Ari's Blog

Back from XML Prague

2012-02-16T16:16:00.000+01:00

I'm back from this year's edition of XML Prague, my favourite markup geek event. As always, there's plenty to praise, from Jeni Tennison's opening keynote to Michael Sperberg-McQueen's closing one and pretty much everything in between, from the friendly organisers to MarkLogic's demojam event at the social dinner, the city itself, and, well, everyhting.

But what really gives me my yearly high is the fact that the event is always so much more than simply the sum of the above. We get to interact and learn from fellow markup enthusiasts, we meet with some of our favourite tool producers (who also are markup enthusiasts, btw) and other pros in the field, and we are once again refuelled and energised and inspired, and ready to do more when back home. Every year.

Don't you think that's amazing?

I Lost

2012-01-23T11:19:00.001+01:00

Or won, depending on who you ask. I sales person called me the other day and said that it was time to renew my mobile subscription and data plan. Well, he wasn't quite as obvious about it but as a gadget geek I'm rather susceptible and my immediate question was "what kind of phones can you offer me as a part of the deal?"

"What kind of phone do you want?" was his reply.

I thought about it and realised that I want to try an iPhone. Yes, I know, you can't get anything more locked down than an Apple product, but I tried my daughter's and liked it. The interface leaves the HTC Desire's far behind and I think the alternative I've been thinking about, the Samsung Galaxy, feels like a fragile piece of plastic. And I've already tried a couple of other Android devices (including my work phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro, that is the worst phone I've ever had the misfortune to use) but no iOS one.

So an iPhone 4S it is, for me. It's supposed to arrive today or tomorrow.

Digital Movie Subtitles and XSLT

2012-01-21T18:12:00.000+01:00

Turns out that digital movie subtitles are kept in an XML file. There's time code, a couple of font elements, and there's a subtitle element that contains the text. ghastly, but I suppose it works.

Well, most of the time. Something had happened with the English subtitles to the festival opening feature, Avalon. A test run revealed that every subtitle was included twice, one set with Font Id "Arial" and another with font Id "Arial0".

Fixed this with an XSLT script, marking the first time I've used XSLT in my work as a projectionist.

Digital Shows, FML and XML

2012-01-20T21:51:00.005+01:00

Ran my second DCP show at Draken, earlier. The film is stored and handled by a Dolby server running a modified Debian Linux with XCF as the window manager producing a lightweight interface with only the bare necessities, but very, very functional necessities. There is drag and drop to handle show components, there are ready-made cues, and it's all reasonably well designed. Every time I use the touchpad/keyboard combo to build or run a show, I'm struck by how similar to my Film Markup Language concepts everything is. I presented my ideas at XML Prague in 2010 but after that, I couldn't make much headway with the hardware so the project sort of died.

Supposedly, the shows are indeed handled using XML files. I was planning something very much like Dolby's interface so I'm dying to know if their XML is anything like my DTD. The components are all there so I'm half hoping it is. I bet they don't use XLink, though.

Digital Images

2012-01-20T13:43:00.000+01:00

Draken, the home of the Göteborg International Film Festival and my frequent point of existence, finally got a digital Barco projector and a Dolby server for handling digital features. As you may or may not know, cinemas around the world are moving to digital images while industry icons such as Kodak are crumbling, and in a matter of months or perhaps a year or two, 35mm film projection will only happen in film archives and art houses.

And, perhaps, film festivals. As I write this, only a week remains to the opening night of the 35th annual Göteborg International Film Festival, and at least half of the features I will screen there will be in DCP format. Yesterday, I ran my first all-digital show with the new equipment and today will be the second.

To people like me, this feels like the end. I'm hoping it's not but I can't help thinking that as a projectionist, I now belong to the museum together with the 35mm projectors and old cinema sound processors.

HTC Desire

2012-01-10T16:27:00.003+01:00

I've been using my daughter's HTC Desire, now that she's moved up in the world, to an iPhone. I have to say, the Desire is a significant step up from my previous mobile, the Nokia N900.

Don't get me wrong, the N900 is a fabulous device. It's not a mobile at all, really, it's a Debian Linux box that happens to have some phone functionality built in, the ultimate geek toy for the smartphone age. The hardware is superb and the software could have been amazing, had it not been for the fact that Nokia abandoned the product and its users twice (first, by moving from the Maemo OS to Meego and then from Meego to Windows Mobile). It's a supplier error and what could have been a great, great product became another footnote in communications history.

For this reason, I will not buy a Nokia again, not because they don't know how to make phones because they do, but because who knows when they'll decide to abandon their customers again?

The Desire, according to my daughter who knows all about this stuff, is an old phone. It's OK but seriously uncool and nothing when compared to an iPhone. Not knowing better, I think the Desire is user-friendly to a degree that I haven't witnessed in a while. Also, I'm not really an app kind of person, but there are enough of them available to keep me busy for a while.

Happy New Year

2012-01-02T11:09:00.001+01:00

Title says it all.

Scientific Publishing in XML, Repost

2011-12-30T08:39:00.001+01:00

I was pointed to this blog post that, in turn, referred to this TEDx talk where Steven Bachrach said this:

"Scientific Publishing is essentially unchanged in 250 years"
"The way we publish today is destroying data"

This really struck a chord with me. And essentially, it applies to just about everyone handling their information in an unstructured format.

Semantic Profiles

2011-12-29T09:58:00.000+01:00

Following my earlier post on semantic documents, I've given the subject some thought. In fact, I wrote a paper on a related subject and submitted it to XML Prague for next year's conference. The paper wasn't accepted (in all fairness, the paper was off-topic for the themes for the event), but I think the concept is both important and useful.

Briefly, the paper is about profiling XML content. The basics are well known and very frequently used: you profile a node by placing a condition on it. That condition, expressed using an attribute, is then compared to a publishing context defined using a similar condition on the root. If met, the node is included; if not, the node is discarded.

The matching is done with a simple string comparison but the mechanism can be made a lot more advance by, say, imposing Boolean logic on the condition. You need to match something like A AND B AND NOT(C), or the node is discarded. Etc.

The problem is that in the real world, the conditions, the string values, usually represent actual product names or variants, or perhaps an intended reader category. They can be used not only for string matching but for including content inline by using the condition attribute contents as variable text: a product variant, expressed as a string in an attribute in an EMPTY element, can easily be expanded in the resulting publication to provide specific content to personalise the document.

Which is fine and well, until the product variant label or the product itself is changed and the documents need to be updated to reflect this. All kinds of annoyances result, from having to convert values in legacy documents to not being able to do so (because the change is not compatible with the existing documents). Think about it:

If you have a condition "A" and a number of legacy documents using that condition, and need to update the name of the product variant to "B", you need to update those existing documents accordingly, changing "A" to "B" everywhere. Problem is, someone owning the old product variant "A" now needs to accept documentation for a renamed product "B". It's done all the time but still causes confusion.

Or worse, if the change to "B" affects functionality and not just the name itself, you'll have to add "B" to the list of conditions instead of renaming "A", which in turn means that even if most of the existing documentation could be reused for both "A" and "B", it can't because there is no way to know. You'll have to add "B" whenever you need to include a node, old or new.

This, in my considered opinion, happens because of the following:

The name, the condition, is used directly, both as a condition and as a value.
Conditions are not version handled. If "B" is a new version of "A", then say so.

My solution? Use an abstraction layer. Define a semantic profile, a basic meaning for the condition, and version handle that profile, updating it when there is a change to the condition. The change could be a simple name change for the corresponding product but it could just as well be a change to the product's functionality. Doesn't really matter. A significant change will always requires a new version. Then, represent that semantic profile with a value used when publishing.

Since I like URNs, I think URNs are a terrific way to go. It's easy to define a suitable URN schema that includes versioning and use the URN string as the condition when filtering, but the URN's corresponding value as expanded content. In the paper, I suggest some simple ways to do this, including an out-of-line profiling mechanism that is pretty much what the XLink spec included years ago.

Using abstraction layers in profiling is hardly a new approach, then, but it's not being used, not to my knowledge, and I think it should. I fully intend to.

Evolution 3.2

2011-12-29T09:11:00.004+01:00

Evolution 3.2 solved my Groupwise problems by eliminating Groupwise support altogether. It's an odd way to do it, considering that both originate from the same company, Novell. I am now left without a groupware solution for Linux.

In all fairness, mine is the unstable ("Sid") branch of Debian Linux, which means that the Groupwise library will likely be updated and re-included at some point. It's just that the functionality used to be one of the core advantages of Evolution and what brought me to it in the first place.

Every time I start to think that Linux is finally ready for the desktop, something happens.

I Spoke Too Soon

2011-12-16T13:45:00.000+01:00

Turns out that Evolution can misbehave in Gnome 3.x, too. It just takes a little longer. Had a look at my calendar, just now, and noticed that the stupid thing had crashed.

Damn.

XML Prague 2012

2011-12-16T09:53:00.003+01:00

There's going to be an XML Prague in 2012, and I'm going to be there, again. Already looking forward to it. Not enough XML geekery for me lately.

Evolution/KDE/Gnome Rant

2011-12-16T09:47:00.001+01:00

I've been running Evolution as my email/calendar/groupware/etc solution in Debian and KDE 4.6 at work ever since I gave up on Windows for anything beyond PowerPoint presentations and such. In spite of the Novell Groupwise server misery that we are forced to live with at Condesign, Evolution does the job. I've actually managed to synch my mail and appointments with both my trusty N900 and an Android thingy that the company wants to be my primary work phone, and have been if not pleased then at least content with the situation.

I should add that using a KDE solution (KMail/Kontact) has never worked for me. I can't get Kontact to log in to the Groupwise server, no matter what.

Anyway, unfortunately a recent apt-get update did... something. I'm still able to read my email in Evolution but the calendar and address book both crash with a DBus error whenever I try to view or use them. The usual suspects, from deleting caches to looking for non-UTF-8 characters in calendar ICS files, do not seem to apply and upgrading or downgrading Evolution doesn't help either. The problem seems to be more fundamental.

