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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Got my hands on this venerable synth. Seems I’ll have to do repairs but oh, I’m so looking forward to this.
After years of not being able to sync my Nokia mobile(s) with my Debian Linux desktop, syncevolution and the Evolution “groupware suite” have finally made that possible. I’ve had success with both my older Symbian 60-based phone, N95-2, and my (Maemo-based) N900.
See www.syncevolution.org for details on how to do this. My Debian Sid box required the apt sources from that site (it seems that Sid is lagging behind, at least for now; they’ve packaged the last beta but the site includes the released 1.0 version), but otherwise the install and sync both went without a hitch.
I’ve switched from KVM to VirtualBox for my virtualisation needs. My Debian laptop is hosting and right now there is a Windows 7 guest. Apart from some slowness, especially with shared folders (on extfs3), the whole thing works like a charm. I can run XMetaL in the VirtualBox with no problems.
Finally it looks like I won’t be needing a Windows partition at work.
Today it occurred me to have a look at the DITA Architecture Specification source to see how the people behind the spec would tag a list; as some of you know, this was the subject of my recent blog entry. There are a number of lists in that spec, many with introductory paragraphs, so it’s a pretty obvious way to find out, right? Well, after the examples in that spec, maybe.
Anyway, this is how they do it:
<p>Introductory para:
<ul>
<li>Item</li>
<li>Item</li>
</ul>
</p>
This was one of my guesses, and I have to say that it’s better than any of the alternatives I could come up with. It’s not good markup, though, in my opinion, as it says that semantically, a paragraph is sort of a block-level superclass, a do-it-all and one that you must use if you need that introduction.
But then, why limit yourself to lists? Why aren’t notes tagged like that? Or definition lists, or images, or tables? Think about it. Doesn’t this feel just a little bit like a cop-out to you? It does to me. It feels like the author realised that he needed that wrapper but there was nothing he could cling to, other than this construction.
I’m not saying that my way is the only way (obviously it’s not) but this bothers me because it muddies the semantic waters.