Warning About Wireless Security

From Small Business Computing comes this discussion of WEP vs. WPA for wireless networking.

Wireless Networking: WEP Security is No Security at All
By Joseph Moran

Interesting Australian Book on Indexing

The Indexing Companion (Cambridge University Press, 2007) is something I came across browsing in Google. There is a fair amount of text available online. I found one chapter, "Threats and Opportunities in Indexing," (Chapter 11, of which it appears the full chapter from 195 to 204 is available online, quite interesting.

Free Web Design Templates

If you are thinking of sprucing up your Web page. . . perhaps moving beyond what came with your Web page software or was available through your ISP, then perhaps check out the Open Source Web Design site.

To quote from their "About Us" page: "To put it simply, Open Source Web Design is a collection of web designs submitted by the community that anyone can download free of charge!"

They have some very nice templates--I may even look at updating my own page, which hasn't changed much in at least 4-5 years.

Here's a Good Explanation of Email Options

Get the Best of Both E-Mail Worlds
By Joseph Moran

List of Back-of-the-Book Indexing Resources

It's dated February 2007, but looks quite comprehensive. I did point out to them that I have a number of articles on Suite101.com about indexing-maybe they will update it.

INDEXING RESOURCES ON THE WWW

Some Web Site Tips from the Pros

Optimize Your Website: Video Tutorial

Consistency Keeps Traffic Returning

Happy Holidays

The Blog will be taking a short break until next week due to Christmas, arriving family members, et al.

Thanks to my subscribers for being interested in these postings.

Charles Anderson

Anti-virus/Anti-spyware Protection

As a user of Trend Micro Anti-virus/Anti-Spyware I was interested in this review of the 2008 product. Anyone considering changing from their current software might want to consider this. I gave up on Symantec, McAffee, and Zone Alarm Pro mostly because of poor technical support. Zone Alarm won't even talk to a user for under $2.95/minute.

I don't own any stock in Trend but have used it this year to protect three PCs.

Review: Trend Micro Internet Security 2008, By Wayne Kawamoto,
December 18, 2007

The Next Thing: Wireless Monitors

Well, at a bit of a cost, here's a way to clean up some desktop clutter if you use a second monitor to view PDFs while indexing.

2008: The Year of the Wireless Monitor
By Troy Dreier
December 13, 2007

PayPal and Phishing Attempts

I was reminded by a posting on the indexersdiscussionlist about a phishing attempt using a fake PayPal notice that the urban legends site www.snopes.com has some reports on these and related scams.

Just search paypal or phishing on snopes for a list.

Good and Bad Web Site Design

Although the linked article below is focused on selling something, I think it has some helpful things to say in general about Web site design. It seems to me that I've seen some indexers' sites that fit into the categories in the article — including mine!

How to Know if Your Website is KILLING Your Business

P.S. There's an interesting thing about the display -- at least on my screen. You may have to scroll down aways to see the actual article. Perhaps the author is trying to illustrate one of the points in the article, or it's just an anomaly on my PC this morning.

Receiving Large PDFs from Publishers

If you run into cases where a publisher has to break up PDFs for a large book in order to get past your mail server limits, then a service that has a free option can help. I've had several clients send me PDFs through YouSendIt, and it cost me nothing to receive them. YouSendIt does have pay for service plans with more options, but I found the free version perfectly satisfactory, receiving gigabyte-size files just as if I had my own FTP server.

There is a review on SmallBusinessComputing.com

Cool Free Tools for Windows

If you like to tinker with your PC software or with Web page development, there are some free utilities from Microsoft that that might tell you more than you want to know——but I found them interesting. If you follow the link below you will see the list and how to download and install.

Five are listed at .NET Toolbox Picks

Two that I found most useful are:

1) the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, which lets you do such things as find out the color code behind Web page colors (you found a great Web page color on some page and would like to use it), resize Windows, validate HTML, view full details on Cookies that you didn't know you had (and clear them). For instance, I even though I regularly delete cookies, I found some hiding on my PC from places Web pages I never visited--in fact, never visited any pages that conceivable should somehow be linking to the cookie source. Once this toolbar is installed, close the broswer and re-open. Then you find it on the extra toolbars to the righ tof "Tools" -- marked by >>.

2) the Process Explorer, which gives you detailed information about the running system, going way beyond the Task Manager screen.

These are the only two I've installed and they seem to work perfectly. Obviously I can't vouch for them, but I didn't encounter any problems. There is also an XML Notepad that might help people indexing with XML I suppose.

Amazon's New Kindle eBook

I searched quite a few Web stories on the release of the latest eBook venture—and found most of them very positive.

However, on each review or news story, I used the Find command to try to locate any mention of indexing, with no success.

So here's my Question of the Week: If/When the Kindle or a successor replaces at least a portion of hard copy publishing, will publishers hire indexers to create indexes for Kindle books or will users rely on the search capability built into the software? If it is strong search software capable of Boolean and proximity searching, will an index really be needed?