Yesterday, however, I booted into Gnome rather than KDE, mostly because I was bored and wanted to see what Gnome 3.x is like. Thing is, for some inexplicable reason Evolution now runs without a hitch. Calendars, address lists, everything. No crashes, no DBus errors.

Now, I've used KDE for years, preferring it over Gnome because the latter always feels a bit patronising to me. Gnome is like a Linux equivalent to OSX, built on the assumption that users are all idiots and the inner workings-on of a computer should always be kept hidden so the user is not unnecessarily confused with anything even remotely technical.

Yet, OSX, for the most part, does the job. It just works, which I discovered recently when setting up a MacBook Pro for my daughter. It had no problem finding and configuring our home network HD and printer (tricky subjects for our Windows and Linux boxes, for some reason), and even displayed a nice image of the exact printer model to help me install it. Pretty cool, actually.

And this is what Gnome 3.x seems to focus on also, on just working. Yes, it feels a bit dumbed down, but it really seems to just work. I even think that I could learn to live with the 3.x GUI.

And I got my calendar back.

Semantic Documents

2011-11-15T11:07:00.001+01:00

I'm back from XML Finland, where I held a presentation on how to use the concept of semantic documents in content management systems. Not everyone was convinced, but I wasn't thrown out, either.

A semantic document is the core information carrier, before a language or other means of presentation to an audience, is added. It's an abstraction; obviously, there can be no such thing in the real world but as a concept, the semantic document is useful.

For example, a translation of a document can using the concept be defined as a rendition of the original, just as a JPG image can be rendered in, say, PNG without the contents of the image changing. It is very strictly a matter of definition--the rendition is not necessarily identical in all details of content to the original, it's simply defined to be a matching rendition for a target audience.

Of course, for a semantic document and its rendition in a given language to be meaningful in a CMS, none of those varying details can be significant to the semantics of the basic information carrier, only to make a necessary clarification of the core information to the target audience. In other words, a translation may differ from the original for, say, cultural reasons (if the original language's details in question are bound to the original language and readership), but the basic meaning cannot be allowed to change.

To the concept I also added version handling, that is, a formal description of the evolution of the contents of the basic information over time. When a new version is required is, of course, also a matter of definition; I'd go with "a significant and (in some way) completed change". What's important is that a two matching or equivalent renditions of the semantic document must always use matching versions.

Expressed using a pseudo-URN schema, if the core semantic document in some well-defined version (say "1") is defined as URN:1, the Swedish and Finnish versions would be defined as URN:1:sv and URN:1:fi, respectively. They would be defined to be different renditions of each other but identical in basic information. It follows that if a URN:2:sv was made, a new Finnish translation would have to be created, because the old translation would differ in some way, according to the definition

This, of course, is largely a philosophical question. In practice, all kinds of questions arise. I had several objections from the floor, of which most seemed to have to do with the evolution of the translation independently from the original. In my basic definition, of course, this is not a problem since the whole schema is a matter of definition, but in the real world, an independent evolution of a translation is often a very real problem.

It could well be that a translation is worked on rather than the original, for example, in a multi-national environment where different teams manage different parts of the content. While theoretically perfectly manageable simply by bumping the versions of that particular translation, a system keeping track of, say, 40+ active target languages becomes a practical problem.

I don't think the problem is unsolvable if there is a system in place to keep track of all those different URNs, but only if the basic principles are strictly adhered to. For example, you can never be allowed to develop the content in different languages independently from each other at the same time, because the situation that would arise would have to deal with what in the software development world is known as "forking", that is, developing differing content from the same basic version. While also solvable, the benefits of such an approach in documentation are doubtful.

Far easier and probably better is to define a "master language" as the only language allowed to drive content change. In the above pseudo-URNs, Swedish could be defined as a master language, meaning that any new content would have to be added to it first and then translated to the other languages.

This is the basic principle behind the CMS, Cassis, that we develop at Condesign. It works, in that the information remains consistent and traceable, regardless of language, and allows for freely modularising documents for maximum reuse.

I would be interested in hearing opposing views. Some I addressed during my talk in Finland, but I'm sure there is more. Is there a reason you can think of that would break the principle of the semantic document?

XML Finland, Not On A Boat After All

2011-10-10T09:56:00.001+02:00

XML Finland will not be held on board a boat, after all. The Radisson Blue Seaside hotel in Helsinki is the new venue and the seminar limited to one day, November 10.The organisers say logistics are to blame. I have to say I'm disappointed. An XML boat would have been fun. Also, I'll miss the evening snacks and sauna, as I'll have to catch a plane in the evening.

I wonder if XML Prague can be persuaded to relocate to a boat instead.

XML Finland, Pt 2

2011-09-22T10:17:00.003+02:00

I'll be presenting at XML Finland on November 10. Looking forward to it already.

Google Plus

2011-09-22T10:16:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I started my browser and found that Google had added You+ to the far left on www.google.com. Being the geek I am, naturally I joined this initiative. Google Plus immediately reorganised my Google settings and all of a sudden, my Blogger page is nowhere to be found. I had to go back to the previous Settings version to find it.

I'm all for change, but I don't like this type of change.

Me and XML in Stockholm... Again

2011-09-12T12:48:00.002+02:00

I'll be talking about XML, modularised documentation and such in Stockholm on December 7. The event is a one-day course organised by Dokumentinfo (link in Swedish).

XML Prague 2012

2011-09-12T12:43:00.000+02:00

Speaking of XML conferences, XML Prague 2012 has been announced and will take place a month earlier than the last few times, on February 10-12. The venue is also new, a good thing since the last two events were sold out.

Looking forward to this one already.

XML Finland

2011-09-09T16:20:00.003+02:00

XML Finland 2011 will be held on board a cruise ship on November 9-10. Looks like fun, so I've submitted a presentation. Wish me luck.

Roland D-50 Key Servicing

2011-06-12T21:48:00.000+02:00

I serviced my old Roland D-50 today after noticing problems with the aftertouch of two keys. It seems the key contacts need yearly mending to work--I took the whole thing apart about a year ago, cleaning all 61 keys and their contacts.

Here's a useful web page for those of you who have a D-50 in need of servicing.

Flight Sims

2011-06-09T00:28:00.000+02:00

There is a terrific open source flight simulator called FlighGear. It's freely available for my platform of choice, Debian Linux (and a number of others, including Windows and Mac OS X) and it's quite mature these days, so naturally it's what I run when I want to fly a plane these days. When I still had a Windows partition that worked, I have to admit I quite liked Microsoft's classic Flight Simulator, but my Vista partition doesn't work all that well and anyway, Microsoft killed off the sim a year or two ago. FlightGear is a more than adequate replacement.

Today I learned that somebody is marketing an older FlightGear version under a different name (Pro Flight Simulator), charging around $50 for a DVD or download and promising free lifetime updates. Of course, there is no (easily found) mention of FlightGear anywhere on their site, and I doubt the source code is easily available, either.

It has to be somewhere, though. See, FlightGear is GPL software, which basically means that you can do whatever you want with the software (including selling copies of it) for as long as you also make available the source code. I think GPL lists a few other conditions as well, but the idea is that software should be free (as in speech).

So what these people do when ripping off free software is most likely not illegal, merely unethical. To further firmly establish themselves in the gutter, they have produced a number of blogs and fake reviews to market the product, seemingly without any shame; do a Google search if you are interested, but I won't help their cause by giving you a direct link.

Read all about the scam at http://www.flightgear.org/flightprosim.html, and download a FREE copy of the latest version if you are interested in flight sims. Or just spread the word.

Me and XML in Stockholm

2011-06-04T01:02:00.000+02:00

I'll be talking about XML in Stockholm on June 16th. The event is a one-day tutorial for technical writers, managers and other interested parties, organised by Dokumentinfo. They organise tutorials on various subjects related to document management and archiving, and a yearly conference where I was invited to speak last year.

So far I have few details but I'm pretty sure I'll manage to include XLink, somehow.

Finally, KDE 4.6 on Debian

2011-06-04T00:43:00.000+02:00

Again, title says it all. I'm only a few days into running KDE 4.6 on my desktop but so far it's superior to any previous 4.x. It feels like, well, it just works. It's also beautiful; Plasma is finally mature enough to do all those things I read about two years ago.

What doesn't work all that well is Amarok. It still won't play CDs (it can now list the CD contents - hooray), and while I do understand that some of these things take time, 1.4 didn't have any problems in that respect. I still haven't found an alternative for my every music need but out of spite I'm now running Clementine, an Amarok fork that also doesn't grasp CDs.

It's May and It's Snowing

2011-05-03T09:11:00.001+02:00

Title says it all.

An Even-Simpler Markup Language?

2011-04-04T11:49:00.000+02:00

in his blog, Norman Walsh writes about an even-simpler-than-Mixro-XML markup language, inspired in part by John Cowan's XML Prague poster and by James Clark's Micro XML ideas. His ideas are well worth a serious consideration--Norm's ideas are always worth considering--but the purist in me cringes at the idea of allowing more than one root element. I have to say that I find the idea attractive but I'm not really big on change so maybe that is why I hesitate.

The pragmatist in me, on the other hand, also cringes at Norm's not doing away with namespaces when he has the chance. in my experience they always create more problems than they solve, but on the other hand, my experience tends to be more about strictly controlled environments where the issues one usually wishes to solve using namespaces can be dealt with using other means.

Until Next Year, XML Prague

2011-04-01T13:12:00.000+02:00

This year's XML Prague is over and I miss it already. For a markup geek, XML Prague is heaven. There is always so much to learn, so many great minds and cool new ideas, not to mention Czech beer and the friendly atmosphere of a smaller conference. This was my third consecutive year attending and I very much look forward to the fourth.

Some notes of interest:

XML Prague is a great success. The conference sold out before the sessions were announced so next year, it will move to a larger venue.
HTML5, last year's hot topic, was pronounced dead more than once.
Michael Kay announced (and demo'd) Saxon Client Edition that allows you to run XSLT 2 on the browser. Very cool. Saxon CE is in alpha but available for testing at www.saxonica.com.
JSON seems to be hot this year. I should probably spend some time learning it, especially since I am planning to use it in the CMS we develop at Condesign.
George Bina from SyncRO Soft Ltd, the company that makes Oxygen, presented some ideas regarding advanced XML development. While Oxygen is at the centre of many of these, his point was that there should be a standardised way to do it all. Dave Pawson suggested expanding XML catalog files for the job via Twitter, an idea I find plausible.
Murata Makoto, a personal hero of mine thanks to his work with Relax NG, presented EPUB3. What those of us who were there will remember, however, is his introduction, expressing his grief over the on-going catastrophe in Japan.

