Subscribe to RSS 2.0Why you need to be a computer expert
I'm not unsympathetic to those who struggle with computers and software and the web, but my question to you is this: what are you going to do about it?
There's very little in the world of publishing that doesn't directly involve computers - and all of it indirectly does. There's a bit of decision-making that might be done without a computer present but that's about it. Even the arty stuff - like cover design or layouts or writing the books themselves - is done using software. 'Books' are really data files until they reach the printers. E-books are data from start to finish: a Word file meets a Photoshop cover design, becomes an InDesign file, maybe turns into a PDF or an EPUB and then maybe ends up as a Mobi file. Your statutory and management accounts are data files, manipulated using software. Most of your correspondence is e-mail. Your marketing involves lots of e-mail or web-sites or sending off print-ready data files. And increasingly the world only finds out about your books because ONIX files get sent out to all the organisations who need to know. If you can't perform some of those functions because you don't know your way round the right piece of software, you're holding your company back. And what about looking after all those computers and the files they contain? If your hard drive fails, have you got backups? Can you set up a replacement computer with all the software and files you need to keep working?
You can pay someone else to do some of these things for you - even most of them. But the time is approaching when you might find yourself paying someone else to do everything for you. And that would be bad, right?
I used to see men in their late fifties on the train in the morning, sitting in the first class compartment, using a fountain pen to write replies to e-mails that their secretaries had printed out for them. Those secretaries would presumably type up the responses too. Perhaps a few of those guys just found the feel of a gold nib gliding across paper preferable to a keyboard - and the cost of a secretary was peanuts to them. But most of those men (it appears that most older bosses are still men) I'm pretty sure couldn't type and couldn't work their e-mail programs. Or even if they could, they didn't care to. My dad was like that: computers were for 'computer people'. Which meant that even sending e-mails was something you delegated to a technical person. He wrote large cheques so the IT people could upgrade their systems but he did his best not to actually use any of those systems.
I'm sure you're not in that category (few people still are) and you'd agree it's ridiculous to write out e-mail replies in longhand and then pay someone else to type them up. An able-bodied employee who claims they can't work their e-mail program, even after suitable training, would be fired not humoured these days. But how sure are you that you're not just the next iteration of the fountain-pen-e-mail-writer? Do you sometimes find yourself typing the exact same repetitive set of keystrokes over and over again, and then notice someone a bit more tech-savvy staring at you in disbelief?
I've written out a bunch of questions here so you can just get a feel for what you know and don't know. I'd expect a comfortably-tech-savvy person to know the answers to about two-thirds of them. You might have to take my word for it that most of them aren't particularly advanced. (And I suppose if enough people are interested I might write answers to the questions just because it's a bit unfair to ask them otherwise - but I won't do that unless there's a fair bit of interest 'cos it would be a load of work to do well):
* You need to send some files overseas and they're too big to e-mail. Could you FTP them? Do you know what that means and would you know what software to use and roughly how to go about it?
* And could you say why FTP might not be very secure? Similarly, do you know what HTTP and HTTPS are and what the difference is?
* If you needed to rename a couple of hundred files to add today's date to their filenames would you be able to write a macro or a script or a little program to do it? Or would you just have to do it by hand or ask someone else?
* If you needed to quickly change some text on a webpage, do you think you'd know enough about a typical webserver to find the right file and enough about HTML to add the text without spoiling the page? Could you also dip into the CSS file and make that text green instead of red? What is CSS?
* Could you add a vignette to a Photoshop file? Or even just resize a photo? Would you know the pros and cons of GIFs, JPEGs, TIFFs and PNGs and which might be appropriate to send to a printer?
* Do you know what RGB and CMYK are? Again, which one might you use when you're sending something to a printer?
* If you want to print out an A1 sized poster would you rather start with a small bitmapped image or a small vector graphic? Why?
* Could you swap out a broken hard drive from your computer, reinstall the operating system and restore all your files from a backup? Do you have a backup?
* When setting up e-mail on your new smartphone do you have any idea what POP3, IMAP and SMTP are for? Any idea what bearing SSL might have on the process?
* Could you encrypt an e-mail if you needed to? Do you have any idea why public key encryption might not just keep the contents of an e-mail secure but also help you be sure who it's from?
* When trying to get your new laptop to connect to the internet do you have any idea what an IP address is, or a DNS server, or DHCP or subnet masks?