In the interim, with 90% of the New York Times bestseller lists already available for Kindle, I would assume that any of the non-fiction titles on the list with hard copy indexes, would have the same indexes in the eBook version. But is that necessarily true?

Anyone bought a Kindle?

Future Information Retrieval Systems

An IBM report, back in 2000, discussed the possibilities of holographic storage of data. The report is quite technical, and I certainly did not read the entire thing. However, I was struck by some information on something called "Associative Retrieval," particularly how it might effect the future of indexing. You can see one extract below or the full report by following the link. Searching within the report using Ctrl-F for associative retrieval will pull up more information.

Searching the terms will pull up more information, including a company called InPhase Technologies which demonstrated a prototype in 2005 and is promising terabyte storage levels. It seems to me the implications of associative retrieval might directly impact the future of indexing.

Holographic Data Storage (IBM Technical Report)

"A rather unique feature of holographic data storage is associative retrieval: Imprinting a partial or search data pattern on the object beam and illuminating the stored holograms reconstructs all of the reference beams that were used to store data. The intensity that is diffracted by each of the stored interference gratings into the corresponding reconstructed reference beam is proportional to the similarity between the search pattern and the content of that particular data page. By determining, for example, which reference beam has the highest intensity and then reading the corresponding data page with this reference beam, the closest match to the search pattern can be found without initially knowing its address."

Authors Who Want to Index Their Own Books

See Martha Osgood's outstanding answer to the question of

SHOULD AUTHORS INDEX THEIR OWN BOOKS?

Useful Stuff About Indexing

Martin Tulic, Indexer, has two very useful pages about indexing on his Web site.

Start at http://www.anindexer.com/about/book/bookindex.html to see a list of books about indexing, and then click on "About Indexing" on the left. These might be more helpful for beginning indexers, but the second page, even for experienced indexers, is another source for information and might save you digging out the Chicago Manual of Style or Mulvany.

Free Online Brochure Publishing

What's the catch?

I don't know, but some indexers might want to take a look at this story:
Want Free Content Publishing? Yes YUDU
By Lauren Simonds, Nov 1, 2007

Source: Small Business Computing.com

Some Mysteries of Search Engine Optimization

I don't know how much readers can, or want to, tinker with their Web pages to improve rankings, but here is a link to an article with some hints.

How to Promote Your Product with Organic Search
by Michael Fleischner.

Checking Index Accuracy: Searching for the Perfect Index: Part 3

Assuming someone is really interested in putting into practice this method for random checking of index accuracy, here's how to do it.

1. For an example imagine you have indexed a book with 375 pages of text. Remembering the explanations of the following terms from Part 2, let’s start with a Confidence Level of 99% a Confidence Interval of three, and a Population of 375. Plugging these numbers into the Sample Size Calculator, we see 312 pages will need to be checked. If we’re going to check this many, why not do the whole thing? So, try a 95% confidence and an interval of five. This gives 190 pages, about half the text, to check. If there are 0% errors in 190 pages, then perhaps being 95% sure there are no errors at all is good enough. As noted before, this is a call that needs to be made depending on the individual’s comfort level and confidence in accurate work.

2. Using a spreadsheet to generate the needed random numbers is fairly simple, but I may write a small program specifically for indexers, particularly ones without spreadsheet software. (See below for an even easier way.) Here’s how to do it with a spreadsheet (the following refers to Excel):

a. Open a blank sheet.
b. In the first cell at the top type in (without the quotes): “=RANDBETWEEN(1,375)”) That is an open and close parentheses). Replace the 375 with the total indexable pages of your book.
c. Highlight the result, Press Ctrl-C, use the down arrow to highlight at least 190 rows, and press Ctrl-V. The result is a list of random numbers. It won’t hurt to go a bit beyond the 190 because Excel’s random generator isn’t re-seeding the formula each time, so it is possible to get some duplicate numbers.

There is an excellent random number generator that will also produce a sorted list of numbers at http://www.randomizer.org/form.htm

3. Compare the entries in the index with the actual text pages that match the random numbers.

4. If no errors are found in the sample, then it is pretty unlikely there will be any in the whole project. However, if even one error is found (0.5% of the sample), then statistically, given the Confidence Interval chosen (five), there might be as many as 21 total errors (5.5% x 375). Obviously you will need to check more pages.

This entire method may seem like too much trouble to apply. Or, it might give some reassurance to indexers less than totally confident they never make an error. In any case, I find that working this kind of thing out gives my mind a rest from some of the more boring indexes that I do. In the future, I want to examine another way of judging how well an index represents the text based on some interesting theories and data about English language redundancy and entropy. . Just be sure to chose "Yes" in the box that asks whether to make each number unique.

Holiday Tsotchkes from Indexers: To Do or Not to Do?

For readers unfamiliar with the term, a tsotchke is a free gift given by businesses to potential clients to induce some sort of customer loyalty. Typical offerings are pens, note pads, day books, trinkets, or more expensive items.

