is copyrighted though the source code is not, so that thing that looks and feels like Firefox is called Iceweasel or some such thing. I've also used BonEcho, a rebranded, stripped-down version of Firefox for the ultralight Puppy Linux.

For a while, one of the lesser-known and more tongue-in-cheek Firefox extensions available was called firesomething, which would put a whole different name on the browser every time you run it. The name on it may be SnowSnake this time, and maybe something like BlizzardLizard the next. It was a goofy extension, but brought a chuckle to this user who remembered Firefox's early search for a name.

The browser made it out of beta and released Version 1.0 five years ago this week. Within four days, more than a million people downloaded it. I was one of them.

I was one of the early Firefox adopters. I was running an assembled-from-scratch computer, and already I was sick of Internet Explorer's balkiness and security leaks. I went to the old Mozilla suite, and when that company announced it was throwing its resources into a new, browser-only project, I had to try it out.

The design was a thing of beauty. You were getting a basic browser, and you'd add whatever you feel you needed to it. Now, five years later, the modular design remains. My Firefox has the experimental Google Gears extension, plus the LastPass password keeper. But the biggest extension I have is ScribeFire, which allows me to compose blogs within the browser and post them seamlessly. ScribeFire is big, adds more bloat to the browser, and is sometimes buggy so I'm a bit lukewarm about it. But I use it.

A caveat about Firefox: The more add-ons and extensions you install, the slower it will run. It's like running a car with all the options instead of a model with power nothing and the kind of air conditioner you get when you open all four windows. But even with a lot of chrome on it, Firefox is a good browser, stable, and secure. The developers stay on top of things, and are quicker to solve their bugs than the Microsoft people are at admitting there's a problem with IE. For a while, Firefox had a problem where it would blow up in your memory and consume every CPU cycle you had, but that was solved several updates ago.

Over time, Mozilla dropped its old browser and made Firefox its big Web browsing application. Recently, some fans of the old Mozilla browser took the source code, tweaked a few things, updated the whole thing, and released it as Seamonkey.

Now, Firefox is taking a decent chunk of the browser market. It's the main browser by about 25 percent of Web users, but that's a funny number. Firefox is not routinely installed on computers out of the box, and many users tend to stick with what's already on the box -- like Internet Explorer. Figure it. To use Internet Explorer you unpack the computer, plug it in, and double-click on the big "e" on the screen. You have to go out of your way to get Firefox -- and then install it yourself. But, Firefox now grabs a bigger share than the obsolete IE version 6, which is still a step ahead.

Recently, MozillaZine announced that Firefox was present on a majority -- 50.6 percent -- of computers, based on numbers by the exo.performance.network. So someone, somewhere, is doing an awful lot of downloading.

But while Firefox has seen some real growth lately, the year-old Google Chrome is growing even faster. Roughly four percent of computer users are making Chrome the prime browser, so that one has a way to go, but the growth rate matches the buzz it's generating. I played some with Chrome, but its development has primarily been on the Windows and, more recently, MacIntosh side. Still, I'm pleased by its lightness and speed -- by comparison a fully-loaded Firefox is kludgy -- but Chrome has an unfinished feel to it. I do suspect that, once it is ported to Linux, I may put it on my front line.

Firefox is still my go-to browser, but mostly because it works better with much of the stuff on the Web (particularly the experimental Google Labs widgets). It's probably a little bloated for my taste, though. Much as I tend to shy away from those large, do-everything suites (such as Open Office), I like Seamonkey (the rebuilt and reissued Mozilla browser suite) a bit better. Even with the built-in mail reader and HTML editor, its design is lighter than the browser-only Firefox. I do like Opera for the same reason, though it hasn't caught on in the mainstream computer world at all. Too bad. Opera is the only one that has a chance of outrunning Chrome in a speed test. Both of them are much quicker than Firefox, while IE lags so far behind you'd need searchlights to find it.

But if you want pure speed, Lynx runs circles around all of them, including Google Chrome. But since Lynx is text-only, you might have a problem watching those YouTube videos on it.

