writing

Writer’s block and the power of good habits

Back in a day when I was blogging almost on a daily basis, writing a new blog post was a zero effort for me. That includes coming up with the idea for the post, the actual content, typing, formatting, and every some promotion around social networks and among my friends and colleagues.

The last few years, however, I stepped away from blogging and shared my thoughts, ideas, and useful links on a variety of media, such as internal company Slack, and a multitude of instant messengers, like Telegram and WhatsApp.

All that brought me to where I am now. Most of the content that I shared on social networks and instant messengers is buried in the archives, never to be seen again. My creative powers are diminished to the point where I’m struggling to verbalize a tweet. And my publishing productivity as practically non-existent. Even when I want to write up a short blog post just like this one, every cell of my brain is resisting the idea.

However, I want to bring that skill back. I’ve setup daily reminders to blog. But they aren’t doing much. At least for the last month or so. I’m constantly distracted by the ideas of reorganizing this website, catching up with history first, and so on. But nothing ever happens.

So, I guess, for the next few weeks you’ll see my hectic attempts at restoring order. For now, I will write for the sake of writing. Just to get back into the habit of it. And while I’m at it, you’ll probably be puzzled by the unusual randomness of subjects, inconsistency in length, quality and schedule, weak attempts to fill in the blanks, and other weirdness. Bare with me. Or not. After all, the web is huge.

Zero-Width Characters

This article shows a couple of interesting zero-width characters techniques for the invisible fingeprinting of text.

In early 2016 I realized that it was possible to use zero-width characters, like zero-width non-joiner or other zero-width characters like the zero-width space to fingerprint text. Even with just a single type of zero-width character the presence or non-presence of the non-visible character is enough bits to fingerprint even the shortest text.

[…]

I also realized that it is possible to use homoglyph substitution (e.g., replacing the letter “a” with its Cyrillic counterpart, “а”), but I dismissed this as too easy to detect due to the differences in character rendering across fonts and systems. However, differences in dashes (en, em, and hyphens), quotes (straight vs curly), word spelling (color vs colour), and the number of spaces after sentence endings could probably go undetected due to their frequent use in real text.

[…]

The reason I’m writing about this now is that it appears both homoglyph substitution and zero-width fingerprintinghave been discovered by others, so journalists should be informed of the existence of these techniques.

The Strange Art of Writing Release Notes

Software development is never just about writing code. Programming is only a small part of the software development work. The rest touches and intervenes with a whole lot of other areas – documentation, support, testing, marketing, and so on and so forth. Recently, Slashdot ran this story on the art of writing release notes. There are a couple of links from the story to this article on IEEE and this on TechCrunch.

These provide a lot to think about, at least for someone who wrote nearly 300 release notes just this year alone (yeah, we had to catch up on historical releases).

Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds

I’ve been a fan of Jeff Atwood’s writing on Coding Horror for years. But it was mostly about technology and programming. Today, I was reading through his review of a video game – Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds – and for the first time in a really really long time, I wanted to download it and start playing even before I finished reading his post.

That reminded me of how gaming reviews and guides were done back in the 90’s – not by professional content managers and editors, but by people who had a passion. Learn from that, the gaming industry. Learn from that, everyone else!

Google Developer Documentation Style Guide

“Google Developer Documentation Style Guide” is a guide for Google developers on how to write the developer documentation. As someone who have been involved in technical documentation for years now, I find a general lack of such guides from other companies interesting and slightly disturbing.

Kudos to Google for the effort and for sharing with all of us who are trying to improve the technical writing.