Anyone missed me? Don’t lie; you didn’t. It’s the Internet and there are a gazillion blogs out there. Some of them are probably even better than mine.
I’m back now, though, and I will once again be offering my views on things that matter to me on this space. Hope you’ll read.
I’ve spent the last few days tinkering with an XMetaL authoring environment for a client. The XMetaL version is the latest, 5.0, which is actually a lot of fun, but unfortunately it means that I’ve been forced back to Windows. What’s worse, it also means that I’m forced to develop in Microsoft’s exceedingly bloated Visual Studio .Net, surely a punishment for a previous life.
It’s beyond me to understand why JustSystems, the Japanese company that bought XMetaL from Blast Radius, insists on this dependency.
An XMetaL developer doesn’t need all the bells, whistles, and bugs that is Visual Studio, he needs a reasonably flexible scripting environment, easy access to modifying CSS stylesheets, writing (XML-based) toolbars and customizations, as well as the occasional form or dialog.
The thing is, different developers have different preferences. While I do believe that there are people that actually like Visual Studio .Net, not all of us do. Maybe we prefer other languages, or maybe we believe that forcing us to use the same tool for everything just isn’t the right way to go. After all, even if you own an 18-wheel truck, you don’t use it to drive to the supermarket to buy groceries. You use a car or a bus or a bike. Something that doesn’t get in the way.
Because that’s what Visual Studio does. It gets in the way, and more so when all you want to do is to tweak a CSS stylesheet. And I haven’t even mentioned how hard it has become to change the DTD and then recompile it and import it into your project.
And I won’t, because my blood pressure is important to me.
So while XMetaL in its latest reincarnation is very nice, I still consider version 3.1 to be superior for a number of reasons, of which one important one (to me) is that I can run it in and wine and Linux.
Yesterday, I finally gave in and bought Oxygen, a Java-based XML/XSL editor available for Linux. While it’s not an editor I’d choose for authoring XML documents (I still prefer something like XMetaL for anything beyond a page or two), I’ve fallen in love with it while writing XSL stylesheets for Arabic/Persian/Hebrew output for a client.
Until now, I’ve used ActiveState’s Komodo for the purpose but I have to admit that Oxygen is better. Obviously, there’s content completion for XSLT, but also for XSL-FO, which is very nice. You can also set a DTD or XML Schema of your own choice as the target output, which makes it a lot easier and faster to write stylesheets.
But the best feature is one that I don’t really expect to use commercially: Oxygen‘s got Relax NG support, both for writing Relax NG schemas and for writing instances. It’s really cool, but unfortunately, nobody seems to use Relax NG. It’s just me and a few mates.
And no, I’m not affiliated with the company behind Oxygen in any way. I just like the product. A lot.
This is the Oscars weekend, and one of the nominated films is The Inconvenient Truth It’s now speculated that an Oscar could be his first step towards the White House., former US Vice-President Al Gore’s eye opener on global warming and the climate crisis threatening us all. The dramatically inclined even suggest that he could announce his candidacy on the podium, Oscar in hand.
I think it’s a great idea. Gore would probably be the best candidate in years, if he runs, a candidate with an agenda as important to the resat of the world as for the US. In his words (with diagrams of water flooding Manhattan in the background), is it possible that we should focus on other dangers than just terrorism?
Until recently, I’ve been using kscd as my CD player in the KDE desktop environment. Some time ago, however, kscd caught a bug. After a few minutes’ worth of playing a newly inserted CD, the CD stops and resets to track 1. If I press Play again, it will now play the CD flawlessly, from start to end. However, if I eject it and insert a new CD, the bug reappears.
This has been driving me nuts.
After some unsuccessful Googling, where I did find others sharing the same problem with me but no solution, I listened to a friend’s advise and switched to Amarok, a media player that handles MP3s, fetches lyrics, builds playlists and helps me compile them in a MySQL database, among other things. Amarok is really nice.
But the kscd bug bothers me, and I want it solved. If anyone out there reads this and knows what happens, and why, please leave a note.
It seems that Microsoft is giving away brand-new Acer Ferrari laptops as Christmas gifts to some bloggers out there. These people have apparently been praising the upcoming Microsoft Vista operating system in particularly clever (and objective, I’m sure) ways, and so now get their rewards.
If you haven’t had the chance to drool over an Acer Ferrari yet, have a look and tell me that you don’t want one.
Look, Mr Gates, I know I wrote a little something about the Vista EULA some time ago, and I know I’ve been blogging about Linux every now and then, but is it really too late for atonement? Perhaps I could write some positive words about the XML-based new layout format you hope to backstab, I mean, replace, PDF with, or maybe I could join the MS choir about the benefits of the Office XML format? Or I could just write a blog about the Microsoft-Novell agreement where you hope to short-circuit the open source market?
