www.nickhodge.com

Who Is Nick Hodge?

An inter­est­ing ques­tion, who am I? This is the ques­tion that we all must answer whilst we are on this small planet. It is right up there with “What is the mean­ing of life?” Maybe they are connected.

My LinkedIn Pro­file, and more formal resume: www.linkedin.com Pro­file: Nick Hodge

From a dur­a­tion on this planet per­spect­ive, I am 39-plus-ish. Loc­a­tion, usu­ally Sydney. The fam­ily travels, and I travel for work — so there are pic­tures and stor­ies from all around the world on http://www.nickhodge.com/.

From a per­sonal accom­plish­ment per­spect­ive, I am mar­ried to Avril and have one son, Liam.

I am presently employed as a Pro­fes­sional Geek at Microsoft in Sydney, Aus­tralia. I work mainly online, pub­lished here and also http://thegeekstories.com/

This web site, mun­genet, has been online since 1996. It pred­ates the cur­rent hype/craze of “weblogs/blogs/blogosphere”. His­tor­ical views of mun­genet on www.nickhodge.com and mun­genet on webstuff.apple.com. Apart from the design com­ing a long way; tech­no­lo­gies have too.

My per­sonal likes are books (his­tory, spe­cific­ally mil­it­ary his­tory), pro­gram­ming lan­guages, music; spe­cially music of the 1980’s; and any­thing that is sorta geeky.

Our fam­ily has two Kor­ats (Lucy and Mee Noi (Our Kor­ats)). They are pure bred Thai cats, known as Si Sawat in Thai­l­and. One is named Lucy and the other Mee Noi.

We also two MINI Cooper S’s; one named Megan and the other SCRLTT (Scar­lett) Yes, the cars have names. It assists when we talk about them.

As stated, travel has been a part of my work, and thank­fully some­thing the whole fam­ily enjoy (70 Days, 7 Coun­tries and Jour­neys in 2005) so I get to New Zea­l­and and major cit­ies in Aus­tralia reg­u­lar­ily. Being a part of the wider Asia-Pacific, other loc­a­tions such as Singa­pore, Hong Kong and Tokyo also pop up from time to time.

This is Avril Hodge, my beau­ti­ful wife. If you are a fan of Chris­tian Slater, you must, must, must visit her web site.

This is Liam, our son. Accord­ing to our friends, he is a split­ting image of me. This photo was taken on our trip to Lon­don in 2004

Hodge Fam­ily His­tory Research

As I gather data, I’ll throw it here. It will also appear in search engines — and we’ll see what link­ages and com­ments appear from all and sundry!

This data shows that Liam is a 6^th gen­er­a­tion Aus­tralian, on his father’s side, and has roots into the Lutheran-German com­munity now in South Aus­tralia. I can con­fid­ently show Liam’s ancest­ors to 1686: 9 gen­er­a­tions back in time; always on the far east­ern shores of Fife, Scotland.

From Rel­at­ives who found this page, and have provided more inform­a­tion:

• Meet Mary Milne, my Great– Great– Great– Grandmother
• Meet David Melville Hodge. My Great-Great-Grandfather
• Hodge Fam­ily His­tory Update — Novem­ber 2008
• Private Angus Hodge

From research:

Accord­ing to Whats in your name?, Hodge means: [also Hodg, Hoge, Hog]

Eng­lish, pat­ronymic derived from HODGE, the com­mon nick­name for ROGER ‘fame, spear’; the name was made pop­u­lar after the Nor­man Con­quest by Roger of Mont­gomery who dis­tin­guished him­self at the Battle of Hast­ings.
Also, accord­ing to Hodge
Hodge/Hudge/Hodgin/Hodgen: Eng­lish Pat­ronymic name from the pet name Hodge, which was derived from the given name Roger. Roger came to Eng­land as Rogier cour­tesy of the con­quer­ing Normans.

In ref­er­ence to Hodge Hill Com­mon: a pre­cious piece of undeveloped land around the junc­tion of the Cole­shill Road and Brom­ford Road. Hodge is prob­ably the fam­ily name of a medi­eval landowner, but this was also a by-name of Roger, used as a pat­ron­ising nick­name for an agri­cul­tural labourer, ie. ‘a coun­try bumpkin’.

“Hodg” is a ser­vant men­tioned in this 1575 doc­u­ment.

Melville Hodge, son of John, father of David Melville Hodge came out on the Joseph Rowan to Adelaide on June 16^th 1854 from County Fife Scot­land via Liv­er­pool (County Fife). It looks like he wasn’t alone: Joseph Rowan Search; there were 376 other gov­ern­ment immig­rants into a colony that had just been pro­nounced (South Aus­tralia, 1836) and found gold (1851). His occu­pa­tion was described as Plough­man and Miner, and reli­gion as Pres­be­tyrian. He was 51 when he arrived in Aus­tralia, had a son when he was 57 and died later in the same year. The name is some­times writ­ten down as: Melvil Hodge, Melvill Hodge or Melville Hodge.

Janet Crom­bie died of bowel inflam­ma­tion at sea on the 28^th March 1854, only 7 days out of Liv­er­pool. Only one other per­son died on this voy­age. Her age was lis­ted as 48 years old; although she was 58 if the birth cer­ti­fic­ate is correct.

On the Josepth Rowan are Jessie Hodge (21, a ser­vant) and a Melville Hodge (47, Farm Labourer). It may be pos­sible Janet was also known as Jessie. Where is Melville’s other son, Thomas Hodge? He seems to have gone miss­ing, and cer­tainly did not emig­rate at the same time as Melville.

