Nobody likes getting ripped off, and I’m no exception. I search the web from time to time to see who’s copying my stuff, and it’s always a little disheartening.

This week I ran a check to see who was copying my 20-year old LZW Compression article. Mind you, I’m not talking about isolated quotes taken without attribution; for the most part I’m looking for people who have posted a wholesale copy of the article – a complete rip-off. Looking through the top 25 hits yields some interesting statistics:

• About 30% of the people who copy my work are University faculty. The assign the article as reading for a class, and instead of simply posting a link, they scrape the article off the web and post a private copy.
• Another 40% are people who are blatantly plagiarizing – they’ve incorporated my work into a paper or thesis. Unfortunately for them Google now crawls PDF and PostScript files, which makes detection pretty easy
• The remainder are blogging programmers who, for some reason, delight in taking my article and posting it on their site, reformatted and unattributed, but often with my name and contact information still intact

Taking Action

Finding these rip-off artists is easy, but getting the stolen material removed from the web is another matter. In the cases where I can clearly identify a person who owns the site, I usually start with a friendly email. Maybe 25% of the time this works, but the typical response is dead silence.

When the informal methods fail, the next step is the formal takedown notice. In the United States, web publishers enjoy protection from claims of copyright infringement under the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act if they register a copyright agent who handles complaints, and if they respond to those complaints in a timely fashion.

This means that a site like Blogger.com, owned by Google, provides a formal mechanism for handling notices. When I can’t find a link to an abuse agent, I use the WHOIS database to find the hosting service, and send an email to their address. This generally works pretty well. For example, Scribd responded to my requests within a matter of hours, and generally assumes that my complaints are legitimate unless the poster of the material puts up a decent defense.

Things aren’t always so simple though. Just as an example, CiteSeer, a very popular database of academic publishing, has a cached copy of a stolen article that their crawler found. In their FAQ, under the question “How can I remove a copy of my article from your database?”, they give this unhelpful tidbit:

Papers within CiteSeerX corpus are crawled from the web. The only reason a papers of yours is in the CiteSeerX database is because it was/is available from the web.

No kidding. And this helps me remove your illegal copy how?

The Tough Cases

With enough perserverance, I’m usually able to remove a large percentage of the illegal copies. But some problems remain intractable. Overseas servers in countries where English is not widely spoken are particularly difficult. I could certainly sue Baidu.com in Federal Court, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t get me very far.

Even when I don’t succeed, there is some entertainment value in the excuses. Today I got an email from a gentleman in India who incorporated my work in a paper published in a peer-reviewed article. He told me that he would work on taking it out, but right now he is busy taking care of his mother, who is in poor health. He hopes I will be patient.

Patient I will remain. Not like I have a choice.

Microsoft has added a new keyword to C# as part of the 4.0 release earlier this year. Objects that are typed as dynamic bypass normal static type checking, allowing C# to have the flexibility of other scripting languages.

This is all well and good, but the headline writers of the blogosphere have taken a decided wrong turn with their naming of this feature:

C# 4.0: Dynamic Programming

C# 4.0, Dynamic Programming and JSON

Dynamic Programming Using C# 4.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

C# 4.0: Dynamic Programming

Note the misuse of the term Dynamic Programming. Everyone who takes an introductory algorithms course learns that the term Dynamic Programming has been in use for over fifty years, and refers to a method for solving problems by decomposition. It’s a useful technique that I’ve covered here in the past, and any skilled programmer should be familiar with it.

No, it’s not the end of the world, but people who are writing about Computer Science really ought to know something about Computer Science, don’t you think?

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out – Samuel Johnson

Monday, November 17, 2008 8:00 AM

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Maxine Perkins and for the next six weeks, I will be either your best friend or your worst enemy.

Most of you are probably wondering “Why am I here? What have I done? Are these restraints really necessary?”

