Having spent a couple of days trying to get used to Atom, I decided to simply upgrade Sublime Text. While full of neat features, Atom was huge. Also, the Markdown customisations were simply too different from what I am used to.
For the last several years, I’ve been using Sublime Text as my main text editor. It’s got a nice UI, it works on all of my platforms, and the license is user-based, meaning that a single license can be shared on any machine I happen to work on, provided the user is me. It didn’t cost an arm and a leg either.
Recently the app asked if I wanted to update. It’s done it every now and then, so I was expecting another bugfix and thought little more of it. I just hit Update. The app was upgraded from version 3 to version 4, however, and an all-caps text on the title bar said “LICENSE UPGRADE REQUIRED”.
Say what?!?
A version upgrade that costs money is fine by me but something I want to know about before I upgrade, not after. There should have been something pointing this out, allowing me to decide if I wanted the hassle now or later. Instead, I now need to downgrade if I want to keep the app.
This is not OK, so I’m now moving to Atom.
I seem to write these once every year or so.
Markup UK 2021 is over and I’m happy to report that it was a complete success. It was all virtual, of course – who does actual physical conferences these days – but it had the feeling of a physical conference. People were there, if you know what I mean. They were more than blips on a screen, they were actual people interacting and talking to each other.
Some of this is due to more clever software. We used Whova, which ties together the boring administrative stuff that you’d otherwise have to do manually using Zoom only, and it brings you all kinds of things that make a virtual conference feel a lot more like a physical one. For organisers, it’s great. Hopefully for attendees, too.
It cannot replace a physical conference, however. If anything I miss the physical ones more, because of the fairly close approximation of one that Whova brings. I’m not a social person but I miss being able to say hi and a few words on a chance encounter at the coffee table, and I miss the dinners after a full day of talks, and I miss addressing a roomful of people ready for the next talk.
I’m sure the presenters felt that way, too.
But the conference was a success, and right now I just wanted to write something about it. Hopefully I’ll feel like writing more within a year, this time.
I’ve not posted for almost a year. I blame work, markup conferences, and golf, not necessarily in that order.
Re work: I’m back to being independent again, which is great. I couldn’t ask for a better boss, and I have a couple of interesting projects to complete.
Re markup conferences: XML Prague is over. I had a paper accepted with Geert Bormans, and what a paper it was. We had so much fun presenting it. Go find the video stream on Youtube if you’re interested.
Re golf: The winter’s been so mild that technically, we never had one.For the first time since I started playing some 20 years ago, I’ve not paused for the winter. It doesn’t help, though – I’m never going to be Tiger Woods.
I’ve been busy finalising the Markup UK 2019 registration app and am pleased to announce that registration is now open – register at https://markupuk.org/registration.xhtml. A special early-bird rate is available until the 1st of May.
Also open is the call for papers – please see http://markupuk.org/speakers.xhtml for details. Please take note of the following important dates:
This year’s XML Prague is over and I’m writing this at the Munich airport on my way back home. My brain is still hurting.
The conference was fabulous, as always. Among the highlights were Gerrit Imsieke’s awesome XSLT trickery for splitting XML, Steven Pemberton’s walk-through of his Invisible XML spec, and Michael Piotrowski’s nostalgic look back at SGML. But my personal favourite has to be Adam Retter’s introduction to his new Fusion DB XML (and NoSQL) database that I think just might prove to be a game-changer. He’s launching it in June at Markup UK in London – another great reason for everyone to join us there!
I also gave a paper at XML Prague, about merging two XML sources of the Swedish Code of Statutes, also known as SFS, a project I’ve been busy with for the last eight months or so. It’s been quite a ride, and if you’re interested, have a look at the XML Prague proceedings. There are lot of other good papers there, too.
While XML Prague is gearing up – there’s just a few short weeks left now – we (me and my partners in crime in the Markup UK organising committee) are busy planning for this year’s Markup UK conference, to be held on 7–9 June at King’s College London. There’s going to be a preconference day with tutorials and meetups on the Friday before the main conference, and I think it’s going to be great.
Mark the dates in your calendar and start thinking about that exciting markup talk you know you want to give!
The next Göteborg Film Festival is almost upon us.