A recent search in the 1841 Scot­land Census shows that Melvill was mar­ried to a Janet Crom­bie in 28^th Decem­ber 1828, and at this time had two chil­dren: Janet (born 8^th Sep 1836) and a younger Thomas (born to Melvil and Janet on 23^rd Decem­ber 1834 in par­ish of Cameron, Fife, Scot­land). Other census details: Where born: Fife, Scot­land; Civil par­ish: Mon­i­mail; County: Fife; Address: Carslo­gie O Its Cot­tages; Occu­pa­tion: Ag Lab [Agri­cul­tural Labourer].

From Google Maps, there is Carslo­gie Road com­ing from a town called Cupar. Carslo­gie Road, For­far, Scot­land. A sim­ilar search of this county/region of a sim­ilar age returns: ‘Culross — Saint Cyrus’, A Topo­graph­ical Dic­tion­ary of Scot­land (1846). Mon­i­mail is a par­ish to the west of the town of Cupar; and the Carslo­gie Cot­tage is now in ruins on this road. By 1851, 3 years before the fam­ily moved to South Aus­tralia, he had moved to Leuchars; Janet was 42, he was 40 and Thomas was 15. Both Thomas and Melville are lis­ted at Agi­cul­tural labourers.

Apart from Fife’s wild his­tory, fur­ther research about this Carslo­gie and Cupar (It is pro­nounced Cooper!) brings us to his­tory: His­tory of Cupar Par­ish Church

Fur­ther research is inter­est­ing. (at Scots Ori­gins) A Melvil Hodge (note the recor­ded spelling) has a birth registered on 23^rd Novem­ber 1803, son of a John Hodge and Elspeth Clark (mar­ried 29 March 1793).
The par­ish, St. Andrews And St. Leonards, is strangely in the region where golf was inven­ted! The east-coast of Scot­land. This school, hav­ing sim­ilar name to the par­ish, has an inter­est­ing loc­a­tion map St Andrews & St Leonards Par­ish School and Par­ishes of Fife, Scot­land. The Fife Fam­ily His­tory Soci­ety provides an inter­est­ing per­spect­ive on the life and times of the shire, includ­ing indus­tries etc. dur­ing Melvil’s lifetime.

John Hodge, born in the same par­ish, 28^th March 1771 to a James Hodge and Mary Scot. No record found of a James Hodge birth in this par­ish (although there are many James Hodge’s in the county of Fife within the range of years, and the only James Hodge in Kings­barn is too young to be mar­ried in 1763), but there is a record of a birth of Mary Scot on 24^th April 1753 in this par­ish to a Hary Scott and Mary Sivess. James Hodge mar­ried Mary Scot at Kings­barn, Fife, Scot­land on 23 Novem­ber 1763. Kings­barn par­ish is dir­ectly to the east of St Andrews.

Janet Crom­bie born 1806, mar­ried Melville on 28 Decem­ber 1828 at St. Andrews And St. Leonards, Fife, Scot­land and evid­ently died at sea. On this voy­age there is also a Thomas described as a agri­cul­tural labourer and a Jessie described as a ser­vant. (born 1836, died in 1854 at about 18 years of age in Scot­land — there­fore not on the voy­age? There is no record of par­ent­age in the data­base, so it could be a dif­fer­ent person)

So what drove Melvil Hodge to leave Fife in Scot­land? 1854 is about the same time as the Crimean War, and by my cal­cu­la­tions he was at least 45–50 when he left Scot­land. A rather old age (in those times) to up and leave. Hodges in Fife, Scot­land. If his daugh­ter, Jessie died in 1854 as recor­ded, did they leave for other reas­ons? This story about Car­oline Par­ish provides a per­spect­ive on the mid 19^th century.

Melvil remar­ried a Mary Milne (born 26^th Decem­ber 1830 in For­Far, Angus, Scot­land) whose mother was a Jean Stew­art and father James Milne which with my new info comes up in the fam­ily, which seem to have come out on the same boat.

Melville him­self died in 1860 and Mary remar­ried a James Couz­ins. David Melville Hodge left home at about 11 due to not get­ting on with his step father but he got mar­ried at his stepfather’s home.

David Melville Hodge, born 18 Oct 1860, Cock­a­too Valley/North Rhine, South Aus­tralia. Died 6^th Septem­ber 1937. Mar­ried Julia Florence Pil­grim 2 Octo­ber 1885, Clare, South Aus­tralia. (par­ents: John Pil­grim born Essex 13 Apr 1834 and Judith Brown, Naomi Frost born Essex 26 Apr 1831)

David Melville was a miner of sorts. He went to Broken Hill and also went by boat up to the Kim­ber­leys; the fam­ily has of a diary that he wrote about this trip. He also wrote poetry, and was a bit of a wan­der­lust. Fam­ily talk is that he had a fierce tem­per and would whip a bul­lock til it fell. After liv­ing in the Mid­north of South Aus­tralia, he then “retired’ in Adelaide, and sube­quently pur­chased land over on the Lock-Elliston road with his sons.

The last piece of farm­ing land on Eyre Pen­in­sula owned by this Hodge fam­ily was Sec­tion 36, Hun­dred of Cowan, Dis­trict Coun­cil of Ellis­ton (Eyre Pen­in­sula, South Aus­tralia). This prop­erty bordered the Bascombe Well Con­ser­va­tion Park on the western-side of the centre line (rail­way line) that splits Eyre Pen­in­sula in two. The prop­erty was bordered the “west­ern side” of the Dog Fence run­ning from south to north on Eyre Pen­in­sula. This side of the Dog Fence is where the din­gos where “free to roam” and eat sheep. The east­ern side was pro­tec­ted from the din­gos due to the fine almost chain-link fencing.