Call me.
It seems that I cannot reply to any comments on my blog entries. The word verification system is messed up and I cannot solve the problem now. Therefore, I will post any comments here, for now…
Comment/Reply to My Entry on Social Stories(TM):
Yes, social stories are indeed very useful. We use social stories to help my son with various day-to-day chores and such.
In this case, I couldn’t get past the TM symbol. I would probably buy that book if it weren’t for the TM inserted everywhere… It’s the autie in me speaking, and that particular detail is all I can see now.
There’s still the TEACCH workbook also authored by Carol Gray. Thankfully.
Cheers,
/Ari
Lately I’ve been rediscovering C. The programming language, that is. Mostly, I’ve been doing it by reading Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s classic tutorial on the language, The C Programming Language. By today’s standards, it’s a rather thin book, only 272 pages, but it’s the best book ever written on the subject, and vastly superior to any 1,000-page Learn C in 21 days and the like. If I was allowed a single computer book to emulate, it would be it, the classic K&R.
They don’t get any better than K&R. The book’s concise yet thorough, easy to read, and never wordy. And it was the first book to showcase a Hello World example program.
Now, I’m not a real programmer by any means. While some of my code is actually used out there, and I’ve been paid good money for it, most is rather bad, wordy, and overly ambitious. Which brings me to another book I’m craving at the moment: Code Complete, by Steven McConnell. It’s a general-purpose volume from Microsoft Press (of all places) on writing good, professional-quality code, containing best practices of all sorts, from tips on testing to the pseudo-code method, and much, much more. I’ve been reading it at the local bookstore for days now, and while it’s way too expensive to buy there, it’s more reasonably priced at Amazon and other online Meccas.
It’s my current #1 obsession to get that book, and while I really don’t have the money right now, I fully expect to give in to the temptation shortly. A few abstract clicks late one night, a PayPal message, and it’s mine.
I’ll let you know.
Social stories are often used to explain the intricacies of social interaction and other abstractions to autistic people. They look a lot like a comic book; rather than using complicated words and thus the inevitable abstractions, often beyond the autistic mind, they use pictures and sometimes text to explain a concept.
A good example of a typical social story is the image to the left, developed to explain some simple similes for autistic children. Often, parents of autistic children will have ready-made images for various purposes, from brushing your teeth in the morning to welcoming guests to the house in a proper manner. Social stories can be an excellent, often invaluable, tool, and have saved the day for probably countless families with kids on the spectrum.
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, a company specializing in part on Asperger/autism literature, publishes a sizable portion of the available books on autism spectrum disorders, so it came as no big surprise to me to find Revealing the Hidden Social Code by Carol Gray prominently displayed. The book promises to explain “key elements of Social StoriesTM, review the guidelines for writing them, and help writers to structure and develop their stories”, and indeed, it would have been one of the more authoritative guides on the topic since Carol Gray is the originator of the concept, had it not been for a little detail.
TM.
Everywhere, those two letters. T and M. And Social Stories, capitalized. Jessica Kingsley Publishers or Carol Gray, or both, regard the concept as trademarked, and so, everywhere where the two words Social and Stories are mentioned in each other’s immediate vicinity, the letters T and M follow, superscripted. Bla bla Social StoriesTM bla bla bla bla Social StoriesTM bla bla. Bla bla bla bla Social StoriesTM bla bla bla Social StoriesTM bla. Social StoriesTM bla bla bla bla bla.
See what I mean? Once you’ve noticed, it’s impossible to not see it. See how those two letters stand out, see how they destroy whatever context the author wished to dwell in? You can’t not see it.
So, for me at least, it’s now impossible to buy that book because I’m afraid I’ll learn not about social stories as such, but about how important it is to preserve your questionable trademark, no matter the cost.
Oh, and in addition to upgrading to Iceweasel, I’ve also taken the leap to the new Blogger. It’s still in beta, but I’ve already noticed significantly faster editing and publishing. There’s a seemingly nifty layout function that goes beyond static CSS hacking, but I’ve not dared to try my hand on it yet.
A possible downside is that instead of a separate Blogger logon, they’ve integrated it with memberships and stuff. I’m not sure I like that, since it would appear that to have multiple Blogger accounts, I need a distinct email address for each and every one. (Why would I want that? Glad you asked; if I want to use and display different personal profiles, that’s what ‘ll need.)
So all I need now for my Google-induced happiness is a GMail account. But that’s not yet in widespread release so I guess I’ll just have to wait.