The last festival I worked was three years ago almost to the day. Over the years, I ran literally thousands of shows for them, most in 35 mm but a select few in 70 mm and a couple of them in 16 mm. I was and remain a film projectionist. I did finish up with some videos, though, when they installed that Barco thing in the booth some years back. I quit when the format became the norm. In my last year, every single feature I ran was measured in pixels, so there was no longer a point in continuing. It was good while it lasted, though, and I don’t regret a single minute of it.
Every year, some weeks before the festival would begin, I’d have at least one dream about the festival and my projection booth. Sometimes I’d climb the stairs only to find that they’d rebuilt the booth or turned the projectors to point in the opposite direction, and sometimes they’d have relocated the whole theatre. I recall several dreams where the transport people – the guys and gals who’d carry the physical prints from one venue to the next – would turn up when I was about to start a show and ask me all kinds of questions about where print A was or if I had yet rewound print B or inspected print C that should actually be replaced with print D. They’d show up right about when I was pulling the curtain, interrupting me, disrupting my flow, bothering me. And inevitably something would go wrong.
I’ve dreamt a thousand variations of the basic theme. I’m about to start the first show; something happens to throw me off.
And here’s the funny thing: I still have those dreams, three years after leaving. And they’re still based on the same concept: I still work at the festival and as I’m about to start the first show, something goes wrong. I guess this is how important the festival is to me, and how much I still miss it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a desire to run a single digital show again, ever. Not even fleetingly. Clicking Play is the very antithesis of everything I believe in terms of film projection. But I do miss the time when I was running actual film prints in a darkened booth, one after another, up to seven or eight features a day plus a number of shorts, trying my very best to provide the best show I could for each and every one. I miss leaping down the projection booth stairs to the auditorium to listen and to fine-tune the sound level. I miss inspecting the prints. I miss planning a show days in advance. I miss being one with my projection equipment.
And so, I guess, I have these dreams. I had the best profession in the whole wide world and it’s now all over.
This year’s Balisage conference is over and I miss it. I miss the people and I miss the talks, but above all, I miss the sense of community.
See, this year’s Balisage was all about communities and the softer values of markup. Don’t get me wrong; there were some great talks on markup theory (overlap, anyone?) and how to make JavaScript into something tolerable in a markup context. But above all, there were numerous talks on communities and on what we do and on how we regard our profession.
Steven Pemberton (who held the mic on no less than four occasions) delivered a brilliant talk on the virtues of declarative markup while killing off HTML5, once and for all.
Mary Holstege discussed the metaphors we code by, and how it’s easy to take those metaphors too far. I chose my words very carefully for the rest of the conference.
Bethan Tovey and Norman Walsh invited us all to rediscover our passion for declarative markup with Markup Declaration, a call for arms to unite the community and to find XML and its kin a new home.
Allen Renear discussed the ethics of XML (really!), and I am unable to do that talk justice here. You should have been there.
Abel Braaksma gave us a tour of the declarative (and functional) programming paradigm, and my only complaint is that he should have been allowed at least twice the time to do the topic justice.
And there was yours truly who discussed the virtues of style guides, that perfect complement to schemas and validation.
The list goes on. I can’t possibly mention everyone here, but I could have mentioned at least as many more talks, every one of them every bit as good as those mentioned above.
Balisage, more than anything else, was about the community we inhabit and participate in, and how we all stand a better chance united. It’s not about just SGML or XML, even though both are important; it’s about declarative markup and our chosen field. It’s about all those standards starting with X but also quite a few that do not, and the power offered to us by semantics, and it’s about us all acknowledging each other’s work. And yes, it’s also about JSON and Markdown, and a whole bunch of other things that we may or may not approve of.
So, from one addict to a bunch of other addicts: I miss you.
P.S. You should all look up Developing SGML DTDs. Yes, there was also a book discussion.
Had my blog not been down because of Markup UK (see my previous post), I would have written about it. Well, it’s not down now.
Markup UK was great. It was fabulous. On short notice (we announced it in February, for chrissakes), we managed to lure enough speakers and participants to have a great conference. There were lots of interesting talks, both on the stage and otherwise, people had a great time, and so we’re going to do it again in 2019.
Watch this space (and http://www.markupuk.org).