On my mother’s side, one fam­ily came out to South Aus­tralia from Silesia. They were Wends in 1848 on the ship “Vic­toria”. On the other branch of my mother’s fam­ily, only 2 broth­ers came out and their par­ents are not known. They came out from Prus­sia in 1860 on the “Emmy”. One was a cooper by trade.

The Wends, accord­ing to Wiki­pe­dia, is a trans­lit­er­a­tion of Van­dals. So, on my mother’s side — our ancen­stors van­dal­ised the known, civ­il­ised Roman world. Cool. If you know my mum, you know exactly out of char­ac­ter this is!

There is a say­ing in my fam­ily: if you’re Ger­man and from South Aus­tralia, then we’re prob­ably related. Some­how! Flee­ing per­se­cu­tion of a state-mandated Cath­olic reli­gion (there was noth­ing scar­ier to a Luther­ans in the 16^th through 19^th cen­tury than Cath­olic over­lords), many emig­rated to South Aus­tralia. More info is here: Ger­mans in Poland

From The top Shiraz from Down Under by Michael Franz of the The Wash­ing­ton Post

The place itself is a study in con­trasts. Most winer­ies are stun­ningly mod­ern, at least on the inside, with futur­istic labor­at­or­ies and all man­ner of glisten­ing steel giz­mos. But if you take a walk down the street of a Barossa town, past an old stone Lutheran church and shops selling everything from stru­del to sauer­braten, you’d swear the place was trans­planted from 19^th-century Prussia.

And in essence you’d be cor­rect. The Barossa was settled in the mid-19^th cen­tury by entire towns from Silesia (now part of Poland), led by Lutheran pas­tors who pre­ferred relo­ca­tion to adopt­ing the revised reli­gious ser­vice man­dated by Prus­sian King Fre­d­er­ick Wil­helm III. The land was sur­veyed and the towns were laid out even before the set­tlers arrived, and every fam­ily received about 30 acres. These plots were prudently planted with sev­eral dif­fer­ent crops, and wine grapes were almost always included.

Explor­a­tion of a dif­fer­ent kind of multi-lingualism

At school, I spent 3 years study­ing Ger­man. Sorry Herr Niemann, but all I remem­ber are the cof­fee and cake ses­sions, and I can now under­stand parts of Ger­man speech. I’d prob­ably still get lost in Ger­many. In an effort to expand the brain a little, in 1990 Avril Hodge and I spent 3 months learn­ing Japan­ese. The last time I tried my Japan­ese was at a res­taur­ant. In Tokyo, my extremely lim­ited skills left me. Luck­ily the wait­ress spoke Eng­lish — or else I would have starved.

Pro­gram­ming lan­guages; well that’s a dif­fer­ent story.

As an exer­cise, I’ve decided to list the pro­gram­ming lan­guages I have known — and see where it leads.

AppleSoft Basic, and Logo

The first com­puter I saw, touched and used was an Apple //+ in mid 1981. In a coun­try school, com­puters were some­thing very alien. I recall our school were given a loaner Apple for 2 months.

The more nerdy of us at the school played around with the com­puter dur­ing lunch breaks — and this is where my love, awe and respect for com­puters star­ted. The school’s sci­ence and math­em­at­ics teacher was a good guy. I prob­ably owe him for get­ting me into this great industry.

Included with the Apple //+ was a spiral bound AppleSoft Basic manual — and Logo. Therein began a long love of programming.

TRS-80 BASIC

Some­how, I man­aged to con­vince my par­ents to spend money on a TRS-80. Now I was a com­puter geek, fulltime.

The TRS-80 incor­por­ated a great BASIC lan­guage in ROM.

I remem­ber pro­gram­ming a word pro­cessor, spread­sheet and a simple account­ing pro­gram. Things were slightly dif­fer­ent in the early 80’s — stor­age was a 1200baud cas­sette tape.

Oh, and now I have an aver­sion to using the back­space key whilst hold­ing down shift…

Cobol

Spent a week on work exper­i­ence in the deep-dark 1980s doing a small bit of Cobol. I am glad that its time has gone — although, if I had per­sisted I might have made mil­lions dur­ing the Y2K crisis!

Hav­ing spent many hours with SQL, I can see why I am happy that I’ve left Cobol behind

Microsoft Basic for the Macin­tosh: ver­sions 1 through 3

My memor­ies of these ver­sions of Basic are mixed. The first ver­sion of Microsoft Basic on the Mac did no Mac UI cod­ing at all. From memory, the most you could do is call up dif­fer­ent fonts and dif­fer­ent win­dows. The sub­sequent ver­sions rec­ti­fied this; but its inter­est­ing to note that Apple had some­thing called “Mac­Basic” in the wings — writ­ten by the same guy that wrote MacWrite. I remem­ber get­ting a pir­ated copy on a floppy from a user group meet­ing. The stor­ies you read in Apple his­tory books state that Microsoft and Apple were at log­ger­heads over Mac­Basic; and Microsoft would not release Mul­ti­plan for the Mac is Apple released Mac­Basic. How times have changed (?)

Pas­cal

A little expos­ure to this… also wrote a kiosk style sys­tem in 1987 I think — cus­tom­ers would come to a Mac and type in their details — and we ran some sort of com­pet­i­tion based out of the data in the kiosk. Tied into this was a simple data­base sys­tem that stored the records. The data­base sys­tem was a C-ISAM pack­age you could pur­chase in these days.

Hyper­Talk

Hyper­Card, as cre­ated by Bill Atkin­son was a pleas­ure to work with and in. I remem­ber first see­ing Hyper­Card in 1987 and say­ing “this is amaz­ing” It pred­ated the web, and whilst lim­ited, the web lacks the sim­pli­city of HyperCard.

