KMess...

...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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ;)