Tuesday 22 September 2009

XMetaL and wine 1.1.28

wine 1.1.28 (the current wine-unstable package in Debian) breaks my old XMetaL 3.1 installation. The application starts but complains about Gecko not being installed, helpfully offers to install it... and then nothing. If I stop the installation, XMetaL starts but crashes soon afterwards, probably because XMetaL needs IE components, not Gecko.

I'm sure it's fixable, somehow, but I'm not sure I'll bother. Oxygen runs without problems and all I need is a good enough XML editor.

Saturday 5 September 2009

Corena S1000D User Forum

Earlier this week, I spent two days attending the Corena S1000D User Forum in Kongsberg, Norway. As product-specific user forums go, this one was quite informative and I remain impressed with the Corena product line. They certainly offer a good mix of S1000D functionality, with clear promises of getting better in many areas of the spec (my current favourite is the applicability editor), and it seems to me that few products out there can match theirs.

And of course, Svante Ericsson, a leading authority on the S1000D standard, gave a talk that in itself made the drive to Kongsberg worth my while. Svante is a former colleague of mine from my days at Information & Media (now Sörman) and knows better than most out there what he's talking about. He's also a lot of fun to listen to.