* Do you know what a firewall actually does and why you might want one? Have you got one?
* What's a NAS? Might you need one? Should it contain a RAID array? What is RAID?
* Can you move around a Windows or a Mac or a Unix file system just using a command line? Could you find and rename a file that way?
So how did you do? Bear in mind I'm not asking you create an FTP client or design an image format; I'm only asking whether you can use existing ones, so clearly we're not at the advanced end of the spectrum here.
I think it's safe to say that a lot of this world runs on software, hardware and networking. Getting good at using it is an investment in your future, not just at work but in the rest of your life too. The pace of change is not going to slow down and you're going to feel marginalised, powerless and foolish if you let it all get away from you. So any time you come across one of these techie challenges, make sure you come away knowing the answers. The easy part is that thanks to these very same technologies, the answers are never more than a quick Google search away.
Comments: 4
Hi Rob,
I’m a programmer by day and a writer by night. So I thought I’d try to provide answers to those questions.
1)FTP is a file transfer protocol, I think automatically available, on most PCs. Though you can download the software. To use you enter the name of the destination computer (host name or IP address), so ftp www.myserver.com and then type get or put and the filename depending on whether you’re getting or putting. The destination (server) needs to recognise your details so some setup is involved. Any ftp software should step you through it.
2) FTP doesn’t use any encryption. SFTP (Secure FTP) does and its usage is similar. HTTP is a request-response protocol between a client and server (your web browser being the client, any website you’re accessing, the server). HTTPS is as above with encryption so is used for web pages that allow you to order things online. Secure pages start with https:/
3) This I would do on unix with a script. I have no idea how to do it on windows. I would definitely need help! [Rob's comment: Windows has a nastly little batch language built in, but all modern OSs will let you install a scripting facility and most of them also have automation built in now. ]
4) I do this all the time I’m afraid - If you’re working through Internet Explorer, you can view your web server contents by going to the FTP site and clicking Page / ‘View in Windows Explorer’ which exposes the files as if they’re on your PC. CSS is the styles section of your HTML, usually at the top – hours of fun.
5) Never used photoshop, but this site seems to explain adding a vignette nicely http://blog.epicedits.com/2007/09/18/quick-tip-using-photoshop-to-add-vignette/
JPEG – detail not great but the pics are small in size so allow fast transfer, standard for web pages
GIF – compresses colours so again small and fast but only suitable for simple colour images
PNG – like GIF except stores colour data more efficiently so smaller file size.
TIFF – high quality, best for printing. Its cons being larger file size, slow transfer. [Rob's comment: TIFF compresses images without losing any data - whereas JPEG is 'destructive'. As you say, GIF is limited, and PNG is not so well supported. So TIFF is a good choice for sending to printers because they usually set at very high DPIs and thus need a lot of detail in their images.]
6) Hmmm... here’s what wiki says: RGB (red, green, blue) the primary colours that are combined to produce colours on monitors. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key(black)) describes the colour palette used in printing (known as the subtractive colour model). [Rob's comment: monitors use the RGB 'colourspace' (R,G and B are the colours of the little dots on a screen), though they can approximate CMYK. Full-colour printed material is usually produced in CMYK (C,M,Y and K being the four colours of inks they use). It's considered a faux pas to send anything in RGB to be printed. Apps like Photoshop allow you to decide which colourspace you're working in.]
7) Well, vector graphics are for computerised images. They hold behaviour data at each point in the image so the image can be zoomed in, rotated etc. So, I’m going to say a small bitmapped image sounds more relevant. [Rob's comment: Your only incorrect answer, Fiona. A vector image will scale up to the size of a house if you need it to without loss of quality because it describes shapes and angles. Whereas a bitmap is just a lot of dots and if you scale a little image up to A1, each dot ends up as a block of dots of a single colour (= 'pixelation') and it looks bad.]
8) Phew, back to my comfort zone. I don’t think anyone should attempt to remove their hard drive and hope to successfully install a new one unless they really know what they’re doing! However on windows, you may be able to retrieve data from a damaged hard drive like this: Go to Computer. Right click the hard drive in question. Select Properties/Tools and the ‘Check’ button. If there are problems, the retrievable files should be presented for you to rescue.