As one who was the recipient of many tsotchkes during a thirty year career as a librarian, I have some opinions on the value of this advertising approach, particularly as used by indexers. In all the years of library convention attendance, the only useful gifts I ever picked up were canvas book bags, which are still offering good service years later. The rest, even pens, quickly vanished into never-never land, never to be thought of again. Although not strictly a tsotchke, I include Christmas/December holiday cards from vendors in this category.

Occasionally now I will get either a Christmas card or even a real freebie like a calendar from other indexers. I am not saying I don’t appreciate the thought, but as far as advertising goes, I have real misgivings about the whole idea. It seems an expensive advertising method if one is attempting to blanket the market. If these are sent only to regular clients, what does this accomplish? An editor presumably continues to use an indexer because the person provides good work. Is a pen with the business name on it going to encourage the editor to allot more jobs to the indexer? I don’t think so. I suspect the same thing happens to this kind of holiday reminder that happened to items I got in my library career—they either were pitched after the convention or just lost in some other way. Even annual December holiday cards usually ended up in the circular file.

At this point, the only worthwhile tsotchke I would even suggest for indexers considering the idea—because I have seen evidence it works—are small “Post-It” notes imprinted with two lines at most. Several years ago, one of the members of Indexers Unlimited suggested an advertising approach to editors using this method. (In addition to pooling resources for advertising campaigns such as Google sponsored ads, Indexers Unlimited undertakes other advertising ventures for its members.)

I think these worked not particularly because they were sent to specific editors, but because in a number of cases, the editors used them on in-house communications. Years later, members are still getting new contacts because of these little notepads that read only, “Find an Indexer at www.indexersunlimited.org.”

So, for what it’s worth, that’s my take on the holiday tsotchke idea.

Checking Index Accuracy: Searching for the Perfect Index: Part 2

The first posting on this subject referred to four items needed to get a statistical handle on checking index accuracy. They were: randomness, getting random numbers, Confidence Level, and Confidence Interval. If indexers with a statistics background will bear with me, I’ll briefly explain these terms as they apply to this topic

Randomness in statistical sampling is used to guarantee that each thing/person/occurrence selected for a sample has an equal likelihood of being picked. If this is the case, and sufficient numbers are chosen, then predictions about the entire question (population) can be made with varying degrees of statistical certainty.

Generating random numbers can be done with a spreadsheet function or through programs developed for that purpose. What we need to test a index for accuracy is a list of random numbers that will fall between 1 and the total number of entries in the index. These numbers then can be matched to record numbers of the index entries and checked for accuracy. Several ways to create the needed list will be covered in a later posting.

Confidence Interval, as explained on one Web site that features a handy calculator “is the plus-or-minus figure usually reported in newspaper or television opinion poll results.” Confidence Level “tells you how sure you can be. It is expressed as a percentage and represents how often the true percentage of the population who would pick an answer lies within the confidence interval.” When you put these two together and check the appropriate number of index entries, you can say that you can be x percent (usually either 95% or 99%) sure that the total number of errors in the index is no more than, or less than, y percent (the Confidence Interval). The only trick is in deciding on what values of x and y to use. Naturally, we would like to be 100% sure that the total number of errors in the index is zero. Since the only way to do this is to examine every single entry, we have to be content with the possibility of some slightly lower certainty.

Selecting the Confidence Level and Interval in the case of index checking is a matter of balancing desire for accuracy against willingness (and time available) to spend on this operation. The larger the Sample, the smaller the Confidence Interval or the higher the Confidence Level, the more the certainty factor will approach 100% and the time required for checking the index increase.

Part Three in this series will illustrate how this system might work in practice.

Tax Software in the Indexing Business

The tax software programs for 2007 are already showing up in computer stores. TurboTax is already on the shelf at the local Office Depot and an empty display is labeled for H&R Block TaxCut.

NOTE: Nothing in what follows is intended in any way, shape, or form as tax advice!

I've seen indexer postings on email lists that discuss this topic now and then, with several people saying they use the "Home and Business" versions of either TurboTax or Taxcut.

I was one of these until the 2006 tax year. Except for one departure a number of years ago, I used the small-business version of TurboTax since it first became available, always importing data from accounting management software like Quicken. I had had occasional frustrating run-ins with TurboTax support on those times when it became necessary to use it.

A serious problem with the tax software on the last go-round, and totally unhelpful and unpleasant Tech Support made me abandon TurboTax. I was then in a rush and found the only reasonable alternative on the shelf at the local Office Depot was the basic version of H&R Block TaxCut. After realizing that this included all the forms I needed for a sole employee business such as Schedule C, #8829 Home Office and #4562 Depreciation, I realized that it didn't make sense to pay $89.95 for the fancy business edition when the basic for $19.95 would do everything I needed. I see that the standard TurboTax version also includes the basic small business income forms as well. I didn't even miss the fancy version at all--and my taxes went much smoother.

So from now on, whether it's TurboTax or Taxcut, it's plain vanilla for me in the tax software area.