The answer is quite simple. As you might recall, two weeks before the presidential election, in an attempt to distract the populace put the minds of the voting public at ease, President Bush issued an executive order making English the official language of the United States. Originally titled the “Speak American Act” but now popularly known as the Jules Winnfield Law , it insures that attempts by foreign terrorists to corrupt our voting process will be nipped in the bud. 2008 marks the year that we made sure election fraud will only be committed by decent American citizens.

Unfortunately for those of you in this room, a detailed analysis of Worldwide Technical Farceware’s internal email revealed the disturbing fact that virtually every employee at director level and above has lost the ability to form simple declarative sentences in English. Thus, Homeland Security issued mandatory invitations for all of you to join me in this reeducation camp.

Monday, November 17, 2008 8:15 AM

I apologize for the brief interruption people. As you probably now realize, your Blackberries won’t work in the newly repurposed Gitmo Training Facility. This apparently proved to be too much for Senior VP Prattle, but the EMTs tell me his seizures should be under control soon.

Anyway, the sooner we start the sooner you will be back at your desks at WTF, so let’s get underway. I’ll begin with an example. Let’s see – you in the back. Director Drizzle I believe? If you don’t mind, could you come up to the front? Chairperson Spooner is no doubt fascinated with the demonstration of your new putter grip, but she will have to wait to discuss it until after this exercise is complete.

Mr. Drizzle, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’ve just complete a corporate coup and managed to consume a new engineering department. What’s the first thing you will do?

Oh that’s easy, I’ll send out a congratulatory email to group.drizzle so everyone is brought up to speed on our innovative new organization.

Okay, and how about doing some ad hoc composition of that email for us?

Hmm… I think it would go something like this. “I take great pleasure in announcing the merger of the Defenseless and Vulnerable Business Unit into my organization. This will allow us to leverage our synergies…”

Stop right there Director, and thanks, you may sit down.

But I was just getting warmed up!

Yes, and it is important that I stop you before too much damage is done.

For starters, I’d like all of you to look up the word leverage in the dictionaries you received in your welcome packet. You’ll note the presence of the designation noun next to the word. Yet Mr. Drizzle clearly thinks it is appropriate to use it as a different part of speech.

Yes Mr. Obfuscator? No, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. We don’t actually have a formal process for ‘verbing nouns.’ Yes, I know he did, but I knew James Joyce, and you, Mr. Obfuscator, are no James Joyce.

Moving on, let’s talk about the word synergy. Is the CTO here? Mr Bunk, what happens to engineering projects when a group doubles in size? That’s right, doubling the number of programmers moves the end date out by 50% and reduces the chance of success by a factor of two.

This is not normally what we mean by synergy. While it is okay to use words in a contradictory matter for a humorous effect, it is probably not the best approach for your business communications.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008 12:30 PM

Welcome back from lunch everyone. Our week of buzzword elimination is now in its second day, and I’m happy to say that you are all doing really well. Let’s continue building our debuzzification dictionary on the board. You all have copies of the sample email announcing the addition of a 47th VP to the Development Management Council. CFO Twaddle, could you please start reading me some of the buzzwords from that email?

What’s that? Oh yes, the Taser rule is suspended for this exercise, you won’t get jolted for using the word in this context. Proceed:

Umm… go-to-market approaches?

Good one Rudy! Yes, let’s translate that as “selling stuff”. Next phrase please.

Lets see… this is a little long, but how about “address market needs with innovative solutions?”

Okay, that sounds like a synonym, we’ll use “selling stuff” for that as well.

Ooh I found a good one: “managing complex portfolio evolution.”

Well done Mr. Twaddle. I’ll write that one up as “scrapping products that suck.”

Thursday,December 25, 2008 3:30 PM

Okay people, I know you’re excited because we’re cutting our class schedule back by 30 minutes today – it is Christmas after all – but we need to keep working. Final exams are tomorrow, and I want to see 100% of you on the repatriation flights back to your homes in the U.S. Your relatives are no doubt wondering where you are by now – what’s that Ms. Bloviate?

