Blog Move

I've moved my blog to www.sgmlguru.org/wp. That is, I've imported everything from this one to that one, and while I do not plan to delete anything, I'm going to write my stuff there.

See you.

My New Site

Yesterday I got myself a shiny new low-end VPS at VPSDime to host my sgmlguru.org site. For now, I've installed WordPress (to which I am considering moving the blog you're reading now, if it all pans out) and maybe some other stuff. We'll see.

XML Prague 2015

I finally got an approval from my boss to attend XML Prague 2015 and registered for it the other day. I'm not presenting this time around, just listening and learning, and looking very much forward to it.

A Note

Noting it's been two months since I last wrote anything here, I feel it is time to add the following:

If you hoped for a new version of ProXist (as hinted by a previous blog entry), sorry. It has not happened yet. It will, eventually.

If you expected something else from me, sorry again. It has not happened yet. It might, if I find out what you're on about.

Contact me if you want blame assigned.

ProXist v2

For the last few days, I've been busy updating ProXist, my XProc abstraction layer and app for eXist. There is a new(-ish) XProc package for eXist that promises to support a lot of (Norm Walsh's XProc engine) Calabash's capabilities, so I decided it was time to test it out and do a new ProXist at the same time.

My XML Prague ProXist version supported only my custom document type and stylesheets, and barely those at that. It was meant to be a demo. For the new version, though, I'm thinking of doing a default implementation for DocBook, including some of the more commonly used stylesheets and a couple of standard pipelines, packaged so they can be used with ProXist--it should be a question of writing a ProX blueprint XML file, theoretically, plus something that helps me list DocBook resources included using XInclude.

At the same time, I'm finally updating the ProXist documentation. It's written using DocBook, incidentally, and now part of the git repository.

ProXist is not even close to being finished, but at least I seem to have moved on from procrastinating to actually doing something.

I Guess I'll Have to Find Another Email App

About a year and a half ago, I bought Airmail to replace Apple's standard Mail app as my primary OS X email client. Not only was it miles above what Apple could offer, it was a bargain at $1.99. It was a no-brainer; I would gladly have paid more, considering its great feature set.

Lately, though, the Airmail updates have done little to fix the bugs I've encountered, from unread post counts not matching the actual numbers and poor threading of mailing list posts to annoyingly slow performance with large inboxes, etc. These annoyances haven't been enough for me to bother looking up another email client just yet, but that's mostly because I'm lazy and keep hoping that an update will eventually fix the problems.

So imagine how pleased I was earlier today, when I noticed that a version 2.0 of Airmail is available from the App Store. Finally!

Except then I spotted the price tag. The upgrade costs $19.99, and yes, that applies for customers both new and old. Although, for a limited time, you can get it at a special introductory price of $9.99.

WTF?

I feel cheated. It's not the money - a year and a half ago, I would have considered $19.99 to be more than reasonable - it's that they want to make me pay twice to get what essentially is an upgrade, the first more major upgrade since I bought version 1.0. See, they've reworked the app "from the ground up" and there's now a "faster engine", that is, they've finally addressed the performance issues and maybe more, but apparently they think they didn't charge their customers enough the first time around.

And what happens the next time they plan a bigger upgrade? What happens when they move to version 3.0? Do they expect me to pay for the damned thing again, a third time?

So, sorry but no; not only will I not be buying the 2.0, I will also uninstall the 1.0 and replace it with an email client developed by someone who isn't planning to rip me off.

OS X Upgrade

I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the new OS X version, Yosemite, yesterday. Some observations:

• The new system font looks great. I'm really glad they finally realised how crappy the old one was.
• As expected, the upgraded zapped my rEFInd bootloader. I can no longer dual boot, so no more Ubuntu until I've rerun the rEFInd script. Unfortunately the word on the web is that the bootloader becomes awfully slow, so I think I'll wait.
• The new dock is sort of ugly and sort of old-fashioned. Didn't it use to look like this, a couple of versions ago?
• And speaking of looks, it all feels to me as something that might have happened if Apple had merged with ToysRus. Which isn't the case, as far as I know, so it probably means that the iOS camp at Apple is winning.
• I'm feeling a bit cheated because the Handoff features require a newer computer than my mid-2010 model. I would have loved to test them out.

I'm pretty sure I'll have more to say in a few days. For now, though, I'll just hit Publish.