Although AppleScript has inher­it­ied Hyper­Talks feel, was a power­ful lan­guage that Apple evolved over time. Then they went into this Pink, SK8, Tali­gent boon­dogles and never really recovered their path.

Over­all, I loved the Hyper­Card envir­on­ment — the web is a poor replace­ment. To do any thing inter­est­ing, you have to know too many syn­taxes: HTML, CSS, Javas­cript, PHP (or sim­ilar) — and this is just to start.

Wrote a chapter for a book that was pub­lished in 1989 by The Waite Group, “Tricks of the Hyper­Talk Masters”

C

Hmm, C. Didn’t do any Unix C stuff — but around 1990/1991 did some Macin­tosh based C stuff to keep my hand in at MacOS pro­gram­ming. All I remem­ber was read­ing Inside Macin­tosh, learn­ing to con­vert this to Pas­cal stuff and all that jazz. Ahh yes, also wrote an XCMD/XFCN that appeared in the above book.

In a lull of con­sult­ing work in 1991 I star­ted to write a small Mac applic­a­tion in C.

sh, csh

Unix rocks, and these shell script­ing lan­guages are extremely power­ful. Cre­ated a simple net­work man­age­ment and report­ing sys­tem for the Aus­tralian Sub­mar­ine Cor­por­a­tion (to look at SNMP inform­a­tion from Kin­et­ics Fast­paths of all things — Loc­alTalk to Eth­er­net routers) — plus internal stuff for Ran­dom Access when they used the Unix-based account­ing system.

The integ­ra­tion of these shell script­ing envir­on­ments into the Unix envir­on­ment made it too easy to cre­ate simple “push” sys­tems. For instance, I cre­ated a sys­tem that per­mit­ted end users to design a simple report, and have it emailed to them on a daily basis. There was also a sys­tem of “watch­ers” where people could ask for noti­fic­a­tion of an event in the account­ing sys­tem (ie: an item was invoiced to one of their cus­tom­ers) — they would get noti­fied when this event occured. 1993.

AppleScript

Bas­tard­ised object ori­ent­a­tion and dynamic syn­tax. Still used today… and I have been known to cut code in it for demon­stra­tion pur­poses. Nowhere near a Guru like Shane Stanley.

Whilst I haven’t had time to work with AppleScript Stu­dio, I am look­ing for­ward to using this. The integ­ra­tion of AppleScript and the NeXT object ori­ented sys­tem is a strong combination.

User­Talk

User­Land Soft­ware, the makers of Fron­tier (and other things now) pion­eered the concept of inter-application com­mu­nic­a­tion on the Macin­tosh. The lan­guage they cre­ated to do this neatly integ­rated into their hier­arch­ical object stor­age system.

I used User­Talk to cre­ate the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that cre­ated the Fairfax@Atlanta (1996)site in 1996. Basic­ally, I stuck my ass on the line with this sys­tem and never looked back. Still have the code on me. Apple really owns it! Not that its worth any­thing today.

PL/SQL

PL/SQL is the lan­guage of choice when I was work­ing with Oracle. Ugly.

VICOM Script

VICOM soft­ware is a com­pany based in Bournemouth Eng­land. I first made con­tact with the then owner, Brian Mor­ris dur­ing Mac­World Janu­ary 1993. Being a “net­work­ing & con­nectiv­ity” guy in the Apple world, their ter­minal emu­lator VICOM Multiterm/Pro was a pleas­ure use. The real beauty was a pro­gram­ming lan­guage inven­ted by one of their tech­nical guys, Darko Roje.

VICOM Script was the per­fect lan­guage to cre­ate Front Ends in. It had excel­lent string pars­ing mech­an­isms and an easy way to make cus­tom Mac based front ends. Mul­tiple win­dows, lists etc — it had the lot. What’s more, if you wanted a change: you could email (AppleLink!) the designer. The lan­guage lent itself to user­int­er­face programming.

I used VICOM to cre­ate a front end to an Oracle SQL data­base. Using the com­mu­nic­a­tions cap­ab­il­it­ies of the sys­tem, I was able to front end a simple ter­minal ses­sion that called PL/SQL scripts on the backend Unix box. Today people would cre­ate web-based inter­faces. Still not as elegant.

New­ton­Script

The script­ing envir­on­ment on the ill-fated New­ton encom­passed more than the lan­guage. All data, such as the address book, were access­ible from your code. The lan­guage and envir­on­ment was easy to get into, once you under­stood the Small­talk terms like slots and prototypes.

Java

I love Java. This is the the lan­guage that really taught me object-orient tech­niques. This means that my concept of object ori­ent­a­tion is Java-centric and not up to the level of a C++ pro­gram­mer. Never had time or a reason to do much in C++.

Most of the real world stuff comes from WebOb­jects, which puts an even stranger slant on my understanding!

JavaS­cript (ECMAScript)

JavaS­cript is some­thing I wish I had more time to delve into; and maybe I should have earlier on in my web life. Its used in two places of interest at Adobe: as the exten­sion mechansim for GoLive 5.0 and the expres­sions engine part of AfterEf­fects 5.0÷5.5.

The other small uses I have made in HTML (related to DOM work) — urgh.

More recently, this engine has been incor­por­ated into InDes­ign, Pho­toshop and Illus­trator. Newer scripts on this site use Javas­cript and it is start­ing to grow on me.