Internet reaches middle age

Although few had even heard of this Internet thing (then known as the "information superhighway" until the early or mid-1990s, it got its real start 40 years ago this week.

It was Oct. 29, 1969 when the first two nodes of ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. And unless you were one of the guys on the inside, you really didn't know or care.

I was a bit of a late adopter. It was 1996 when I used a noisy modem to link into an Internet provider in a nearby city. My computer was an old Leading Edge XP, with an 8088 processor, Hercules graphics card, DOS 5, and 2400-bytes-per-second modem. I used Procomm to link up, and the text-only Lynx browser to surf.

This wasn't the first time I'd used a modem. By then I was an old hand at sending text files point to point over the phone lines. I worked for a newspaper in Kingman, Arizona at the time, and generated a lot of stories from my home office in Bullhead City, 40 miles away. I'd call the publisher, Matt, and tell him to set up the computer for incoming copy, give him five minutes, then send the stuff. Soon Matt would see my text streaming across his screen, a character at a time. One of my other reporters would send me his copy from his home office, I'd edit it from home, then send it to the home office the same way. I was even able to execute commands on my home computer (the Dos-driven PC) from the MacIntosh at work, using an old-school program called Telnet.

Once I got the knack of surfing the Internet, it became a bigger part of my life. And I remember telling my parents about my experiments. Dad was already good with computers -- we'd traded software for several years -- but he wasn't sure about this online thing. A curious toy, he concluded.

At the time, Netscape was the go-to browser before Internet Explorer nuked it in market share. There were rumors that you might be able to surf on the same infrastructure that your cable TV used, and much faster than dialup. Companies began building their own primitive Web sites, and ordinary people were cobbling together their own Web sites on GeoCities (which shut down a few days ago). It was a whole new world out there, the Wild Blue Yonder.

It's been 13 years since I fired up my first Web browser (Lynx, by the way, is still available and still text-only). But a lot has changed since then. Rather than write for print, my work shows up in the ether of the Internet and many of my readers are on the other side of the world.

I've developed friendships with people I'd never met, and who live in places I've never visited. I've discovered musicians I've never heard before and downloaded their music. I've downloaded entire a lot of software and quite a few operating systems -- and asked questions about the software online. I've communicated with a Linux developer in Australia and let him know how I was able to get his system to run on computers that even he wasn't sure could be done. I've debated many a subject online. I've set up the computer to download news from several hundred sources at a time.

I'm an experimenter, and can't leave stuff alone. Besides Netscape, I've used Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Seamonkey (which is what Mozilla has become), Opera, and Google Chrome. Firefox is my most-used browser now, but I notice Seamonkey is now in 2.0 and it deserves a look.

Instead of listening to a whining modem, I go straight wireless. I have about a half-dozen places where I go to do my work -- some indoors, some outside, and I'll unpack my netbook, hit a few buttons, and talk to the world. In fact, once I left dialup I had no earthly reason to even keep a landline -- a cell phone on my hip, wireless Internet close by, a second, Internet-based phone line through Google Voice, all my communications needs are met.

Even then, I'm a bit of a primitive. My cell phone merely makes calls and sends off text messages. It doesn't browse the Web. I can send short text messages to Twitter or this blog, even an email, but my single-function LG doesn't stack up to those iPhones or Crackberries that do everything.

When you consider the all-purpose cell phones, netbooks, laptops -- and I recently read about a pen that's really a computer -- you just may see desktop computers as another dying breed. Even hard drives may become a thing of the past, what with USB thumb drives and online file storage. Some of your netbooks work with just internal flash storage and USB drives, without a hard disk in sight.

The folks at UCLA and Menlo Park had no idea at the time what they'd started.

(Screenshot: The old text-based Lynx web browser, where I made my first forays on the Internet, is still around. It's shown here with Firefox 3.5.3.)

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You tell me: Remember your first time on line? Care to share? Use the comments section for your input.

Twitter's appeal: People love the mundane

I'll have to admit, this Twitter grows on you.

A couple of years ago, I hadn't even heard of Twitter, and even a year ago I wondered what the point of it was.