See www.xmlprague.cz for more.

Squeeze Is Out

2011-02-14T10:16:00.000+01:00

The new Debian, Squeeze, is out. This means that we can finally expect new things added to the unstable version, Sid, such as KDE 4.6.

XML Prague 2011, Part Two

2011-01-27T13:22:00.001+01:00

This year, my paper wasn't accepted for XML Prague. I guess I'll just have to go there anyway.

Presentation at the Dokumentinfo Conference

2010-11-29T09:17:00.000+01:00

I held a presentation on addresses and naming of resources in document management at the Teknisk Dokumentation 2010 conference (Swedish-laguage link; sorry) last week. The conference now stands out among the ones I've attended lately due to the fact that there was a power outage during the afternoon of the first conference day (leading to some rather different presentations).

I also learned a lot. Olaf Drummer's presentation about the PDF/A format, especially the coming PDF/A-3 standard, gave me a few ideas that I intend to implement.

XML Prague 2011

2010-10-01T11:28:00.001+02:00

XML Prague 2011 will take place on March 26th & 27th. I'm so going to be there.

DITA Specialization in DocBook?

2010-09-22T15:54:00.001+02:00

Eliot Kimber and Norman Walsh apparently have discussed DITA, DocBook and specialization á la DITA in DocBook. Norman Walsh wrote a blog entry on it, and Eliot Kimber commented it.

Very interesting reading, at least if you are a markup geek (which I am). I don't think they've changed my opinions on DITA, however, even though I'm thinking about it.

Mobile Sync, Part Three

2010-09-07T16:28:00.000+02:00

After (unsuccessfully) banging my head against the wall trying to sync my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop with the Nokia N900, I resorted to the only solution I knew would work.

I wiped out Ubuntu and installed Debian GNU/Linux Sid in its place. Apart from spending a night recovering from a dodgy dist-upgrade, the laptop now works, syncing perfectly with the N900.

Me, I think there is something wrong with Ubuntu 10.04.

AdSense and Spam

2010-08-31T09:24:00.000+02:00

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

More XProc

2010-08-18T15:50:00.000+02:00

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 Mårtensson 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.

XProc

2010-08-16T15:19:00.000+02:00

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.

Mobile Sync, Part Two

2010-08-13T11:13:00.000+02:00

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.

Roland D-50

2010-07-15T19:16:00.001+02:00

Got my hands on this venerable synth. Seems I'll have to do repairs but oh, I'm so looking forward to this.

Mobile Sync

2010-06-29T15:45:00.000+02:00

After years of not being able to sync my Nokia mobile(s) with my Debian Linux desktop, syncevolution and the Evolution "groupware suite" have finally made that possible. I've had success with both my older Symbian 60-based phone, N95-2, and my (Maemo-based) N900.

See www.syncevolution.org for details on how to do this. My Debian Sid box required the apt sources from that site (it seems that Sid is lagging behind, at least for now; they've packaged the last beta but the site includes the released 1.0 version), but otherwise the install and sync both went without a hitch.

VirtualBox

2010-06-29T10:58:00.000+02:00

I've switched from KVM to VirtualBox for my virtualisation needs. My Debian laptop is hosting and right now there is a Windows 7 guest. Apart from some slowness, especially with shared folders (on extfs3), the whole thing works like a charm. I can run XMetaL in the VirtualBox with no problems.

Finally it looks like I won't be needing a Windows partition at work.

DITA Lists, Part Two

2010-06-14T22:57:00.003+02:00

Today it occurred me to have a look at the DITA Architecture Specification source to see how the people behind the spec would tag a list; as some of you know, this was the subject of my recent blog entry. There are a number of lists in that spec, many with introductory paragraphs, so it's a pretty obvious way to find out, right? Well, after the examples in that spec, maybe.

Anyway, this is how they do it:

Introductory para:
<ul>
<li>Item</li>
<li>Item</li>
</ul>


This was one of my guesses, and I have to say that it's better than any of the alternatives I could come up with. It's not good markup, though, in my opinion, as it says that semantically, a paragraph is sort of a block-level superclass, a do-it-all and one that you must use if you need that introduction.

But then, why limit yourself to lists? Why aren't notes tagged like that? Or definition lists, or images, or tables? Think about it. Doesn't this feel just a little bit like a cop-out to you? It does to me. It feels like the author realised that he needed that wrapper but there was nothing he could cling to, other than this construction.

I'm not saying that my way is the only way (obviously it's not) but this bothers me because it muddies the semantic waters.

BP Spilling Coffee

2010-06-14T00:30:00.002+02:00

http://mag.ma/andrew/617364

List Modelling

2010-06-09T17:44:00.092+02:00

I've been reading up on DITA. I've looked at the specs and the DTD before, obviously, but more from the perspective of an innocent bystander. The DTDs I implement in authoring systems and elsewhere are usually my own, and whenever I need to deliver content in some other format, I simply convert to it. This time things are a bit different, however, as we are considering doing a "DITA Edition" of the content management system I'm responsible for at work, and I need to know how DITA can fit into our stuff.

DITA's got lots of things that I like, such as the combining of topic IDs with target IDs in references to avoid ID collisions. The DITA way is a very elegant solution and probably a better one than what I would usually do, which is to (in various ways in the DTD and in the authoring environment) make sure that authors can never end up in situations like it to begin with. There's other stuff, too, but those are best left to another blog entry at some point.

Here, I want to talk about list modelling and specifically something that not only DITA but so many other DTDs and schemas seem to ignore, and that, in my mind, results in bad markup. Let's start by discussing list semantics first:

A list is, well, a list of things. There are several types of lists, of which unordered and ordered are the most common, and the semantics are probably clear enough: the former lists stuff without a specific order (say, grocery lists) and the latter items whose order is significant (for example, David Letterman's top ten lists). There's also the definition list (which, in my mind, is not a list at all but a special case of a table, namely a two-column one), and probably some other types as well. In DITA, you can find something called "simple list", which claims to limit what's listed to one line per item, tops, without bullets or numbers, but to me that's less about semantics and more about presentation.

So here's a typical DITA list (HTML, DocBook and quite a few others look exactly like it, too):

<ul>
<li>Apples</li>
<li>Oranges</li>
<li>Bananas</li>
</ul>

There's more to list semantics, though, at least in my mind. If you wanted to find a complete list in a document, you'd probably want to include its qualifying introduction ("Here's the groceries you need to buy:"), and any and all information that goes between list items without being part of them but still belonging to the list as a whole. If your spouse is kind enough to subcategorise the grocery list to vegetables, fruit, dairy products and so on (I know I need the help), we'd have a multi-part list where the participating lists are part of a larger whole.

The introductory paragraph is where it gets tricky in DITA and similar structures. There are a LOT of block-level elements to choose from, but you cannot easily do a list that meets these requirements. This one, the preferred DITA way (at least if we choose to believe the examples in the spec), lacks a wrapper that identifies the list as one unit instead of a loose paragraph that happens to be followed by a list:

The fruit we need for tonight:
<ul>
<li>Apples</li>
<li>Oranges</li>
<li>Bananas</li>
</ul>
And the vegetables for tomorrow:
<ul>
<li>Cucumbers</li>
<li>Tomatoes</li>
</ul>

Of course, one could argue that our grocery list is really a section, but I would argue that the introductory paragraph is actually part of the list, but not necessarily a part of the whole section. What if I wanted to include images or perhaps a note to that section? Semantically, I can think of dozens of ways to reasonably expand the structure of such a surrounding section and still keep it on topic (that is, limiting it to subject matters concerning that central grocery list).

Keeping with DITA's topic-based approach, we could certainly use a number of such sections and wrap the whole thing in a topic, but me, I think that's overkill. All I want to do is include an introductory paragraph.

This, of course, is where some will argue that the introductory paragraph is really a heading. Definition lists in DITA and some other DTDs actually do have a heading for this very purpose, which to me hints that somebody did touch the subject at hand at some point, but then why do the "ordinary" lists without that heading? And of course, me, I think that introduction is not a heading at all, only a qualifier for the list.

Another option in DITA and others is to use the element as a wrapper:

The fruit we need for tonight:
<ul>
<li>Apples</li>
<li>Oranges</li>
<li>Bananas</li>
</ul>
And the vegetables for tomorrow:
<ul>
<li>Cucumbers</li>
<li>Tomatoes</li>
</ul>


This is perfectly valid, of course, but it ruins the intent of the element and creates a very odd (and ugly) mixed content that would be difficult to process properly.

What I would like to see is more in the lines of this:

<ul>
The fruit we need for tonight:
<li>Apples</li>
<li>Oranges</li>
<li>Bananas</li>
And the vegetables for tomorrow:
<li>Cucumbers</li>
<li>Tomatoes</li>
</ul>

Now we have a single list (our grocery list) that includes the necessary introduction(s). Of course, it's still somewhat ugly; I, for one, dislike the relative lack of list item structure--I'd much rather see an item modelled more properly, perhaps divided into paragraphs and other block-level content, where the concepts block level and inline remain properly separated.

4G?

2010-06-07T22:26:00.000+02:00

Apple unveiled their newest iPhone, the 4G, earlier today. Looks like they are getting a little closer to what my Nokia N900 can do. I have to admit that they know how to market their stuff. If the functionality matched the hype, I might even be interested.

N900 Gets New Firmware

2010-05-25T19:01:00.000+02:00

Those of us owning a Nokia N900 have been patiently (well, some of us, in any case) waiting for the new firmware, PR 1.2. It's been delayed a couple of times but now maemo.org informs us that tomorrow the wait is finally over.

Among the goodies are a new QT library, more apps, a revamped UI, and quite a list of bug fixes.