There’s a lot of instructions online for installing an operating system but I still don’t think it’s an easy task unless you’re very comfortable with computers. My Dad, for example, should not try to reinstall Windows. Yes, I back up. [Rob's comment: hard drives are actually very simple to change, at least in a desktop machine: four screws and two connectors on a modern SATA drive (and no high voltages or anything - though you obviously turn the machine off first). And if you use a good backup program it can probably handle the whole reinstallation after that.]
9) One would hope your very smartphone will do this for you. However, if you do want to tailor your email service then: SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) transfers email from one server to another. POP3 (Post Office Protocol) downloads the email from the server to the client. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is a powerful version of POP3 and I believe it can be customised... here’s a youtube tutorial! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmLYnBYW82w. [Rob's comment: POP3 will download files to your inbox, IMAP will download all the other folders too. SMTP is for your outgoing e-mail.]
10) To encrypt an email you’d need encryption software. You can buy various packages or there’s GPG (GNU protection guard) which I think is free. So, public encryption works by setting a public and private key. You give the public key to your recipient which they can use to decode your encrypted email. In turn, you’ll get a key from a sender, which is how you could verify the sender. [Rob's comment: Exactly. With something like GPG or PGP, people can publish the public part of their key on the web. They then use the private part of their key to send you a message. You use their public key to decrypt the message, and if it works then you know it's from them (or they're very careless with their private key).]
11) Each computer has an IP address (Internet Protocol). It identifies your computer or a server uniquely to the rest of the world. The DNS server maps the computer host name to the IP address. DHCP is a protocol that generates IP addresses. A subnet is part of an IP address and a subnet mask imposes a filter that exposes a subnet. I can provide more info here but who wants that? [Rob's comment: To split a hair, I think I'd say DHCP is a service for handing out IP addresses - which is one of the ways your computer can get one. Your machine also needs to know which subnet it's on and where the gateway out of that subnet is, plus it needs a DNS server so it can turn domain names, like Snowbooks.com, into IP addresses like 74.86.153.134. DHCP servers typically hand out those three pieces of info.]
12) A firewall blocks unidentified sources from accessing your computer. On windows you can change your firewall settings under Control Panel/Security. It should always be on unless you want to connect directly to another computer in which case you would temporarily allow the other PC access. All servers have strict firewalls to prevent virus attacks. They can be an endless pain when you’re trying to get things done. [Rob's comment: Yup. Firewalls sit between the outside world and your local subnet, passing data back and forth. They read the IP packets they're passing on and bin the ones they don't like according to the rules you give them. ]
13) Hard question! So, NAS (network attached storage) is extra data storage in a box, basically. RAID is a word I haven’t heard since college and it’s basically the storage protocol for reliability and speed. [Rob's comment: NAS boxes are an easy way to have a 'network drive' shared between several machines. RAID is a way of combining several physical hard drives so they act like one big one: usually one that is faster and/or better able to survive a hard-drive failure without losing data. ]
14) All of the operating systems have plenty of online help for command line operations. On windows you get there by typing cmd at the run command prompt. On unix I wouldn't want to work any other way.
I’m off now to retrieve my Sunday which is feeling a bit like a Monday!
Fiona
Posted by: Fiona Pearse on October 23, 2011 04:30 PM
I don't know the definite answers to any of these groups of questions, but I feel confident that I could learn the answers to about half of them if it was required of me. But I don't expect it to be required of me anytime soon. I'm just a writer. Are my standards for my knowledge too low?
I know how to write a little bit of HTML, but I don't know how to use CSS. I know how to fiddle around in PhotoShop, but I don't know the differences between the file types. Do I pass? I've always considered myself reasonably tech-savvy, and compared to some of the people in my day-job field, I'm a downright expert.
Now I'm a bit panicked.
Posted by: KatharineC on October 23, 2011 05:17 PM
Wow, Fiona! Excellent effort. I might split a few hairs, but only if I were feeling picky. Plus you've saved me from having to write out the answers (if you don't object I might splice a few comments into your answers just to throw in my two penn'orth).
Katharine, I'm sure you'd do fine. And anyway, writers have a lot less technology to worry about. But some of the stuff around DHCP or NAS boxes or firewalls is very handy if you want to setup a little home network.
Posted by: Rob on October 23, 2011 09:49 PM
I am impressed!
Posted by: Fiona Pearse on October 23, 2011 10:52 PM