Ah, I understand your concern. Yes, it’s true that WTF has been without executive leadership for six weeks, and you might think the company would be floundering. But my contacts in middle management tell me that productivity measures are up across the board. Apparently the decrease in corporate announcements, mass emails, and mandatory all-hands meetings have given each employee four or five hours a week to actually do work.

If I may continue with you, Ms. Bloviate, as corporate communications officer, let’s see if you were able to put your training to work in your sample press release. I believe our premise for the exercise was the departure of the long-tenured, beloved head of development, Fred “Greener Pastures” Mumbles. Please read us your work.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Worldwide Technical Farceware wishes to announce that our head of development, Frederick Mumbles, quit yesterday. We will pretend to still like him, and he will pretend to still like us, but in truth we hope we never see the ungrateful bozo again.
Please direct inquiries to I. Bloviate, WTF.

Excellent work Iris. Every sentence is recognizable English, you make your points clearly – wait, are you crying?

No dear, you really have to stop thinking that people judge your writing based on the length of the press release. Honestly, the readers will actually appreciate it. Consider yourself validated. Have a tissue.

Friday, December 26, 2008 Noon

Congratulations class! Your 100% graduation rate is a tribute to the quality of the people that work at Worldwide! Remember that we offer on-line refresher classes if you feel yourself losing your grasp on English. But don’t worry; with the new Homeland Security Auto-CC function installed in your corporate Exchange servers, we’ll be on top of any slips before you even have time to notice.

Good luck, and go forth and leverage – hee hee, just some English teacher humor – and use your new skills to work together, build stuff, and sell it.

Jeff Bezos Hawks the Kindle

It’s still not clear whether electronic books are the wave of the future or a consumer products cul-de-sac. Technology continues to improve, and there are certainly lots of good reasons for a device like Amazon’s Kindle to be the leading edge of a major wave of adoption. A few of the more obvious arguments include:

• Reduced cost of distribution. The publishing industry wastes a lot of money printing and shipping books, and because of historical practices, creates huge numbers of books that never even get sold. Not very green, and a waste of money.
• Niche markets that can be very well-served. For example, high school and college students can replace those 30-pound backbacks with a 30-ounce tablet-sized device.
• Removal of barriers to publication. The news and magazine businesses are being revolutionized by self-publication in the form of blogs. Self-publication is possible in the printed book world, but it is still a rather awkward process. Publication to electronic format is presumably a trivial problem.
• Integration of information resources. A device like the Kindle allows you to consult the Internet, written reference materials, and your personal notes all from the same device, making it a true information portal.

But consumer acceptance is a fickle thing, so we don’t know if these rational arguments are going to fly. And of course, every writer who reviews a device like the Kindle or the equally capable Sony Reader feels compelled to write something along the lines of “But I just can’t imagine forgoing the pleasure of curling up on my couch with a good book.” I’m sure that when Gutenberg introduced movable type there were millions of industry reviewers posting notes to their blogs saying “The uniformity of the type is just esthetically unpleasing – I love it when I recognize the script of one of my favorite transcribing brothers.”

And then of course there’s the Steve Job’s money quote on the subject:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore, forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So it’s really pretty hard to be sure just which way this is going to go.

Looking Beyond The Reader

Sony’s Reader

For electronic books to succeed, one thing is certain: the physical reading experience needs to match up well with the one we have right now for our printed media. In some ways this problem is already solved – readers like the products from Amazon and Sony are book-sized and lightweight, with displays that are doing their best to match the various good qualities of paper.

But there are still issues that need work. One of the most important is in the area of layout and markup. A presentation format such as HTML is designed to work with multiple display sizes, repositioning elements as needed. This doesn’t necessarily work so well with textbooks, magazines, etc., where graphic artists invest huge amounts of time and energy on positioning, font selection, and other esthetic issues.