Bye Bye Andrew Wakefield

2010-05-24T22:42:00.001+02:00

Finally.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100524/ap_on_sc/eu_britain_autism_doctor

Blogging from My N900

2010-05-12T20:27:00.001+02:00

This is just to test blogging using my N900 and MaStory. It seems to work.

Permanent URLs, Addresses and Names

2010-04-16T09:21:00.002+02:00

I found a link to an article by Taylor Cowan about persistent URLs on the web. It was mostly about what happens to metadata assertions (such as RDF statements) when links break, but there was a little something on persistent links and URNs, too. A comparison with Amazon.com and how books are referenced these days was made. A way to map the ISBN number as a URN was described (URN:ISBN:0-395-36341-1 was mapped to a location by the PURL service, in this case at http://purl.org/urn/isbn/0-395-36341-1), which is quite cool and, in my opinion, both manageable and practical.

The author thought otherwise, however: But on the practical web, we don’t use PURLs or URNs for books, we use the Amazon.com url. I think in practical terms things are going to be represented on the web by the domain that has the best collection with the best open content.

Now, what's wrong about this? At first, it may seem reasonable that Amazon.com, indeed the domain with the (probably) largest collection of book titles, authors, and so on, should be used. Books are their business and they depend on offering as many titls as possible. In the everyday world, if you want to find a book, you look it up at Amazon.com. I do it and you do it, and the author does it. So what's wrong about it?

Well, Amazon.com does not provide persistent content per se, they provide a commercial service funded by whatever books they sell. At any time, they may decide to change the availability of a title, relocate its page, offer a later version of the same title, or even some other title altogether. The latter is unlikely, of course, but since we are talking about URLs, addresses, rather than URNs, names, talking about the URL when discussing what essentially is a name is about as relevant as talking about the worn bookshelf in my study when discussing the Chicago Manual of Style.

Yes, I realise that my example is a bit extreme, and I realise that it's easy enough to make the necessary assertions in RDF to properly reference something described by the address rather than the address itself, but to me, this highlights several key issues:

An address, by its very nature, is not persistent. Therefore, a "permanent URL" is to me a bit of an oxymoron. It's a contradiction in terms.
Even if we accept a "permanent URL approach", should we accept that the addresses are provided and controlled by a commercial entity? One of the reasons to why some of us advocate XML so vigorously is that it is open and owned by no-one. Yes, I know perfectly well that we always rely on commercial vendors for everything from editors to databases, but my point here is that we still own our data, the commercial vendors don't own it. I can take my data elsewhere.
Now, of course, in the world of metadata it's sensible to give a "see-also" link (indeed that is what Mr Cowan suggests), but the problem is that the "see-also" link is another URL with the same implicit problems as the primary URL.
URLs have a hard time addressing (yes, the pun is mostly intentional) the problem with versioning a document. How many times have you looked up a book at Amazon.com and found either the wrong version or a list of several versions, some of which even list the wrong book?

Of course, I'm as guilty as anyone because I do that, too. I point to exciting new books using a link to Amazon.com (actually I order my books from The Book Depository, mostly) because it's convenient. But if we discuss the principle rather than what we all do, it's (in my opinion) wrong to suggest that the practice is the best way to solve a problem that stems from addressing rather than naming. It's not a solution, it merely highlights the problem.

I Want A Nokia N900

2010-04-13T17:22:00.000+02:00

I've been waiting to get my hands on a Nokia N900 smartphone for a couple of months now. Nokia released it in November or December (depending on who you choose to believe), and here in Sweden in January, but the phones have been in very short supply. I've been asking around but so far, there's been no sign of the N900, anywhere I shop. The other week I finally placed an order at The PhoneHouse. I was told that there are currently six (6) phones available for 114 stores, but that I could expect it in a week and a half or so. And if I didn't want it, the guy said he could sell it anyway...

The phone itself is a nerd's wet dream. It runs on Maemo, a Debian/GNU Linux-based distro (yes, it can run Debian apps even though the screen might be ill-suited for some of them), and is actually more of a computer with a built-in mobile rather than the other way around. People have successfully managed to get OpenOffice to run on it and so I'm thinking that I can probably make some kind of XML editor work on it.

A fellow XML'er in the UK has had the phone for months, now, and doesn't miss a chance to tell the world about it on Twitter. I'm jealous and I want one. Now.

Footnotes

2010-04-07T10:16:00.000+02:00

Those familiar with my old schemas and DTDs will now probably raise an eyebrow, but I have finally succumbed to the lure of footnotes in the inline content model of my all-purpose personal DTD.

What finally convinced me was my need to create multiple references to a single note that, while interrupting the text flow and thus unwelcome in the text itself, was too short to place in a section of its own. There was no logical way to semantically identify that note in a form or in a place that would allow me to reference it from several different points in my text. Footnotes (and footnote references) solve that problem very neatly, and the allow me to present my footnotes as end notes using a different stylesheet.

Coffee

2010-04-06T09:22:00.000+02:00

Coffee, as you all know, is the lifeblood of any office. Well, our coffee machine is dead and while I would have liked to say that it didn't suffer, the trail of dried-up coffee along the floor speaks the opposite.

Expect a slow day after the Eastern Holidays, here.

Balisage, Please Move to Europe

2010-03-23T10:43:00.002+01:00

Title says it all.

XML for the Long Haul

2010-03-19T23:30:00.000+01:00

There will be a one-day symposium on the theme XML for the Long Haul, right before the Balisage conference in Montréal this year. I've thought about this, lately.

First of all, isn't this what XML is about? The ability for information to survive a proprietary method of conserving it? The means to make it happen, regardless of what happens to your software? I've preached about this for a long time for my customers, listeners, and those who just couldn't get away. If a disaster happened to your software, if it was somehow wiped out in spite of your best efforts, my point was that it would only take a few days to build something that would parse most of the information in an XML file. Maybe another few days to produce output from it, but provided that you spoke the written language and the structure was done by someone who had at least a basic idea of what XML (and SGML; this isn't new) was about, it wouldn't take more than a few days at most to see what that lost information was about.

Second, my points re the first, above, pretty much summarise my views here, but I really mean it: This is what XML is about.

But is it really that simple? Is markup really that descriptive? Well, not always. There's plenty of markup out there that is obscure and hard to read. For example, is a namespace going to make your leftover instances easier to read? Are your element type names descriptive? What about your attributes? Do you include comments or annotations with your schema? Do you include wrappers that contain groups of element types in a semantically meaningful way? Does your group include everything required for that group to be complete? Have a look at one of your instances with fresh eyes, see if it makes sense. Does one type of information relate to another? How would you format this lost instance, if you had just come across it? If it had been a thousand years and you could understand the language but not the culture, would you understand the meaning of the information? Could you print it and explain what went on then?

Don't laugh. Pretend that you really are viewing your structures from the outside. Pretend that you don't have the schema at hand. Pretend that you don't know the semantics, even though you can understand the contents. Pretend that you really are studying the information as an outsider. Does it all make sense?

I think this is a worthwhile reality check. I think that we all should ask this of the schemas we create, every time we do an information analysis. Are our schemas understandable? Are they legible?

I would really like to be in Montréal in August this year. I think it's important.

Back from XML Prague

2010-03-16T12:31:00.000+01:00

I'm back home from XML Prague. It's been a fabulous weekend with many interesting talks and lots of good ideas, and I'm still trying to sort my impressions. So many things I want to try, so many technologies I want to learn. The feedback from my talk on Film Markup Language alone is enough to keep me busy for a few weeks.

More later, but for now, suffice to say that I'm already thinking of a subject for a presentation next year.

It's Quite Possible to Lose Your Way in Prague

2010-03-12T21:49:00.000+01:00

I drove to Prague for XML Prague, yesterday. I left Göteborg on Wednesday evening, taking the ferry to Kiel, and then spent most of Thursday on the Autobahn. It all went without a hitch; not that I'm that good but my GPS is. I would probably have ended up in Poland without it because I often miss the road signs when on my own. Some of my business trips before the GPS era were truly memorable.

So today I took a walk around central Prague, shopping gifts and seeing the sights. And a wonderful city it is, one of my favourite cities in Europe. All that history, all that architecture, the bridges... and small, narrow streets that are never straight. They are practically organic (and probably feed from the gift shops since they are everywhere), and it's very difficult to find your way. It's a labyrinth we are talking about.

Yes, I lost my way. The third time I came back to that innocent-looking Kodak shop (and there are a lot of shops with Kodak signs in central Prague, I might add), I knew I was in trouble. I was walking in circles, my feet aching while a particularly wet mixture of snow and rain poured down, and had no idea where I was. And I kept thinking about my GPS, safely tucked away back in my hotel room, remembering that I actually considered bringing it along for the walk but then shrugging, thinking "how hard can it be?"

I found a shelter in a mall I hadn't seen before (well, I think I hadn't seen it before) and considered my next move while high-heeled ladies tried lipsticks and wondered what the out-of-place stranger was doing in the cosmetics department. I could ask someone, I suppose, some friendly local...

Then I remembered: I have a GPS in my mobile. It took a few minutes for it to find the satellites it required but after that, I only had to walk for a few more minutes to find a familiar landmark. In a counter-intuitive direction, I might add.

The wisdom in this story? Thank goodness for GPS devices. Oh, and XML Prague starts tomorrow morning.

Automating Cinemas at XML Prague

2010-03-02T22:36:00.000+01:00

I've been busy writing my presentation and some example XML documents for my presentation on Automating Cinemas Using XML at XML Prague in about a week and a half. I'm slightly biased, I know, but I think the presentation actually does make a good case for XML-based automation of cinemas. I know how primitive today's automation is, in spite of the many technological advances, and I know where to improve it. The question I'm pondering right now is how to explain the key points to a bunch of XML people who've probably never seen a projection booth, and do it in twenty minutes.

The opposite holds true, of course, if I ever want to sell my ideas to theatre owners. They know enough about the technology (I hope) but how on earth will I be able to explain what XML is?

There's still have stuff to do (for one, it would be nice to finish the XSLT conversions required and be able to demonstrate those, live, at the conference) but the presentation itself is practically finished and the DTD and example documents are coming along nicely. I suppose I need to update the whitepaper accordingly and publish it here, when I'm done.

