Making technical documents interesting...

Technical write-ups can be boring if they talk just technical stuff. But some writers make an attempt to make them interesting.

Like in the Java API reference. Here's an example. In explaining the difference between the append() and insert() methods in the class StringBuffer, this is what I found in the API reference.

The principal operations on a StringBuffer are the append and insert methods. [...] The append method always adds these characters at the end of the buffer; the insert method adds the characters at a specified point.

For example, if z refers to a string buffer object whose current contents are "start", then the method call z.append("le") would cause the string buffer to contain "startle", whereas z.insert(4, "le") would alter the string buffer to contain "starlet".

It wasn't really necessary to pick an example where all three words made sense. But someone went that extra step.

Little things - and it made it just that little interesting.

In other news...

American efficiency in Iraq (from NYTimes)

[The] discovery that the world’s richest, most technologically advanced country could not restore basic services to minimal prewar levels left an impression of American weakness and, worse, of indifference to the well-being of ordinary Iraqis.
...
Yet another example of shoddy contract writing, lax oversight and absent supervision that has consistently characterized Washington’s approach to Iraq reconstruction from the start.

How pathetic! And how tragic!

~~~~~

You thought Google wanted to pervade all our lives even more? Here's a situation where they don't want us to use google. (They are not evil, remember?)

As it turns out, they are okay with us saying "I googled it out" - but only if we had actually used their search engine. Don't say "I googled it out on Yahoo!", please.

By the way, I sometimes use Dogpile because they google from all googling engines!

~~~~~

There's a portfolio game on. Here's my take:

93 Shares of TCS @ Rs. 1080.1 = Rs. 1,00,449.3

"Flat" World Syndrome

I am getting a little bugged that people associated with Infosys are adopting the horrendous "flat world" metaphor introduced by Tom Friedman like crazy.

Take a sample:

Nandan Nilekani
Stephen Pratt
Basab Pradhan [See the "About the Site" description in the side bar]

Infosys even has a "Think Flat" blog!

It seems to have become the next buzz-phrase after GDM. And it means nothing. Or if you want to be nice to Friedman, it really means everything that's the modern world.

And what good is a metaphor if we can twist it to mean anything and everything?