Twitter is called a "microblogging service," which allows one to post whatever he wants online, as long as it's no more than 140 characters. Twitter basically asks the question, what are you doing now?

And most of the posts (called "tweets" in Twitter parlance) indicate that a lot of people have no real life, and should stay away from computers. I mean, how many posts about the mundane can you endure?

It's this mundane stuff that seems to be much of Twitter's appeal. And, it's become huge. According to ComputerWorld, people are tweeting from the car, the theater, from restaurants, even from the can. But, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology studied these short messages -- actually from Jaiku, a microblogging platform that Twitter is practically edging out of existence -- and suggests most of the posts are beyond inane. And the Oxford University Press studied 1.5 million "tweets" and came to the same conclusion.

Newsweek columnist Daniel Lyons calls Twitter "a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers," citing folks like Shaquille O'Neal, Kim Kardashian, znd Ryan Seacrest as regulars in TwitLand.

"It's morbidly fascinating, kind of like the forbidden thrill you get watching Maury Povich's show or professional wrestling," Lyons wrote. "You know it's awful. You know you shouldn't enjoy it, yet you can't look away. That, I'm afraid to say, is why I've come to believe that, of all the hellish things that have been spawned in the fever swamp that is the Internet, Twitter may turn out to be the most successful of them all—not in spite of its stupidity, but because of it."

Lyons said that one recent study -- though he didn't cite it in his article, so the findings are immediately suspect -- said that 40 percent of tweets were "pointless babble." Only 40 percent? My own study, using a time-honored methodology called "pulling numbers out of my butt," suggests close to 70 percent of tweets are mindless, worthless wastes of server space.

Shoot, I don't want to know what you're having for dinner, unless I'm invited. I personally don't give a rip that you're going to the bathroom now, and I REALLY don't want to know how it came out. Are we on the same page here?

Twitter is one of those things where the machine is invented first and you find out what you can use it for later. And, so far, a few put it to good use. It was someone on Twitter who brought us up to speed, real-time, on the election protests in Iran a few months ago. Someone else used the microblogging service to send us the first pictures of that plane crash in the Hudson River in January, the one where the pilot did such an incredible job of keeping all his passengers alive.

I've picked up a few blog ideas from tweets, and some interesting reading has come my way through Twitter. A few job leads. And, I notice businesses use Twitter to introduce product lines, throw out ideas, you name it. Used properly (and I'm sure there's a trick to it), one with good leadership chops can build his own ready-made parade to get in front of.

When you do the Twitter thing, you find out who else is using that service, and you may elect to "follow" a person. Or someone else may opt to follow you. For a minute that seemed too strange for words, like I'm being stalked or something. But that's how word about something can get out quickly. I have a mixed bag of followers on Twitter. Most are legit, the kind of folks I wouldn't mind chatting with over some coffee. But other followers are nothing but smarmy hucksters with an agenda. But since I'm the one making the tweets, I'm calling the shots. I'm pretty selective about who I follow, but am less discriminate about who chooses to follow me. Hey, if the sketchier followers click on the link and make it to this article (and if they're not easily offended), we're all cool with it.

Admittedly, I wasn't really sure what to do with my Twitter account once I opened it. I used it for a while for short, newsy items via text message directly into a sidebar on one of my blogs -- like dispatches from last November's election -- until I found out how to post directly to the blog from my cell phone. But after that I figured out how I can use Twitter.

I'm finding it another vehicle for getting word out on my blogs. Both -- The Column, Reloaded and The Workbench, Reloaded -- automatically drop links into Twitter through a service called Twitterfeed, so you can open my prose directly from there. As soon as I started using that, my readership jumped considerably.

Occasionally I'll send out a tweet on something else I'm working on, sort of a teaser for this blog. I've done this from the computer, and often via text message from my phone. (If you see a ~E at the end of a tweet -- or a short blog entry -- it means I turned my cell phone into remote control. I love showing off.)

Ooooh, I'm doing something really stupidly mundane now, and I've got to let my followers know all about it. A 140-character review to follow.

(Lest I forget: Follow me on Twitter!)