See you at XML Prague!

Developing SGML DTDs: From Text To Model To Markup

2010-02-24T16:12:00.001+01:00

Quite by accident, I discovered that Eve Maler and Jeanne El Andaloussi's Developing SGML DTDs: From Text To Model To Markup is available online. I'm one of the people lucky enough to own a hard copy, but if you aren't as fortunate, read it at http://www.xmlgrrl.com/publications/DSDTD/. It's one of the best books ever written about information analysis, that (far too) little used skill required to write a good DTD. In my ever-so humble opinion, the book should be mandatory for anyone involved in a markup-related project of any kind, that's how good it is.

(Yes, I know it was written before XML came out, 12 years ago, but XML is SGML, really, and the book remains as useful today as it was when it came out in 1995.S

Tiny URLs

2010-02-19T21:41:00.001+01:00

I don't like them. Tiny URLs, that is. Those short things that look like web addresses (they are!) but give no clue to what their targets are. They have become commonplace enough now, though, and it's time to react.

I really don't like them.

Here's why: They look just like those little URLs that used to be well hidden in seemingly legitimate spam emails. Every time I see them, my first thought is spam. If I follow that link, someone will exploit a weakness in my browser to gain control over my machine or empty my credit card, somehow. And yes, I know, it won't really happen but I've lived with spam for a long time and I don't trust anything that cannot be deciphered simply by looking at it. I'm a bit silly in that respect. Yes, I realise there are benefits with using short URLs when tweeting, when your available space in counted in characters, but that's another instinctive dislike of mine: What's the point of messages forced to be short in such an arbitrary manner?

Yes, I use Twitter myself (mostly to keep track of stuff such as my favourite XML conference, XML Prague) and I fully understand the need of short URLs in tweets. You don't really want to waste the available space with a URL, if at all possible. It's a neat way of solving a problem, but a problem that is extremely artificial to begin with, to make room for other characters in an arbitrarily limited message.

But above all, I don't trust tiny URLs because I can't see what they are about. They are just characters preceded by "http://" and they look every bit as sneaky as that link you just know will break your machine.

Festival Impressions

2010-02-09T14:24:00.001+01:00

The Göteborg Film Festival is over and life is slowly returning to normal. As usual I've worked at the festival as a projectionist (my 21st consecutive year at the Draken Cinema), screening films day and night, and the first few days after each festival are always a blur. First of all, I've had way too little sleep so my brain is not working at full speed. Second, the festival itself imposes a mental and physical routine that takes a few days to break. A day at the festival is divided into shows starting at certain times so everything I do is based on these fixed points in time; when I eat, when I have coffee, when I do anything but the screening itself.

And I'm not there yet. The last show was at 9 p.m. last night and mentally I'm still in the projection booth. I have still to say more than "hi" to my family, and I have no idea of what's been going on in the outside world, other than what I've learned through the Internet.

I expect the same to be true for many of my colleagues and probably quite a few festival visitors. The difference between me and most of them is that I don't watch films, I just screen them. The vast majority of the others visit and work at the festival because they love watching films. They see several of those every day, for 11 straight days, and then discuss them between themselves, finding new angles, new interpretations.

And sometimes they ask me about the films. Did I see anything good? Was the festival a success? Was this or that actor in film xyz? Etc. And I always tell them that I have no idea, that I didn't see a single film, that I don't care about what I show, just that it's shown as well as possible. I'm not there for the films, I'm there for the projection. It's a film projection marathon and I like the challenge. And every time, they are mystified. They look at me in disbelief, wondering why, wondering how I can spend 11 days in a dark projection booth, screening 60 shows without being interested in what I show.

It's the work itself, people. It's the technology, the projectors and the sound systems, but it's also the art, the show itself, with curtains and lights and magic; and it's the craftsmanship, inspecting film prints and handling the various requirements that together result in a successful show.

I explain this to people and they nod as if finally understanding... until the next time around, the next year and the next festival.

So yes, there might have been a few good films this year but I don't know that, and I really don't care. Was the festival successful? Yes, my screenings went well, all of them.

See you next year.

Five Days and Counting

2010-02-04T12:47:00.000+01:00

The film festival is past the halfway mark now. And yes, I'm counting the hours.

Two Days Left To...

2010-01-27T15:41:00.002+01:00

...Göteborg Film Festival and I'm already wishing for it to be over and done with.

Indexing Functionality in FOP

2010-01-26T14:36:00.003+01:00

Anyone reading this who happens to be involved in the development of FOP, Apache's open source XSL-FO engine? If I ask you really nicely and politely, would you please consider implementing XSL-FO 1.1 index handling?

Alternatively, can you recommend a FO engine that is capable of index handling but costs less than RenderX's XEP or Antenna House's XSL Formatter?

Visual Studio and XMetaL

2010-01-26T08:44:00.003+01:00

I'm doing an XMetaL-based authoring environment based on scripts and stuff from earlier projects. I already have the CSS and I have most of the macros. All I need is a rules file, that is, XMetaL's compiled DTD file for the documents I need to write using this new environment, a few customisations, and a toolbar. For this I need to install 3.6 Gigabytes of Visual Studio .Net and XMetaL Developer. Is it just me or does any of you reading this agree with me that this is like taking an eighteen-wheeler to buy groceries? I know, I've ranted about this before, but it still amazes me that the XMetaL developers can allow this madness to continue.

C'mon, JustSystems, give us a way to customize XMetaL without having to buy Visual Studio. Give us what we had before XMetaL 4 and the misguided Corel deal to shut out other platforms. It doesn't have to be like this.

The Göteborg International Film Festival...

2010-01-23T01:22:00.004+01:00

...is now less than a week away. I don't care about what they say about the Stockholm equivalent; ours is still Scandinavia's largest and if you care about film, you should attend.

XML Rock Star

2010-01-21T13:48:00.001+01:00

Norman Walsh is the XML Rock Star. Who said being an XML guy is not glamorous?

elementNames and attributeNames

2010-01-15T16:00:00.003+01:00

I keep getting annoyed by the (Java-inspired) naming of elements and attributes in some people's XML, where the names contain capital letters to help keep the names clear. I'm sure you've seen how it works: elementName, attributeName, myNewAndExcitingElement, ohLookICanCreateReallyLongQNamesForNoApparentReason, ad nauseam.

Why do they do this? I know there is some kind of rationalisation for it in the world of programming languages, but in XML? XML is not a programming language and I still think it should be understandable and usable by humans (I know; SGML was supposed to be human-readable but XML doesn't have that requirement). If you find yourself writing XML in a text editor (still happens to me), not only are these names enough to drive anyone nuts but they also make the XML more error-prone because you're bound to spl something wrong. And if you write your XML in an XML editor, the element names filling the start and end tag symbols take up a lot of space that should be left to the actual content. (And no, I don't believe in the minimal tag symbols that some editors provide; I want to actually see the tag names and I want to see the attribute names. They help me structure my document; in fact, they are there for that purpose!)

I ask again: why? If you are writing a schema and need to name an ordinary paragraph element, surely you don't need to name it ordinaryParagraph or even paragraph? In my schemas, p is more than enough.

SoPleaseUseShorterNamesWithoutResortingToSillyConventionsBorrowedFromElsewhere.

Göteborg Film Festival

2010-01-13T19:15:00.002+01:00

For 11 days every year, I take time off XML and the IT business to show films at the Göteborg Film Festival. I've been involved in the festival since 1987 and showing films at the Draken Cinema (for the festival; I've worked at the place for longer than that in other contexts) since 1990.

In just over two weeks, it's time for my 21st consecutive festival at the Draken.

XML Prague 2010

2010-01-11T11:21:00.002+01:00

I'm proud to inform you that my little something on Film Markup Language has been accepted at XML Prague. The conference will take place on March 13-14.

Not the SGML FAQ

2010-01-08T11:26:00.001+01:00

Had reason to revisit Not the SGML FAQ.

It's still the funniest piece I've read on SGML or XML.

Finally, a new Intel Xorg driver in Debian Sid!

2010-01-08T09:01:00.005+01:00

As most Intel video card users on Linux will know, the Xorg drivers have regressed significantly during the last year or so. From a reasonably stable driver with (mostly) expected performance and functionality, we've become accustomed to, well, a mess. For every bug fix, something new seems to break and I for one have become increasingly reluctant to upgrade unless I have to.

This time I really had to.

The new driver does seem to take care of the disappearing mouse pointer bug where any resolution higher than 1024x768 would make the pointer vanish. I had hopes it would also be able to recognise the correct resolution for my laptop when it is docked to an external screen (which the stable driver does without a problem) but no such luck.

Performance is still slow, too. The extra bells and whistles on KDE 4.3 just aren't possible if you want a desktop you can work with. I don't think they are that heavy on the system, it's just that the Intel driver sucks.

Still, for the first time in months, the new driver means an actual improvement.

Words in Boxes

2010-01-05T13:31:00.004+01:00

This is the day for reading other people's blogs. Dave Pawson's XProc tutorial indirectly pointed me to James Sulak's blog, Words in Boxes. A lot of it is about XML-related stuff but I also found gems such as his rant on grammar.

Recommended reading.

An XProc Tutorial

2010-01-05T12:58:00.003+01:00

Dave Pawson has written an XProc Tutorial, with contributions from James Fuller, James Sulak and Norman Walsh. If you need to do step-by-step XML processing in your application and haven't yet heard of XProc, follow that link, now.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T19:24:00.000+01:00

Title says it all.

XLink FTW, Part 2

2009-12-30T11:37:00.003+01:00

Reading through my yesterday's blog entry on XLink, I feel there are things I need to clarify. In no particular order, here goes...