Web­Script

This lan­guage is a part of WebOb­jects that is deprec­ated. Woe­ful lan­guage, great environment.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a lan­guage and an envir­on­ment. The psuedo-object ori­ent­a­tion can turn you in knots. The way that Microsoft’s COM sys­tem works whilst inel­eg­ant, seems to work. Adding extra com­pon­ents or calls to applic­a­tions such as InDes­ign or Illus­trator per­mit quick cre­ation of front ends or data mun­gers. I would find it dif­fi­cult to work on a large pro­ject in VB as you could get lost very eas­ily, and the lan­guage is not very elegant.

I think that writ­ing in PHP is faster for web cod­ing as com­pared to VBScript…

PHP

Whilst some­times inel­eg­ant — there are some sim­ilar com­mands that have dif­fer­ent syn­taxes; it smells of C and Unix inside a script­ing envir­on­ment. How­ever, it is a lan­guage that makes cre­ation of web based applic­a­tions very easy. The data/text manip­u­la­tion with arrays (and keyed arrays) makes the pro­cess of tak­ing data from some­thing like MySQL and pok­ing into HTML easy.

The cur­rent ver­sion of the mun­gen­eten­gine is 100% PHP cur­rently run­ning at over 1500 lines of code. Its too easy to cre­ate pro­ced­ural style code rather than purer object ori­ented code.

Action­Script

Action­script and Flash (with a little bit of XML): hmmm, mixed emo­tions on this one. The Flash player seems to no do things you would expect such as per­mit opa­city changes on “html” text fields. Strange. The hier­archy of moviec­lips and vari­ables held in them is also inter­est­ing. Whilst the lan­guage (at least in Flash5 level plu­gins) is like Javas­cript, I find the envir­on­ment a little inter­est­ing; the scope of vari­ables etc, and the address­ing of vari­ables cool.

Python

Why did I ignore Python for so long? It has to be the easi­est lan­guage to pickup, and the easi­est lan­guage to get some­thing done.

Python is way cooler than I expec­ted. Hav­ing “wanted” to learn Python for more than 3 years, its good to get it under my belt. There are so many exten­sions to COM, wx (Win­dow­ing sys­tem), SOAP — so it was easy to cre­ate a simple client/server upload sys­tem for adding stuff to the Mun­genet sys­tem. The OO nature of Python forces you into think­ing about MVC coding.

Now get­ting into Tur­bogears and all that Ajax stuff. SQLObe­jct reminds me of NeXT’s Enter­prise Object Framework.

C#

Now work­ing at Microsoft, it is imper­at­ive that you can read and write C#. Also, listen­ing to Anders Hejls­berg in vari­ous Microsoft set­tings — makes me respect this lan­guage and the .NET plat­form immensely.

Lan­guages I wish I had known…

C++,  Perl.

Wow, again!

InDes­ign CS2:

Thanks to the product man­age­ment team, I made it for the third time run­ning. You’ll find my name in the InDes­ign CS2 about box, too. Way cool. An hon­our. Again

InDes­ign CS:

Some­times, its the little things…

A goal of mine whilst work­ing at Adobe has been to get my name in the ‘About box’ of an applic­a­tion. Its sorta like the cred­its you see at the end of movies.

In one sense, this is easy to do. Just ask a product man­ager or engin­eer to place your name there. How­ever, these seem to be con­trolled to (rightly) only include those who actu­ally con­trib­ute some­thing to the devel­op­ment of the applic­a­tion, and adds input to its dir­ec­tion (even in a little way).

The dif­fi­cult part is adding your input to an applic­a­tion. Pro­grams such as Pho­toshop which have deep fea­tures and strong user com­munity are dif­fi­cult to get any sig­ni­fic­ant input that would war­rant an inclu­sion in the about box. Suf­fice to say, there are much smarter people than me who have their hands on the Pho­toshop tiller.

InDes­ign, how­ever, is a rel­at­ively new applic­a­tion that needs strong input from our cus­tom­ers to influ­ence its dir­ec­tion. Thanks to a good friend on the inside, the local Adobe office has been assist­ing the InDes­ign team to ensure that it meets local require­ments and cus­tomer requests as much as pos­sible. There are fea­tures in InDes­ign 2.0 that are a dir­ect res­ult of local cus­tomer feed­back. This makes me proud of the application

After a little nudge, I’ve man­aged to ensure that my name goes down in a little piece of his­tory. To any­one that has sug­ges­ted InDes­ign 2.0 fea­tures to me: this is all thanks to you

Nick, Decem­ber 2001

Visit the new InDes­ign Prepress Sec­tion: Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Tech­niques

Duo­tones: Pho­toshop to InDesign

What are duo­tones? From the Pho­toshop 7.0 Online help file:

Duo­tones are used to increase the tonal range of a gray­scale image. Although a gray­scale repro­duc­tion can dis­play up to 256 levels of gray, a print­ing press can repro­duce only about 50 levels of gray per ink. This means that a gray­scale image prin­ted with only black ink can look sig­ni­fic­antly coarser than the same image prin­ted with two, three, or four inks, each indi­vidual ink repro­du­cing up to 50 levels of gray.


Some­times duo­tones are prin­ted using a black ink and a gray ink–the black for shad­ows and the gray for midtones and high­lights. More fre­quently, duo­tones are prin­ted using a colored ink for the high­light color. This tech­nique pro­duces an image with a slight tint to it and sig­ni­fic­antly increases the image’s dynamic range. Duo­tones are ideal for two-color print jobs with a spot color (such as a PANTONE Color) used for accent.

Duo­tones is a gen­eric name given to mono­tone, duo­tone, tri­tone etc images. The mono– pre­fix here denotes the num­ber of col­our­ants (plates) in the final file gen­er­ated by Photoshop.