Additionally, there is am staggering amount of material that is simply not in a format compatible with today’s electronic books. Even magazines being published today are not always ready for transfer to an eBook format, and there is of course a massive backlog of valuable material in the world that has never existed in digital format.

Into this void steps Robert Maxwell Case, who has developed a system called ReadAllOver, and is attempting to exploit it via his company, SeeAndBelieve.com. SeeAndBelieve.com has created a digital layout technology called ReadAllOver (the company seemingly has a love affair with awkward CamelCase constructions) that does a superior job of preserving the look of printed materials. The company web site gives a good demonstration of exactly what they are capable of doing – it is definitely worth your time to take a look.

I asked Robert if he could take the time to answer a few questions about ReadAllOver, and he was gracious enough to respond.

Questions With Robert Maxwell Case

Mark Nelson: Hi Robert. I just recently became aware of your company, SeeAndBelieve.Com, and your imaging system, ReadAllOver. Before we get into the details of your technology, can you tell me a little bit about the history of your company? How long have you been at it? Are you working mostly solo or do you have some help? What kind of background do you have that got you into your current work?

Robert Maxwell Case: Sure, Mark. I come from a background of being a full-time musician and a part-time graphic designer. Around 1991-92, I was unhappy with then-current digital halftoning routines and began experimenting on my own. So I’ve been at it 15-plus years.

Jimmy Kung (left) and Robert

I’m not a programmer, so I have had a succession of programming assistants. In recent years, they have come from my affiliation with the Computer Science department at Texas State University-San Marcos where I am a seven-year member of the Industrial Advisory Board. Currently SeeAndBelieve.Com, in addition to myself, has one full-time employee, Jimmy Kung, and several part-timers.

The first of my five U.S. patents (three issued, two pending) was filed in 1993 in response to some interest expressed by Steve Carlsen, developer of the .TIF graphics file format at Aldus (he’s now with Adobe Systems.)

MN: Can you give me a capsule summary of ReadAllOver? How does it differ from page layout systems like we see in web browsers or PDF viewers? Does it differ from the rendering systems used in Sony and Amazon’s current eBook readers?

RC: Well, ReadAllOver in a nutshell is a digital halftone-based graphics system suitable for eBooks. It renders on the screen a digital page with the “look and feel” of a printed page, with all included graphic elements, typography and images, placed precisely as the graphic designer intended. It differs from existing web browsers and .PDF viewers in that it relies less on text files and font metrics and instead places more emphasis on a simplified, highly-compressible bitmap image. In many respects, it is a “picture” of the page, with an ancillary text file.

The Sony and Amazon eBook readers are primarily text-based, offering a limited number of typefaces and few graphics. They both use the E-Ink subtractive screen and we think ReadAllOver’s halftone system can be tailored to enable a good fit with that screen.

MN: It looks like your technology emulates the halftone process used to render photographic images in newspapers and magazines. How does it improve on that process to achieve smaller file sizes? Do you have data showing the level of compression you get for specific images? And do you also render type as halftone images? That would seem a lot less efficient than treating type as marked-up text.

RC: That’s right, ReadAllOver does emulate the halftone process with one major difference, and that is that typography can be processed with it and not fall apart.

Samples of ReadAllOver output (Detail may not be representative, images were resized)

The big idea is that the output image starts as an interim monochromatic checkerboard pattern, beginning from gray. To simplify, we derive the output image by rendering local areas of the input image that are darker than checkerboard gray by turning corresponding output monochrome white pixels to black. Conversely, we render local areas of the input image that are lighter than checkerboard gray by turning corresponding output monochrome black pixels to white. The result is a checkerboard-based ordered dither that can be re-ordered for variable-length run-length compression.

We presently are comparing compression levels for specific images and plan to publish the results. So with typography, abrupt gray level changes such as font outlines fall on the black pixels of the interim checkerboard to render any font without reliance on font metrics or hinting. For example, ReadAllOver pages containing only typography are competitive in file size to marked-up systems, and with the additional attribute that our system is able to efficiently render any font, in any language, and any image, placed correctly. That’s exciting.

