With more editing comes the end of the E-Prime text

Well, I kept the book E-Prime up until this part of the process, and for that I feel satisfied. I don't feel proud enough of it to think myself better than the professional copy editors at Prentice Hall, though, so here it ends. Writing the initial draft in E-Prime definitely made it easier to keep the text as relevant and clear as possible, so it definitely feels well worth it to me.

For the uninitiated, writing in E-Prime means writing in a more active, subjective voice. Developers do things. These practices achieve these results. The cornerstone of E-Prime comes in removing all conjugations of "to be" from language. Writing something like "The rendering in Figure 3 is better." doesn't explain anything about what makes it better in that context. Writing in E-Prime doesn't always come easily, but it does make it much easier to write more coherently.

At least, I told myself that as I wrote the book. Time will tell, I suppose.

I found out why the first round of edits seemed really light

It turns out that the technical editor doesn't look at how badly I've written things, but instead looks at the content and form of the chapters. Now that I've made it to the copy editing stage, I feel quite a bit better knowing that my writing has gone through both steps. All of the pages I've gone through so far have as many edits as shown below:

Making my way through the edits and waiting for permission to come back from the places owning things of which I took screenshots for the book...

Great new server, same lousy connection

I should say that for more than a year, Time Warner Cable (business class) has had a very strong, reliable connection. About a week ago, though, they had a cable cut and lost DNS for all of Texas...then took about 24 hours to fix it. Today, the connection dropped again and they immediately leapt into action and promised to send someone around on Monday to take a look at it. I politely convinced them to send someone today instead, but the connection has returned of its volition.

I took advantage of today's extended outage to switch the old server (iMac 333MHz G3 with 512M/80G) out for the new server (PowerEdge SC440 Dual Core Xeon 2.4GHz with 2G/2x250G RAID1). As long as the business line stays online, this should speed things up a bit.