Gen­er­at­ing Duo­tones from Photoshop

The greatest con­trol over true Duo­tones as defined above is going to be in Pho­toshop. How­ever, there is a concept known as fake or poor man’s Duo­tones, which InDes­ign 2.0 sup­ports directly.

The pro­cess of con­vert­ing a col­oured image into a Duo­tone in Pho­toshop starts with con­vert­ing the image to gray­scale. The quick­est, and raw­est method of con­vert­ing is to go Image>Mode>Grayscale

After con­vert­ing to grey­scale, the next step is to Image>Mode>Duotone change the gray­scale into a Duo­tone image. The dia­log box that appears allows you to change the spot col­our that makes up the second col­our. If you would prefer a mono­tone, change the first “Black” ink in the list to the spot col­our. The curve box per­mits tweak­ing of the ink dens­ity where the second col­our is applied.

How do you get Pho­toshop Duo­tones into InDes­ign 2.0.x?

To place this file in InDes­ign, the format that we need to save the file is Pho­toshop EPS. Pho­toshop EPS is a nice, Com­pos­ite format that per­mits us to print com­pos­ite out­put; includ­ing Com­pos­ite PDF. I am not a major fan of Pho­toshop DCS as a format. (ref: InDes­ign 2.0: Pho­toshop with Spots, InDes­ign and Com­pos­ite PDF)

In InDes­ign, File>Place the Pho­toshop EPS saved above. Once the image is placed, you will notice that InDes­ign adds a new Swatch to the Window>Swatches palette.

From this point, the new Swatch is con­sidered a Spot col­our. Man­aging this is the same as man­aging Spot col­ours in InDes­ign: through the Ink Man­ager.

Note: There is a known (and you do read Readme’s, right?) a doc­u­mented bug with InDes­ign 2.0: it con­siders the spot colour’s altern­ate col­our space RGB. This means, if you print sep­ar­a­tions where you have Ink aliased the Spot to Pro­cess in the Ink Man­ager, it con­verts the Spot spe­cified in the Pho­toshop EPS to RGB rather than the CMYK altern­ate. The work­around is to make this ele­ment 99.9% Nor­mal Trans­par­ency, and print using the [High Res­ol­u­tion] Trans­par­ency flattener style. The Flattener will cor­rectly con­vert the Spot to its CMYK (Pro­cess) break­down, and per­mit a pure Pro­cess out­put. (ref: InDes­ign 2.0: Print­ing Out­put Choices and Flattener Tricks (includ­ing force Grey­scale export!))

Poor Man’s Duo­tones in InDesign

Gray­scale images can be dir­ectly made into Mono­tones in InDes­ign 2.0. Here, we are assign­ing the Black (K) plate to an altern­ate col­our, includ­ing poten­tially a Spot Color. The user-interface needs to be care­fully described as there is a little twist: some­thing the help file doesn’t quite explain. The order of steps below are crit­ical!

1. Place the Gray­scale TIFF or Pho­toshop image into InDes­ign 2.0
   
   
2. Open Windows>Swatches
3. Ensure that the Swatch, Spot or oth­er­wise is in the Swatches list
   
   
4. Select the Dir­ect Selec­tion Tool
   
   
5. In the Swatches palette, ensure that the Fill is selec­ted at the top:
   
   
6. Click inside the Grey­scale image with the Dir­ect Selec­tion Tool
7. Click on the Swatch you would like to apply to the image:
   
   

The key to this pro­cess is ensur­ing that you have the Fill selec­ted in the Swatches prior to Dir­ect Select­ing the con­tent of a grey­scale image. I do not think the online help in InDes­ign 2.0 clearly explains these steps.

Thanks to Gene Palmiter for sug­gest­ing I write this up. Its been in my head for months.

Why is my text prin­ted from InDes­ign (a) fat (b) out­lined © fuzzy (d) or all of the above?

This art­icle describes the Adobe Sup­port Data­base Text Is Ras­ter­ized When You Print to a RIP from InDes­ign (2.0 on Win­dows or Mac OS)

In this example, you can see there has been a Pho­toshop file placed into a layout:

The Pho­toshop file on the red-marked layer (named: “pho­toshop file”) has been masked out of a back­ground image, and saved as a .PSD . A text wrap has also been applied to this Pho­toshop files alpha chan­nel (or trans­par­ency) caus­ing the text in the yel­low layer (named: “body text”) to wrap. Noth­ing too strange about this, how­ever when prin­ted to Post­script and Dis­tilled, the fol­low­ing occurs:

This is a screen dump of the PDF gen­er­ated from the InDes­ign CS file above (Print to Post­script as CMYK, using the [High Res­ol­u­tion] Trans­par­ency Flattener Style. PDF gen­er­ated using Acrobat Distiller)

As you can see, around the marker “A”, the text looks “fat­ter” and “fuz­zier” than the text next to the marker “B”. This is the res­ult of the trans­par­ency flattener. (NB: in Acrobat, in Edit>Preferences, Dis­play if you turn on the “Smooth Line Art” option, this fuzzi­ness goes away.)

Lets zoom into the area where the Pho­toshop file and the body text over­lap. You can see in the above image that the red out­line of the image over­laps cer­tain lines in the under­ly­ing body text. In this instance, the Trans­par­ency Flattener has decided to cov­ert the all the text to out­lines in the lines that run under­neath the image.

The effect we are see­ing here is the Trans­par­ency Flattener in action. In Post­script, there is no way to have a semi-transparent image (the masked por­tion of the car) blend into type. There­fore, the flattener con­verts the rel­ev­ant text to out­lines and “clips” into the out­line shape any image inform­a­tion that is required to gen­er­ate out­put. The import­ant end goal is to gen­er­ate out­put in print that matches the design­ers intent.