MN: I get digital delivery of some magazines already. For example, IEEE Spectrum is delivered using technology from Qmags. Do you think you can do a better job than they are already doing?

RC: Qmags has selected Adobe PDF as its preferred file format, so the comparisons I’ve made previously between ReadAllOver and PDF come into play here. Taking a quick look at Qmags’ file sizes, I would say that ReadAllOver is competitive and looks subjectively more “print-like.”

MN: Have you released any sample code or SDKs for people to work with your compression technology?

RC: Not at the present time … we have been too busy developing our prototype (you can see it at SeeAndBelieve.Com ).

MN: The idea of an electronic book reader has been floating around for a long time, but right now it seems like we’re finally seeing designs that are actually gaining some traction. There are still a lot of naysayers, however. What do you see in the future for the electronic book reader? Will it eventually do for reading what the iPod did for music? Or will it forever be a niche product that is stuck on the verge of popular success? And how hard will it be for you to get the manufacturers of eBook readers to adopt ReadAllOver?

RC: Mark, I do believe that an electronic book reader will achieve iPod-like popular success, and, hopefully, in the near-term. In my opinion, the more book-like the readers become, the closer we will get to that so-called tipping point. Then the public will recognize the added benefit of having access to any publication, including one’s own library, available whenever and wherever they desire. There are some of obstacles still to be overcome, like screen pixels that are pretty large, and wired and wireless transmission pipes that are pretty small.

I personally would like to see a reading device with 8-1/2″ x 11″ facing screens, about the size and weight of a coffee-table book, with graphics-intensive magazines and newspapers rendered on screen nearly indistinguishable from paper and ink. I certainly can imagine a college student not having to carry a backpack full of textbooks around campus.

Here’s my vision for our product: We’re hoping to make adapting to ReadAllOver as seamless and easy as possible. We envision three communities of ReadAllOver users:

1. The reader

2. The publisher/bookseller
3. The hardware manufacturer.

We plan to provide each of these groups with a cost effective, easy-to-use solution. The ReadAllOver Viewer will be free for readers. They’ll read .RAO files on dedicated eBook devices, and most likely on other devices that could emulate a book-like reading experience. The inherent look and feel of printed material should reduce eye strain and, of course, we plan to offer such extras as page flipping, content search, printing, etc.

Publishers and booksellers will use ReadAllOver Publisher, our media content production system. They’ll be able to convert content from scanned material, as well as from existing editing and page layout systems and standards, including Adobe InDesign and FrameMaker, Quark XPress, MS/Office, Open Office, etc. (and, of course, we’ll include a .PDF to .RAO converter.) This community will appreciate a built-in high level of content protection with ReadAllOver’s emphasis on bitmaps. Hopefully they won’t need more, but if they do, our product should easily be able to incorporate additional encryption and DRM mechanisms.

We also plan to collaborate with eBook (and other display device) manufacturers in order to provide built-in support for the ReadAllOver rendering system. We feel we can efficiently adapt our system to display components with limited available grayscale and color levels. We also hope to offer a fixed-bit-rate option where every delivered page is the same file size.

Conclusion

Thanks Robert, this is all interesting stuff. I can see advantages to ReadAllOver that we don’t get from layout systems like PDF or HTML, so perhaps you will be able to hammer out an effective market position. I don’t have an eBook reader yet, but I think when the technology reaches the point where I can have a color Kindle I’ll probably jump on board. I’m almost there now, but since the Kindle is perpetually sold out at Amazon.com, my dollars are still safely in my wallet.

The eminently quotable Samuel Johnson had a very pragmatic view about writing, and was quoted by Boswell as having said:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Personally, I think Johnson is pretty close to the mark on this one, but I will add one caveat. Ask any writer about their first book, and the thing they remember best is the thrill of seeing a volume with their name on it up on the shelf – money has nothing to do with it.