I think that a schema of some kind (speaking in the general sense and thus including anything from DTDs to XSDs) is always necessary for XML to work well. I know, that sets me apart from quite a few of the young whippersnappers in XML today, but I never consider the well-formedness advantage an advantage when it was marketed as such. But then, I'm a dochead, to borrow Ken Holman's terminology.
Namespaces frequently make life difficult, especially for those of us who feel that DTDs are superior to XSDs. Those pesky namespace attributes often keep popping up when processing XML, resulting in bug reports from desperate technical writers. And they all know my mobile number, it seems. However, namespaces really are a must in these days, regardless of your refusal to import foreign namespaces to your XML, because most of XML's really useful sister recommendations depend on them.
I do consider data typing in XML to be largely unnecessary, if we stick to using XML for documentation and publishing. Only rarely have I felt the need to include data typing in a schema, and in most of those instances I have been proven wrong by more sensible colleagues (or come to my senses on my own, resulting in the quick removal of unnecessary data types in my XSD).
It is a pain to implement XLink in an XSD, but largely because of reasons that have nothing to do with XLink as such and everything to do with problems with namespaces (such as the problem hinted at above). Plus, of course, the fact that different XML editors still seem to implement different parts of the XML Schema recommendation in differing ways (or not at all).
DTDs, on the other hand, work like a charm with XLink attributes added, provided that your tools follow the XML spec. I have experienced problems with MSXML and its derivatives, which proves my point.

Thank you for reading.

Was XLink A Mistake?

2009-12-29T08:46:00.008+01:00

This morning, I read Robin Berjon's little something on XML Bad Practices, originally a whitepaper he presented at XML Prague 2009. I was there, presenting right after he did, and I remember that I nervously listened to his presentation while preparing my own (not my finest hour but that's a story for another blog entry), wanting to address some of his points. While a lot of what he said made good sense, some didn't then and certainly don't now.

In Reusing the Useless, Robin discusses XLink, a recommendation that remains my personal favourite among W3C's plethora of recommendations. Apparently it's no-one else's, at least if Robin is to be believed. "Core XML specification produced by the W3C such as XSLT or XML Schema don't use it even though they have linking elements," he says, adding that very few have implemented anything but the rudimentary parts of it. But I get ahead of myself; let's see what Robin says. He starts out with this:

That feeling (and a general sense that reuse is good) leads people to want to reuse as many parts of the XML stack as possible when creating a new language. That is a good feeling, and certainly one that should be listened to carefully — there are indeed many good and useful technologies to reuse.

This, of course, makes a lot of sense. We are in the standardisation business so we don't want to reinvent the wheel every time. Me, I've done so time and again, and the one W3C recommendation I have used again and again is... XLink. It provides me with a neat way of defining link semantics without enforcing a processing model, from very simple point-to-point relations to multi-ended link abstractions. Yes, I have used both; Simple XLinks are present in most of my DTDs requiring cross-referencing, images or indeed any point-to-point semantics, and Extended XLinks were a useful and necessary addition to the aftermarket document structures of a major car manufacturer, among other things.

But again, I get ahead of myself. Here's what raised my eyebrows for the first time, this morning:

But that only works if everyone plays, and furthermore the cost of using XLink has to be taken into account. First, a whole new namespace is needed.

This is interesting, to say the least. I thought this was one of the main points of introducing namespaces in the first place, to avoid name collisions.

The basic idea behind namespaces is extremely simple: you use one DTD (well, maybe it's a schema since DTDs aren't namespace-aware; there's a lot I would like to say on that topic, too, so either this is going to be a very long post or I need to start writing down my ideas for blog posts) but in your instances you need to include content created using other schemas. One solution is to only use unique names, but this is a pipe dream and in reality, there's only so many names you can give, say, a paragraph (p, ptxt, para, ...) or a cross-reference (ref, href, link, ...), without resorting to silliness. Inevitably, your elements and attributes will have the same names as someone else's, and that can be a huge pain. Namespaces are a neat way of getting around this problem, and as an added bonus you'll eventually always get that question, "what does the namespace URL stand for?" from your audience when presenting your work.

My point, and the simple question I would like to ask here, is why is it suddenly a bad thing to introduce a namespace for XLink when practically every recommendation, suggestion, and badly written XML configuration file seems to use one these days? Yes, they all come at a cost, among them that if you actually want to validate that included content from that other namespace, you need to implement something doing the work, somehow. You need to validate it against the right schema and so you need all kinds of lookup mechanisms and stuff. But if you can implement one namespace, shouldn't you be able to implement several, especially if your imported namespace provides you with a useful mechanism, say, a standardised linking mechanism?

Namespaces aren't my favourite W3C recommendation but it is what we have. In his blog and whitepaper, Robin points out several bad practices when implementing namespaces and I fully agree with them (perhaps excepting some of the discussion on a "default" namespace for attributes without a prefix), but they are mostly outside the topic at hand because I fail to see why they'd make XLink an undesired recommendation while still encouraging various others.

Robin continues:

Second, the distinction between href and src requires a second attribute.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what this means. First of all, what, exactly, is, the distinction between href and src? According to the XLink recommendation, href "supplies the data that allows an XLink application to find a remote resource," adding that when used, it must be a URI. In simple XLinks, href's are all you need; the source and a reference to it are (or rather, can be) the same thing. (Yes, there is some verbosity since you'll need that namespace declaration and the XLink type, that sort of thing, but if you use XML Schema, you'll be far more verbose than this anyway.)

When discussing extended XLinks, though, yes, there is a difference between a "source" and a "reference" to that source (provided I understand the objection correctly). It's one of the really neat things with extended XLink because it allows us to leave out the linking information from the document instances. We can create complicated, multi-ended, linking structures between resources without the resources ever being aware of them being part of a link. The links can instead be described out-of-line, outside the resources, centrally in a linkbase.

To do this well, there needs to be a clear distinction between pointing out link ends and creating link arcs between them. Certainly, it requires more than one attribute, and in the XLink recommendation, it could easily require three (the pointer to the source, the source's label, and the actual link arc).

Is this the only way to do multi-ended links? No, certainly not, but it does provide us with a standardised way, one that a group of people put considerable thought into. It is possible to redo the work and maybe even do it better, but unless you have a lot of time on your hands, why should you? It's a perfectly serviceable recommendation, with far fewer side effects than, say, namespaces on older XML specs, and it does most of the things you'll ever need with links.

(Granted, XLink, just as any post-namespaces spec, will cause havoc for any system that includes badly implemented XML parsers wanting to interpret everything before and including the colon in an element or attribute name as throwaway strings, but that's not an XLink problem; it's a namespaces problem and above all an implementation problem. XML allows colons in QNames; don't use a parser that tries to redefine what was meant, once upon a time.)

Not everyone agreed with the XLink principles and so left them out in specs that followed, but I have a feeling that what happened was at least partly political (the linking in XHTML comes to mind, with the, um, discussions that ensued), plus that the timing could have been better. At the time, implementing XLink could be something of a pain.

An aside: around the time the XLink recommendation came out, I was heavily involved in implementing large-scale extended XLinks in a CMS for a well-known car manufacturer. Extended XLink solved many of our key problems; being able to define multiple relationships between multiple resources in multiple contexts using a central linkbase made, for the first time, actual single-source publishing possible for the company, and they had been using SGML for years.

The system almost wasn't, however, for a very simple reason. The XML editor of choice (not my choice, by the way; I was presented with it as a fact of life) and its accompanying publishing solution could not handle the processing of inline link ends or indeed any kind of inline link elements beyond ID/IDREF pairs for page references. The editor and the publishing solution chosen would simply not allow us to access and process them, no matter what we did. This was before XSL-FO was finished or in widespread use, mind, and before most editors (including this one) would offer complete APIs for processing the XML.

I won't go into details but the solution was ugly and almost voided the use of extended XLinks. No alternative linking solution would have fared any better, however; the problem was that we were slightly ahead of what was then practical to implement and several of the tools available then just didn't cut it.

Getting back to Robin's blog entry, he also says:

And then there are issues with parts of XLink being useless for (or detrimental to) one's needs, which entails specifying that parts of it should be used but not others, or that on such and such element when one XLink attribute isn't present it defaults to something specific not in the XLink specification, etc.

It's hard to address the specifics here since there are none. I don't have a clue of what parts of XLink are useless or detrimental to Robin's work and can only address his more general complaints.

Most "standards" are like this. There is a basic spec that you need to adapt to, with the bare essentials, and there are additions that you can leave out if you don't need them. XLink makes it easy to implement a minimal linking mechanism while offering a standardised way to expand that mechanism to suit future needs. It also deliberately leaves out the processing model, allowing, for example, for a far more flexible way to define "include" links than XInclude, a linking mechanism that in my mind is inferior in almost every respect to the relevant parts of the XLink spec.

Central here is that with XLink, I can use one linking mechanism for all my linking needs, from cross-references to images to include links, and still be able to define a single processing model for all of them, one that fits my needs. I suspect it would have been very difficult to define anything sufficiently consistent (yet flexible) in the spec itself, so why force one into it?

To me, this is akin to the early criticism DTDs received for lacking data typing. XML Schema added this capacity, resulting in a huge specification with a data typing part that either remained unused or was used for all the wrong reasons. In a document-centric world, data typing is mostly unnecessary which is a good reason to why it wasn't included in DTDs. (In the few cases where data typing was useful, it was easy enough to add an attribute for the element(s) in question, containing either a regular expression or some other suitable content definition, and add the necessary processing for the applications as needed. There was no need to write a novel for the data types no-one needed, anyway.)

As you might guess, my point is that not including the processing model in the spec is a strength, not a weakness, because a sufficiently complete, general-purpose, processing model for a complete linking mechanism is most likely too complex to do well. It would only serve to create conflicting needs and make the spec less useful. Why not leave it to implementation?

Which brings me to Robin's next point:

Core XML specification produced by the W3C such as XSLT or XML Schema don't use it even though they have linking elements.

I don't pretend to know why this is; I have an idea of why XHTML didn't, and in my mind it had very little to do with any technical merits or lack of same, and a lot to do with politics and differing fractions in the W3C. Could it be the same with XML Schema and XSLT? It might; I know that XLink could have addressed the linking needs of both specs. Certainly, XML Schema is "costly" enough to not be bothered by an extra namespace among those already included. Maybe someone close to the working groups would like to share, but what's the point now?

In Robin's blog, the above statement leads to:

I don't believe that anyone implements much in the way of generic link processing.