To an aver­age observer, at high res­ol­u­tions (I have examples at 2400/133lpi Computer-to-Plate out­put) — its dif­fi­cult for the naked eye to pick “out­lined” vs “nor­mal” type with serif text at low point sizes.

How do you solve the problem?

There are two pos­sible solu­tions to this prob­lem. One key point I would like to make before I con­tinue is that you must choose one path or the other for the whole job.

Choice 1: Con­vert All Text to Outlines.

InDes­ign 2.0, Edit>Transparency Flattener Styles… Cre­ate a New Trans­par­ency Flattener style that turns on the “Force Text to Out­lines” option.

Now when print­ing using this Flattener Style to the Dis­til­ler (ie: same pro­cess as above), the end res­ult will look like:

The res­ult is that all the text in the doc­u­ment is con­ver­ted to out­lines. When you com­pare a page prin­ted (at 2400 dpi/133 lpi) with text con­ver­ted to out­lines side by side with a page where the text is nor­mal, the dif­fer­ence is just not­ic­able to the naked eye.

If you use this flattener style con­sist­ently through­out the job, the res­ult will be that all the text looks con­sist­ent. The down­side is that the text is no longer text — it’s paths — unsearch­able and to a trained eye slightly fatter.

Choice 2: Change Layer Ordering

This is my pre­ferred option, and when design­ing doc­u­ments in InDes­ign its best to fol­low a pro­cess where all body text in the top­most layer.

In the InDes­ign doc­u­ment, I am going to change the order of the lay­ers so the body text sits above the image:

In the above example, you can see that the “pho­toshop file” layer is under­neath the “body text” layer.

QuarkX­Press Users: don’t panic! As you would real­ise, in Xpress, your text wrap is based on the pos­i­tion­ing of objects in lay­ers. Images above text pushes the text out of the way: cre­at­ing text wrap. Not so in InDes­ign. Text wrap in InDes­ign is object-to-object based. It doesn’t mat­ter that the image is under­neath the text, it will still cause the text above to wrap around.

Prepress oper­at­ors: don’t panic! Chan­ging layer order­ing like this will not cause InDes­ign 2.0 to re-wrap the text.

What is the result?

In this final res­ult, you can see that the text has not been con­ver­ted to out­lines. This example was prin­ted from InDes­ign 2.0 using the stand­ard [High Res­ol­u­tion] flattener style.

Pointe-du-Hoc:

Pegasus Bridge:

Omaha Beach:

Gold Beach (Arro­manches):

Brecourt Manor:

Thursday, 25^th March, 2004

Due to the timezone dif­fer­ence, presently only 1 hour, or more likely the lack of decent sleep: about 4 hours a night for three nights has taken its toll. For­cing myself to con­cen­trate in meet­ings and act­ively add value. Men­tal fuzziness.

Sleep­ing in strange beds in many hotels you learn how to get a good night sleep. Its an occu­pa­tional skill. Rule One: keep the room cooler than 17 degrees C. Rule Two: use a flat pil­low. The prob­lem with many hotels is they pride them­selves on big puffy pil­lows. Instant neck prob­lems here.

I have a bad habit of fall­ing asleep about when the cabin crew start the safety demon­stra­tion and wakeup when level flight is reached. Its uncanny.

Read­ing the my new pur­chase in the Lonely Planet range: Japan. I have a the­ory that I enjoy travel to coun­tries that I wrote school pro­jects on (if that makes any sense) Love Actu­ally on the screen in eco­nomy. Ahh, Lon­don. See you next week.

Sick of forms. To leave Aus­tralia, arrive in New Zea­l­and, leave New Zea­l­and (after pay­ing NZ to get out of Auck­land Inter­na­tional Aiport, thank you very much) and finally arrive back into Aus­tralia takes 4 forms. Name, address, email, SARs, Pass­port num­ber. There has to be a bet­ter way! In the time between the Singa­pore trip and the Auck­land trip, the Aus­tralian arrival form has changed!

5 minutes from Immig­ra­tion to Aus­tralia. The joys of pack­ing light!

Wed­nes­day, 24^th March, 2004

The Auck­land Sheraton prop­erty has been sold to someone else, accord­ing to the gos­sip. I hope they have deep pock­ets as the place is a little tired. The hotel rooms are still stuck in 1983, maybe 1984. No high speed inter­net access. At least BBC-World is on TV.

Meet Luke in NZ. He is a new dad, only 4 days in. He has another 21 years of fun. Men that have had chil­dren, and been involved in all the birth­ing action, remem­ber more about the pro­cess of child birth and other obscure obstitric details than one would expect through the years. Is this universal?

I also real­ise that I am car­ry­ing 896Mb of Com­pact­Flash memory to Europe. This is a massive amount of stor­age (about 900 digital cam­era shots) before I load them into the laptop. How the world of memory has moved on.

Tues­day, 23^rd March, 2004

6.50pm flight to Auck­land, NZ. Hello Qantas Club Inter­na­tional Sydney, my second home. Almost second office as I run into Barry and dis­cuss business.

Neil Perry my arse. The food on the 2hour 20 minute flight tastes vaguely famil­iar. Yes, I am reminded of 3 years of board­ing house food. The lamb was prob­ably from the mid 1980s as it was tough. Thanks to the iPod, apart from the dubi­ous food, its a quick and pain­less flight. Arrive 11pm, hotel lobby bar until late.

Fri­day, 12^th March, 2004

Thursday and fly­ing home. 20 minutes from hotel to checked-in, and through cus­toms. A posse of Singa­por­ean sol­diers patrol the air­port with their machine guns at the ready. The world has changed.

