Tuesday 31 August 2010

AdSense and Spam

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

Wednesday 18 August 2010

More XProc

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.

Monday 16 August 2010

XProc

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.

Friday 13 August 2010

Mobile Sync, Part Two

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.