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.

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.

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 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.

Microsoft’s version of the brave, new world was never more apparent than in the Windows Vista EULA:

You may not work around any technical limitations in the software.

In other words, you’re prohibited from downloading and installing any patch or driver to your shiny new Windows Vista OS, unless the patch or driver is provided by Microsoft. Where do you want to go today? Me, I want to run away screaming.

I think I’ll stick to Debian GNU/Linux, for now.

wine 0.19-1 has now reintroduced XMetaL in my Linux apps repertoir. However, it still crashes if I double-click on a word in the edit window. This rather limits the usefulness of the editor, for now.

wine 0.9.17-1 breaks XMetaL 3.1. So there.

I don’t have the strength to go back to wine 0.9.16-1 right now, so I think I’ll just wait until the Debian package folks catch up. At WineHQ, the current version is 0.9.20…

I was pointed to this by a friend. Scary. Very scary.

ClamAV, my virus hunter for Linux, stopped working today, after an unfortunate update of it and LSB Base (“Linux Standard Base”). Therefore, please don’t send any viruses my way until the fix is in place (the updates are supposed to be uploaded within the next few days; have a look at the bug report).