Whatever you want, there is a place to pur­chase it at the Singa­pore air­port. The prices are more than the Funan, and the Funan is only about 10% cheaper than Australia.

QF6 from Frank­furt via Singa­pore leaves 30 minutes late. De-icing in Frank­furt took “fright­fully long”, so we’re late leav­ing Singapore.

2 hours sleep on the flight, and a full day of work on Friday.

Wed­nes­day, 10^th March, 2004

After 2 days stuck in internal meet­ings, and short sojourn to a bowl­ing alley, its time to go shop­ping. Stod, Lee and I leave the hotel and head toward the Funan Centre: a build­ing with IT stores.

If you are smart, you can walk from one end of Singa­pore to the other without los­ing sight of a retail store, and under­ground so you miss the sky. Half way, we see a tourist-y couple look­ing at a roadmap of Singa­pore. Stod assumed they had been stuck under­ground for days and were per­man­ently lost in the mall underground.

So I got lost too. Too many changes in build­ings around Raffles City, one wrong turn and you’re lost. Thank­fully, a short S$6 taxi ride and we’re at the Funan. The Funan Centre houses most of the IT stores in Singa­pore, all under one roof. I am look­ing for a PCMCIA Com­pact­flash card reader. Lee clocks one in a store on a high level. S$18 and we’re away.

Stand­ing in the rain, 45 minute tough phone con­ver­sa­tion. I won­der what people around thought of my con­ver­sa­tion? Missed lunch, but didn’t miss lunch if that makes any sense.

Monday, 08^th March, 2004

Flight QF5 is delayed by 30 minutes. Some­thing about the engine need­ing to be “run up”, so it looks like Qantas have just fixed some­thing on the tar­mac. QF5 is also on its way to Frank­furt, abso­lutely full of an eclectic mix­ture of For­mula 1 pil­grims and tra­gic Gay and Les­bian Mardi Gras attendees.

On the pointy end, and I mean pointy end, of a sieben-sechs-sieben vier hun­dert on its way from Sydney to Frank­furt via Singa­pore. This time, I am alight­ing in Singa­pore. Watch­ing the inseat enter­tain­ment, choos­ing “Lost In Trans­la­tion” from the vari­ous choices. Bill Mur­ray (my father-in-law’s name), Scar­lett Johannsen (I am in love) and Gio­vanni Ribisi (from “Sav­ing Private Ryan”). Hmm, Tokyo in May; Nor­mandy in April. The world is a small place, indeed.

Note to self: pur­chase the Lonely Planet guide to Tokyo so I don’t get lost. In the past 3 months, the Hodge fam­ily has pur­chased about 12 guides for vari­ous cit­ies. The Seoul guide helped my not get lost. Which I think is the point.

I blame my father for giv­ing me pro­fes­sional won­der­lust and a desire to travel. As a sailor in the late 1960s, early 1970s I remem­ber see­ing pic­tures and souven­irs from exotic places includ­ing Singa­pore, Hong Kong, San Diego, Hawaii and Toyko. Either by nature or nuture, I want to see other places in the world. The next 70 days is going to be many cit­ies com­pressed into a short time span.

In roughly 70 days time, I am in Tokyo for the first time. Watch­ing “Lost in Trans­la­tion” holds many res­on­ant moments. Call­ing from a very strange time in an unfa­mil­iar hotel room to a chaotic fam­ily at home is very com­mon for partner’d travellers.

Sit­ting at the front of the 747, and I do mean the abso­lute front: seat 1B, the rain beats on the nose cone. It sounds like rain on a tin roof, but we are in a plane trav­el­ling at a couple of hun­dred kms per hour, on the equator, 25 minutes from Singa­pore. Ah, the tropics.

Fast and effi­cient Singa­pore: out in a taxi within 20 minutes off to the Pan Pacific hotel. The taxi driver is speak­ing on his mobile, hands free. Also, hands free from the wheel as he ges­tic­u­lates his points in a lan­guage unknown to me. As we aqua­plane in Changi to the Pan Pacific, I am eagerly await­ing to get hori­zontal in a hotel bed.

Ran­dom shot from out­side the taxi in Singa­pore


Nick, Sydney in the back­ground, Qantas Club Sydney Intl


Laptop some­where near Dar­win


Even the toi­let in the new 747 as a win­dow. Now the world gets to see your bare arse


Yes! The bag arrives in one piece


Rainy night on arrival in Singa­pore. The taxi driver had it in hand


View from my hotel room. Large build­ings is the Suntec centre


Hotel room, Pan Pacific, Singa­pore.


View from hotel room toward res­id­ental por­tion of Singa­pore


Inside Pan Pacific hotel. Yes, 33 floors up!


Morn­ing over the CBD of Singa­pore. This was the view whilst eat­ing break­fast.


View from the meet­ing room. Stuck in here for 3 days.


Wait­ing for taxis, Suntec


Off and away


Ray bowl­ing, Singa­pore


Asleep after a long day


In the lift to the 33^rd floor look­ing at the night lights of Singa­pore


Stod, Lee and Nick some­where under­ground in Singa­pore. Every­where a store.


Inside the Funan Centre. Every com­puter store in Singa­pore is in here.


Out­side the Pan Pacific


Three of the Suntec towers


Foun­tain of Wealth, Suntec


Adobe office, Suntec, Singa­pore


Limo to the air­port, Singa­pore


Inside Singa­pore air­port. Yes, more shops.


Three Aus­trali­ans doing last minute toy shop­ping, Singa­pore air­port.


Nick asleep, Singa­pore Qantas Club. Later that night I had 2 hours sleep.


On the flight from Frank­furt via Singa­pore, we had inap­pro­pri­ate read­ing mater­ial