XML Finland 2011 will be held on board a cruise ship on November 9-10. Looks like fun, so I’ve submitted a presentation. Wish me luck.
XML Finland
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Roland D-50 Key Servicing
I serviced my old Roland D-50 today after noticing problems with the aftertouch of two keys. It seems the key contacts need yearly mending to work–I took the whole thing apart about a year ago, cleaning all 61 keys and their contacts.
Here’s a useful web page for those of you who have a D-50 in need of servicing.
Flight Sims
There is a terrific open source flight simulator called FlighGear. It’s freely available for my platform of choice, Debian Linux (and a number of others, including Windows and Mac OS X) and it’s quite mature these days, so naturally it’s what I run when I want to fly a plane these days. When I still had a Windows partition that worked, I have to admit I quite liked Microsoft’s classic Flight Simulator, but my Vista partition doesn’t work all that well and anyway, Microsoft killed off the sim a year or two ago. FlightGear is a more than adequate replacement.
Today I learned that somebody is marketing an older FlightGear version under a different name (Pro Flight Simulator), charging around $50 for a DVD or download and promising free lifetime updates. Of course, there is no (easily found) mention of FlightGear anywhere on their site, and I doubt the source code is easily available, either.
It has to be somewhere, though. See, FlightGear is GPL software, which basically means that you can do whatever you want with the software (including selling copies of it) for as long as you also make available the source code. I think GPL lists a few other conditions as well, but the idea is that software should be free (as in speech).
So what these people do when ripping off free software is most likely not illegal, merely unethical. To further firmly establish themselves in the gutter, they have produced a number of blogs and fake reviews to market the product, seemingly without any shame; do a Google search if you are interested, but I won’t help their cause by giving you a direct link.
Read all about the scam at http://www.flightgear.org/flightprosim.html, and download a FREE copy of the latest version if you are interested in flight sims. Or just spread the word.
Me and XML in Stockholm
I’ll be talking about XML in Stockholm on June 16th. The event is a one-day tutorial for technical writers, managers and other interested parties, organised by Dokumentinfo. They organise tutorials on various subjects related to document management and archiving, and a yearly conference where I was invited to speak last year.
So far I have few details but I’m pretty sure I’ll manage to include XLink, somehow.
Finally, KDE 4.6 on Debian
Again, title says it all. I’m only a few days into running KDE 4.6 on my desktop but so far it’s superior to any previous 4.x. It feels like, well, it just works. It’s also beautiful; Plasma is finally mature enough to do all those things I read about two years ago.
What doesn’t work all that well is Amarok. It still won’t play CDs (it can now list the CD contents – hooray), and while I do understand that some of these things take time, 1.4 didn’t have any problems in that respect. I still haven’t found an alternative for my every music need but out of spite I’m now running Clementine, an Amarok fork that also doesn’t grasp CDs.
It’s May and It’s Snowing
Title says it all.
Sponsored Links Rock
Found this while reading about fake pilots on AOL Travel. Don’t you just love sponsored links?
An Even-Simpler Markup Language?
in his blog, Norman Walsh writes about an even-simpler-than-Mixro-XML markup language, inspired in part by John Cowan’s XML Prague poster and by James Clark’s Micro XML ideas. His ideas are well worth a serious consideration–Norm’s ideas are always worth considering–but the purist in me cringes at the idea of allowing more than one root element. I have to say that I find the idea attractive but I’m not really big on change so maybe that is why I hesitate.
The pragmatist in me, on the other hand, also cringes at Norm’s not doing away with namespaces when he has the chance. in my experience they always create more problems than they solve, but on the other hand, my experience tends to be more about strictly controlled environments where the issues one usually wishes to solve using namespaces can be dealt with using other means.
Until Next Year, XML Prague
This year’s XML Prague is over and I miss it already. For a markup geek, XML Prague is heaven. There is always so much to learn, so many great minds and cool new ideas, not to mention Czech beer and the friendly atmosphere of a smaller conference. This was my third consecutive year attending and I very much look forward to the fourth.
Some notes of interest:
- XML Prague is a great success. The conference sold out before the sessions were announced so next year, it will move to a larger venue.
- HTML5, last year’s hot topic, was pronounced dead more than once.
- Michael Kay announced (and demo’d) Saxon Client Edition that allows you to run XSLT 2 on the browser. Very cool. Saxon CE is in alpha but available for testing at www.saxonica.com.
- JSON seems to be hot this year. I should probably spend some time learning it, especially since I am planning to use it in the CMS we develop at Condesign.
- George Bina from SyncRO Soft Ltd, the company that makes Oxygen, presented some ideas regarding advanced XML development. While Oxygen is at the centre of many of these, his point was that there should be a standardised way to do it all. Dave Pawson suggested expanding XML catalog files for the job via Twitter, an idea I find plausible.
- Murata Makoto, a personal hero of mine thanks to his work with Relax NG, presented EPUB3. What those of us who were there will remember, however, is his introduction, expressing his grief over the on-going catastrophe in Japan.
See www.xmlprague.cz for more.
Squeeze Is Out
The new Debian, Squeeze, is out. This means that we can finally expect new things added to the unstable version, Sid, such as KDE 4.6.