My first effort was The Data Compression Book, published all the way back in 1992, when there was a lot less interest in the field than there is now. It was unbroken ground, which meant there was room for an amateur in the field, and I nearly had it to myself.

With the help of DDJ Editor and mentor Jon Erickson, I convinced M&T Books I could do a creditable job on this book. They took me up on it, and believe me, the first time I walked into Taylor’s books in Dallas and saw three or four of these on the shelf, it was a thrill you can hardly imagine.

Fifteen years later, with a handful of other books behind me, I’m much more Johnson-esque and blase these days. Show me the money.

But every once in a while, something manages to pierce this hard-boiled shell and remind of what it was like to first see that book in 1992. This week it was an email out of the blue from somebody named Steve Johnson, who was kind enough to let me reprint his email in its entirety:

Dear Mark,

I have had a copy of The Data Compression Book in my possession for a long time. It was a book of instrumental importance to me when I was starting out a fledgling business long ago – in 1992 – which turned into an image compression company partly because of your book. Your book captivated me with the compression problem, and taught me the basics of information/coding theory (enough to become a dangerous dilettante). Out of that understanding sprang a company called Johnson-Grace Company, which created the first streaming online media ever. AOL used my algorithm to put pictures online in early 1994 when the world dialed in at 2400bps or 9600bps, and ‘digital pictures’ were as fantastic as radio in 1920. My little company went on in 1995 (around the time MSN was launched) and created ‘streaming sound’ and ‘moving pictures’ (slideshows with sound) and then simple telephony (still over dialup, now at 14.4kbps, we added a ‘talk’ button to AOL’s Instant Message box – and then subtracted it after seeing the challenge of creating a consumer grade experience over low bandwidth dial up!).

AOL bought my company in 1996, and the algorithm (AOL’s proprietary ‘ART’ format) still compresses billions of images everyday on the backend of their web delivery system. I owe a great deal to your book – for its clear accessible style, and excellent coverage of the subject. It quite simply taught me (an economist) how compression works, and I managed to put it to a use that solved an important problem.

So here’s why I’m writing (besides finally thanking you after all these years!).

My eldest daughter Emma graduated from high school earlier this year (we live in Boston) and has just commenced her freshman year at Oberlin College this fall. As a graduation gift, I’m presenting her with a bound set of my favorite books called “Dad’s Great Books,” of which I have included my rebound copy of Data Compression. It is no doubt one of the most influential books I’ve ever read, and I hope Emma cherishes the book as much as I did (she happens to be fascinated with information theory at the moment).

If it isn’t too much trouble to ask, I would greatly appreciate it if I could send this bound copy to you for your autograph and have you return the book in the FedEx envelope that I would include.

Please let me know, at your earliest convenience, as well as a good address to use for sending this your way.

Warm Regards,

Steve Johnson

When I read this email to my wife she had tears in her eyes, and yes, I was a bit verklempt myself.

Steve sent me a nicely bound copy of the book and I inscribed it to he and Emma (without even asking for an honorarium!), and with luck she’ll have it on her shelf in a few days, a curious souvenir of bygone times.

All in all a Hallmark moment, although there is a scary side to the whole thing. Steve comes from a background in Economics, knowns as the Dismal Science. Emma is interested in Information Theory, which has no nickname yet, but perhaps should be known as The Yet More Dismal Science.

Should this continue, I fear for Emma’s children. They’ll have to find a branch of mathematical science even more obscure, confusing, and impossible to explain at family functions. Will they be Set Theorists? Transfinite Algebrists?

Regardless of their intellectual or business pursuits, it seems inevitable that anyone from this line of people will be delightful to have around.

Thanks, Steve, for a reminder of what it was like to write that book in 1992, and best of all, to know that at least for you, it was exactly what I had hoped it would be.