This year, my paper wasn’t accepted for XML Prague. I guess I’ll just have to go there anyway.
XML Prague 2011, Part Two
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Presentation at the Dokumentinfo Conference
I held a presentation on addresses and naming of resources in document management at the Teknisk Dokumentation 2010 conference (Swedish-laguage link; sorry) last week. The conference now stands out among the ones I’ve attended lately due to the fact that there was a power outage during the afternoon of the first conference day (leading to some rather different presentations).
I also learned a lot. Olaf Drummer’s presentation about the PDF/A format, especially the coming PDF/A-3 standard, gave me a few ideas that I intend to implement.
XML Prague 2011
XML Prague 2011 will take place on March 26th & 27th. I’m so going to be there.
DITA Specialization in DocBook?
Eliot Kimber and Norman Walsh apparently have discussed DITA, DocBook and specialization á la DITA in DocBook. Norman Walsh wrote a blog entry on it, and Eliot Kimber commented it.
Very interesting reading, at least if you are a markup geek (which I am). I don’t think they’ve changed my opinions on DITA, however, even though I’m thinking about it.
Mobile Sync, Part Three
After (unsuccessfully) banging my head against the wall trying to sync my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop with the Nokia N900, I resorted to the only solution I knew would work.
I wiped out Ubuntu and installed Debian GNU/Linux Sid in its place. Apart from spending a night recovering from a dodgy dist-upgrade, the laptop now works, syncing perfectly with the N900.
Me, I think there is something wrong with Ubuntu 10.04.
AdSense and Spam
Gotta love AdSense. When checking my Gmail account’s spam folder, I noticed that AdSense did its thing. Above the dozen or so Viagra and penis enlargement ads, AdSense had placed this:
Spam Skillet Casserole – Broil until golden
More XProc
I’ve been busy reading up on XProc today while walking through W3C’s XProc Test Suite.
An XML pipeline language has been on my wish list ever since my friend Henrik MÃ¥rtensson wrote something called eXtensible Filter Objects (XFO), an XML pipeline language not unlike XProc, about ten years ago and then lost interest, focussing instead on lean theories, business management and such. Some time before he moved on he wrote a Perl implementation of XFO and another friend, David Rosell, wrote a Java version of that, but unfortunate circumstances killed it all after XFO had been implemented for a few of our then-clients at Information & Media.
XProc, of course, does more than XFO ever did, but the ideas are the same. XProc is scratching a persistent itch for me and might (IMO, of course) very well become one of XML’s most important specs to date. For someone like me who is basically a non-programmer, being more of a markup theorist and dochead (to follow Ken Holman’s labelling of the degrees of XML geekery), it’s a wish come true.
Today, in spite of me going through the test suite and reading the spec, I feel that my most important action towards XProc wisdom was to check with Norman Walsh if he’s working on an XProc book yet (he is).
I’m getting there, though. I hope to finish a working pipeline for Cassis TI publishing tomorrow.
XProc
I’m going to spend the next week or two doing a test implementation of XProc for our document management system, Cassis TI. XProc, as some of you will know, is a pipeline processing language for XML processing, in the same vein as pipe processing in the *nix world. It’s intended to standardise and ease XML processing by treating the processing as a black box consisting of smaller black boxes; in other words, what is inside is less interesting than how the in- and outputs are defined and used.
The test is about producing PDF output so it’s nothing fancy or new, but it’s important because I believe we can replace our current backend with an XProc-based processor, making things easier, faster and better for programmers and users alike.
Mobile Sync, Part Two
I have an older IBM Thinkpad (a T42p) laptop with Ubuntu Studio installed. In version 9.10, syncevolution worked like a charm. All I had to do was to install, setup the N900 and sync, no problems whatsoever. Then I got brave and upgraded the laptop to Ubuntu 10.04 and syncevolution to the latest version.
Fail to sync.
And mind you, it doesn’t tell me what’s wrong, it just fails. I’ve tried installing older syncevolution packages, resetting bluetooth stuff, sacrificing my firstborn… nothing helps!
If you know what’s wrong, please let me know.
Roland D-50
Got my hands on this venerable synth. Seems I’ll have to do repairs but oh, I’m so looking forward to this.