I've implemented a lot in this respect, starting from about the time XML became an official spec. XLink has proved to be very useful, allowing me to benefit from my earlier work while still being flexible enough to encourage some very differing link implementations.

Granted, most of my work has been document-centric, with my clients ranging from companies very small to the armed forces of my native country, but in all of these, XLink has proven to be sufficiently useful and flexible. A friend of mine, Henrik Mårtensson, now a business management guru, wrote a basic XLink implementation more than a decade ago (yes, long before XLink was a finished spec; we were both involved in implementing XLink in various places back then), with everything that was required to create useful links, be they cross-references, pointers to images, or something else. This implementation is still in use today, and while I and others have changed a lot of stuff surrounding it, the core and the basic model remain unchanged. My presentation at XML Prague 2009, right after Robin's, touched on some of this work, and had my computer been healthier, he would have witnessed at least one XLink implementation.

Which (sort of) leads to Robin's last point:

Reuse of other languages should be done where needed, and when the cost does not exceed that of reinvention.

I agree with the basic notion, obviously, but not with his conclusions. XLink, to me, is exactly the kind of semantics that is far easier to reuse than to reinvent. Yes, it is possible to simply write "href CDATA #IMPLIED" (or the schema equivalent) and be done with it, but anything more complex than that will benefit from standardisation, especially if you ever envision having to do it again. XLink is a terrific option when it comes to anything having to do with linking.

Korg TR61

2009-12-03T10:58:00.004+01:00

I'm sure you'll all be thrilled to know that I bought a Korg TR61 synthesizer and "musical workstation" yesterday, replacing my old and trusty Kawai K4. I've slept about 4 hours, choosing to spend most of the night playing instead.

KMess...

2009-10-16T13:34:00.002+02:00

...is a Linux-based IM client for Windows Live. It's a very nice little app that allows me to connect to Windows Live, formerly known as MSN, without having to use Windows. Or allowed, because it's broke. Right now it crashes every time I try to start it.

Oxygen 11 and an Old Bug

2009-10-13T08:20:00.004+02:00

Oxygen 11 is out and I just installed it on my laptop. It's still the best XML IDE there is, by far, but I'm getting a bit annoyed by a bug that has persisted for a year now.

Long story short, but basically the tabs bar that keeps track on the open documents and indicates the current document is buggy and will not correctly focus on the current document if that document is too far right to be visible without scrolling, and a previous document, also too far right to be visible without scrolling, has just been closed. The bar and the actual visible document do not synch so while the document itself is open and editable, the tab is missing. Very annoying, to say the least, if you are working with a highly modularised stylesheet and need to have more than a handful documents open at the same time. Apparently the bug is in a third party component and until that component is updated or replaced, the bug will persist.

I can live with that bug, though, and the new version seems to have enough fun stuff to keep me busy for a while. XProc support, for example, is a welcome addition. I've been wanting to try it ever since Norman Walsh presented it at XML Prague, and now there should be no further excuses.

Amarok Woes

2009-10-06T08:59:00.002+02:00

Amarok, the best music player there is for Linux or indeed any platform, has been redesigned from the ground up. The old version 1.4, while feature-rich, was apparently up to the standards and visions of the app's makers, and now, there is a 2.2 out.

Amarok 2.2 is completely different in terms of appearance (and probably even more internally), but right now I'm having lots of trouble getting it to work the way 1.4 did. Here's what's bugging me the most:

I can't seem to get the playlists to sort my music according to albums without every album on the list being listed once for every song that album contains. VERY frustrating.
Version 2.2 reintroduced the capability to play audio CDs. However, this feature doesn't seem to work on my laptop--the CD is listed but just won't play (even Kscd plays on the laptop and that's to say a lot). On my desktop, the CDs will play, though.
CD title lengths are always 0:00. Annoying.

I'm sure these will be sorted out in time, but right now, when KDE 4 is still buggy and unreliable, and Pulseaudio still mutes sound on every boot, there is enough on my plate already to keep me annoyed.

XMetaL and wine 1.1.28

2009-09-22T14:03:00.004+02:00

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.

Corena S1000D User Forum

2009-09-05T00:41:00.003+02:00

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.

Integrated Logistic Support

2009-08-24T21:31:00.002+02:00

I'm spending this week in Malmö in southern Sweden, participating in a course on Integrated Logistics Support (ILS). ILS, basically, is about planning for and supporting a product's whole lifecycle, from its early planning stages and onwards to the deployment (called "employment plan", a phrase that to me meant something very different until today), the product's useful life, including maintenance and support, and the product's eventual disposal. As always, the idea is to create a better and more cost-effective product, meaning more money to you. See, what's really intersting is how the results of an ILS analysis, called LSA (don't you just love acronyms?), can be put into the design of the product itself and how a proper analysis can help significantly reduce cost.

ILS is traditionally about military products, preferably state-of-the art helicopters or perhaps a large frigate but an ordinary rifle can benefit, too, and so is the course I'm attending, but it's easy to see how ILS can be put into good use elsewhere. It's fascinating stuff. Obviously it's a bit early for me to comment on anything factually relevant, being a complete newbie in all things ILS, but I can see a relevance to document management and the systems I help build when I'm not in Malmö.

As I said, fascinating stuff.

More on KDE 4.3

2009-08-21T13:06:00.003+02:00

I like KDE 4.3. Let's make that perfectly clear, because after reading this, you might get the wrong idea.

KDE 4.3 ha a far more finished look and feel than 4.2. Things seem to be better integrated and the crashes are fewer, with fewer causes. I've finally got the hang of Dolphin (that tricky address bar, for one thing), and I even got Kscd to work.

But.

There are many annoyances as well:

KMix mutes the master volume on every startup (I only have to unmute it and turn the volume up, but this is very annoying to do on every startup).
Okular won't accept (or remember) landscape print settings (Document Viewer from Gnome, that uses the same printer drivers, as far as I can tell,has no problems).
The eye candy on Desktop settings usually crashes parts of the KDE environment, with the taskbar going first, if you try more than one or two settings.
The PulseAudio/Phonon combo is very unreliable. With GStreamer, it won't output sound, but with the Xine backend, it usually does.
Amarok no longer knows how to play CDs. I tried to use Rhythmbox but it chops up CD audio in 15-second bursts with a 200 ms pause between every one, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why.

Some of the eye candy issues could easily be related to the (very) buggy Intel Xorg driver, but I still think that KDE shouldn't crash as a result.

On the whole, I like the environment, though. ;)

KDE 4.3...

2009-08-10T21:30:00.004+02:00

...is a big step forward. Finally things are starting to actually work. Now, if they could only reimplement the CD player functionality in Amarok I'd be even happier. (And to be honest, I'm not sure I like Amarok's new look.)

The Sopranos Ending

2009-06-29T16:35:00.003+02:00

I watched the final episode of The Sopranos last night, for the fourth or fifth time. Now, I know some people say Tony died in the end of that episode, but I just don't see it. Yes, I know how one uses POV shots (I've made my share of films), and yes, I know the Members Only jacket guy looks shady, and yes, I know that there is a not-so-subtle reference to the first Godfather film, but I just don't see it.

I think the ending was made ambiguous on purpose. We can all interpret it pretty much how we want and go on with our lives, and should David Chase decide to revive the Sopranos as a feature film, we can all go and see it, and make Mr Chase an even richer man. And go on discussing that.

Inline Tagging

2009-06-09T14:32:00.005+02:00

Here's a trivial little piece of inline tagging that is nagging me:

It's a classic chicken-or-egg problem, really. The tagging is commonplace enough; it's trivial, crude, even, and represents an emphasised and superscripted number, but should the number be emphasised first and then superscripted, or should it be the other way around, like this:

I know, I really shouldn't bother, but it is precisely this kind of nested inline tagging that can completely stop me in my tracks. In a wider context, the question is: is the order of nesting important? That is, semantically speaking, is there a difference? Am I saying that an emphasised (in other words, important) number happens to be superscripted, or that a superscripted number happens to be emphasised (important)?

More often than not, this type of inline tagging is about formatting, not semantics, so it probably doesn't matter. Also, emphasis as an inline tag is dodgy at best because while it says that the highlighted text is important but fails to mention why, and the "why" is what is important if we want semantics, if we need intelligence. It's the same with superscript and subscript elements, and quite a few other common inline elements that are about how things should be presented rather than structured.

But then, of course, formatting is useful, too, because it can visualise abstract concepts.

Chicken or egg, folks? Me, I don't know. I only wrote this because I needed a break form designing an export format from a product database, a format where I need to visualise data.

KDE 4.2

2009-05-29T22:01:00.003+02:00

Some time ago, I made the upgrade to KDE 4.2 from 3.5. It was made available in Debian's Unstable branch so I figured "why not?"

Why not, indeed?

Well, for starters, I can't figure out how to make it react to audio CDs in the CD drive. KDE 3.5 offered a dialog where I could choose what to do with the damned thing. With this one, it's beyond me; nothing happens. I've toyed around in the Settings, but to no avail. I've googled around. I can't make it work.

Just now, I received an email with a MS word attachment, a .doc file. KMail offered Kate as the default choice, a bloody text editor, but the thing is that not too long ago, KMail knew that OpenOffice works for anything with that suffix, and furthermore, KDE knows, from what I can see in the File Associations settings, that OpenOffice is the right application to use. But it doesn't. It won't.

The refurbished Kicker menu gets stuck on the desktop after I click it, until I click on it somewhere near the Search edit box. On my laptop, the task bar (or whatever they want to call it, these days, never remembers how wide it should be if I use the laptop on an external screen (with a different resolution) in addition to the built-in one. For some reason, something switched the sound settings on the Audigy card to the Digital output after I upgraded to a 2.6.29 kernel, without telling me, so I went through hell to get my sound back, before I discovered the switch (that, by the way, is not available on every mixer there is) that needed a click.

Or all those settings that used to require a root password, to change how KDM behaves. Or whatever. Lots of things have gone wrong with the KDE upgrade and I don't know how to fix them, not without some surfing on the net, and I can't be bothered. I think of myself as a power user, I have used computers in various forms since the late seventies and Unix in a number of incarnations through the years, but surely it shouldn't be like this?

And no, I don't want to switch to Gnome because I hate it, I think it treats me lika an idiot, but maybe I need to? What say you? I don't want to spend all my free time on the bloody Internets, trying to find the answers to each and every little problem there is.

Put XSD 1.1 On Hold

2009-05-17T18:16:00.004+02:00

In his latest blog entry at O'Reilly, Rick Jelliff asks W3C to please put XSD 1.1 on hold and address the deeper underlying issues that make schemas practically useless.

I'd like to go one step further and encourage the schema working group to consider Relax NG, compact syntax, instead, as a more sensible and compact alternative to XSDs. It does everything we need from a schema language, without being impenetrable or impossibly verbose. If W3C actively endorsed Relax NG, maybe we'd get the software manufacturers to support Relax NG on a wider scale. Yes, I know, Oxygen already supports it, but there are plenty of manufacturers out there that need to follow suit.

Please.

Jean Michel Jarre

2009-05-13T08:52:00.001+02:00

I went to see Jean Michel Jarre perform in concert, earlier this week. I've been a fan since the 70s when Oxygène came out but I never thought I'd experience him live. Göteborg's too small a city for the kind of thing he is famed for, painting the Houston skyline with lasers or transforming London's Docklands to a gigantic concert venue, so I was pleasently surprised when he announced his "In-Door" tour, a series of performances indoors, on a fairly small scale.

The Scandinavium is not what I'd call small (U2 paid a visit 18 years ago, and I listened to Paul McCartney dust off his Beatles repertoir there, close to 20 years ago), but I still thought it wouldn't be enough for Jean Michel Jarre.

Boy I was wrong. From the laser harp (you have to see and hear it; there's no way I can make it justice here) to the analog synthesizers, from Oxygène to Rendez-vous... it was all perfect (well, actually he slipped while playing that laser harp, just once, but it happened) and I really only wrote this to gloat.

Slow Keys

2009-05-04T13:27:00.003+02:00

The KDE 4.2 desktop on my Debian/GNU Linux laptop install (Sid, the unstable flavour) practically died the other day, after a dist-upgrade. Well, actually, the keyboard stopped responding while the touchpad continued working perfectly. A first Google search (sloppily performed, I'll admit) hinted at changes done in Xorg 1.6 but while I found a few hints, nothing I did with the xorg.conf file could revive the keyboard.

After a few hours of experimenting and general panic, I stumbled on an older post on a KDE message board. The author had managed to turn on the Slow Keys feature in KDE 4, a set of functions designed for the disabled, which resulted in a very slow keyboard. I checked my settings and yes, the feature had somehow been turned on.

Now, relieved as I was, I'm also pretty sure that I have not been anywhere near that checkbox. How is this possible?

Out of Print

2009-04-27T22:34:00.007+02:00

I like O'Reilly's books. They're well-written, well-researched, and a lot of fun to read. They are also very cool, because O'Reilly, probably better than anyone else in the IT publishing business, know how to market their books (think The Camel Book if you don't believe me, and resign yourself to "I need to find another blog to read" if you don't get this particular geek reference). I would love to write for them some day.

In the meantime, I frequently surf over to their site, reading the blogs, browsing the catalogue, and planning my next buy. And sometimes I just read stuff here and there. Today, I browsed the list of out-of-print books and found this:
I LOL'd, as they say. Yes, a book from January 1900 is probably out of print by now, but I had no idea that XML was that old.

TomTom and Microsoft

2009-04-17T11:33:00.004+02:00

Apparently TomTom and Microsoft have promised not to sue each other for the next five years. The settlement came soon after TomTom countersued and joined forces with the open source movement.

I can't decide if I like this or not.

Is It Just Me, Or...

2009-04-14T14:25:00.002+02:00

...does KDE 4.2 remind you of Vista?

Anticlimax

2009-04-07T10:21:00.002+02:00

My persistent Debian-related WiFi problems finally got solved. The other day, I sat at a restaurant, working away, and decided to try the WiFi. The laptop connected, immediately, with no problems whatsoever.

This got me thinking.

Apparently, Debian and the Intel drivers couldn't be to blame. It had to be a router issue. So I upgraded my Netgear router firmware (I have both a gateway and a repeater, so there were two machines to consider), and voilá! I had a working WiFi connection at home.

Not That Easy - WiFi Woes, Part Two

2009-03-29T22:17:00.003+02:00

Turns out I was too optimistic. wicd and the little adjusting I did does not deliver a working Internet, not every time. Today, no matter how I tried, I couldn't connect (beyond the router, to which I can always connect) until I changed the laptop IP from dynamic to static, and the DHCP client from automatic to dhclient. All of a sudden, I was back surfing!

Only, just now, when I booted up the laptop again, I couldn't connect beyond the router (which connected fast enough), not until I changed the IP back to dynamic... This is seriously weird and I can't explain it. I wonder if it's got something to do with my router, an instruction that is lost on the way, DNS services that aren't updates... something?!?

WiFi on Linux is NOT easy.

WiFi Woes

2009-03-26T21:28:00.005+01:00

Just a little note for posterity:

My Lenovo T61 laptop that now runs Debian has an Intel 3945 ABG wireless network adapter. While the Debian (Lenny) installation and the subsequent upgrade to Sid went flawlessly, with the WiFi card discovered and listed, it wouldn't connect wirelessly to my Netgear router (actually a repeater, fed from a Netgear ADSL modem/gateway). It connected to the router itself, I was able to ping the router and connect to it using a browser, but everything beyond that was inaccessible. I tried various interfaces stanzas, reconfigured TCP/IP, and tested all kinds of tricks, without any success.

Then I did some serious googling. A lot of people have had this problem and many probably still do. Also, the problem was pretty much the same, regardless of your Linx flavour. Finally, a Ubuntu forum suggested removing the network-manager package and installing wicd in its place. Said and done (luckily I had upgraded to Debian Sid; the package is not available in Lenny). I had to reboot but could still not connect.

As a last resort I tried explicitly pointing out my ISP's DNS server IP addresses in the wicd configuration. That did it and I'm now writing this blog on a WiFi connection.

Sometimes it's important to document these things. Maybe, just maybe, it will help someone else.

Linux on the Laptop

2009-03-26T21:07:00.006+01:00

Following the unfortunate events surrounding my presentation at XML Prague (a fabulous event, by the way; you should have been there), I now run Debian GNU/Linux as my primary OS on my work laptop. There is a Windows XP partition, so far, but my plan is to use Xen and virtualisation, and run the Windows operating systems as Xen domains.

The laptop installation that failed contained my first attempts at virtualisation, by the way. Microsoft's Virtual PC ran Windows 2003 Server and Cassis, the Document Management System that I'm part of developing at Condesign Operations Support, and was connected to my XP installation through a loopback adapter. In theory, this is a very nice setup since it is possible to simply run a complete image of an OS and the server setup as part of a demonstration and then reset it to its pre-demo state for the next show. In practice, however, Virtual PC does not deliver. The hardware it emulates is very limited and everything it does is rather slow. It was enough to wet my appetite, however (together with my friend Niklas' obsession with Xen), so I decided to do it right, now that I had to wipe the old drive anyway.

My Debian installation does not yet run a Xen kernel, but I'll keep you posted.

I Hate Windows

2009-03-21T23:07:00.002+01:00

This blog is about blame. Specifically, it's about Windows XP. If you're into the Microsoft-friendly thing, quit reading.

I held my presentation at XML Prague today. It seemed to go reasonably well until I was about to switch to a demo. I was in Powerpoint and meant to show a little something on the actual application, so I switched to Internet Explorer, or so I thought.

NOTHING happened. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nothing whatsoever.

Nothing. Can you imagine the terror? WTF?

I kept on speaking, realising that my presentation wasn't up to par. Another demo opportunity came up, with similar results.

Nothing.

And that is what happened. Nothing. You explain this, because I can't.

Two Days Left

2009-03-19T00:05:00.001+01:00

Well, a bit more than that, actually. See you at XML Prague.

Ari's Blog

Back from XML Prague

I Lost

Digital Movie Subtitles and XSLT

Digital Shows, FML and XML

Digital Images

HTC Desire

Happy New Year

Scientific Publishing in XML, Repost

Semantic Profiles

Evolution 3.2

I Spoke Too Soon

XML Prague 2012

Evolution/KDE/Gnome Rant

Semantic Documents

XML Finland, Not On A Boat After All

XML Finland, Pt 2

Google Plus

Me and XML in Stockholm... Again

XML Prague 2012

XML Finland

Roland D-50 Key Servicing

Flight Sims

Me and XML in Stockholm

Finally, KDE 4.6 on Debian

It's May and It's Snowing

Sponsored Links Rock

An Even-Simpler Markup Language?

Until Next Year, XML Prague

Squeeze Is Out

XML Prague 2011, Part Two

Presentation at the Dokumentinfo Conference

XML Prague 2011

DITA Specialization in DocBook?

Mobile Sync, Part Three

AdSense and Spam

More XProc

XProc

Mobile Sync, Part Two

Roland D-50

Mobile Sync

VirtualBox

DITA Lists, Part Two

BP Spilling Coffee

List Modelling

4G?

N900 Gets New Firmware

Bye Bye Andrew Wakefield

Blogging from My N900

Permanent URLs, Addresses and Names

I Want A Nokia N900

Footnotes

Coffee

Balisage, Please Move to Europe

XML for the Long Haul

Back from XML Prague

It's Quite Possible to Lose Your Way in Prague

Automating Cinemas at XML Prague

Developing SGML DTDs: From Text To Model To Markup

Tiny URLs

Festival Impressions

Five Days and Counting

Two Days Left To...

Indexing Functionality in FOP

Visual Studio and XMetaL

The Göteborg International Film Festival...

XML Rock Star

elementNames and attributeNames

Göteborg Film Festival

XML Prague 2010

Not the SGML FAQ

Finally, a new Intel Xorg driver in Debian Sid!

Words in Boxes

An XProc Tutorial

Happy New Year!

XLink FTW, Part 2

Was XLink A Mistake?

Korg TR61

KMess...

Oxygen 11 and an Old Bug