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Thursday, September 30, 2004
Tiger and the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism
As you are all aware by now, the "Tiger" release of Java, version 1.5.0, was officially released today! Get it from java.sun.com.
What you may not be aware of, is the Endorsed Standards Override
Mechanism. This feature was available in java 1.4, and was needed if
you wanted to use a newer version of Xalan or Saxon than was bundled
with the JDK.
After I installed Tiger today, I was working away happily, until I
tried to transform some tech docs with Saxon 8. I soon questioned
whether the endorsed override worked as before, or whether I'd have to
find some new trick.
I'm happy to report, that the override is still there and worked just as soon as I dropped the newest jars in /usr/jdk/jdk1.5.0/jre/lib/endorsed
More information on the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism is available at: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/standards/.
See also: XSLT
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
UCS Y-Wing under the radar
Wow, this one snuck up on me.
Theforce.net reported today that the UCS Y-Wing Starfighter is now available from the Lego Shop. I checked, and it's running $119 to preorder for Nov 2004 delivery.
I hadn't visited the trusty FBTB.net, and now I'm really sorry. They broke this story back on September 25. FBTB please set up an RSS feed! I'm hooked on Bloglines to get all my news now :-)
The UCS Snowspeeder is also a very cool model, but nothing tops building the UCS Star Destroyer!
See also: Lego
Labels: Lego, Sci-Fi
Monday, September 27, 2004
Reviews: THX-1138, Sky Captain, and Battlefront
Last week was a very busy week for Sci-Fi and myself.
Amazon FINALLY shipped my Star Wars Trilogy on DVD, but it was 3
days late as far as I'm concerned. If I pre-ordered 3 months early,
you'd think that would be plenty of time to figure out how to ship it
to me THE DAY of public availability.
I got Star Wars Battlefront for PS2 the day it was available, and it
is a great game. The depth of the plot isn't quite there like other SW
titles, but the game play is fun and the Dolby Pro-Logic II sound is
incredible. I've been working my way through the historical campaigns,
so I've been on Naboo, Kashykk, Kamino, and am now on Rhen Var. I can't
wait to try multiplayer. Check out the Dork Tower comics this week. They crack me up! Yeah, I'm a lot like Igor.
I went with a friend to the Denver Pavillions to catch THX-1138 in
the theater. I hadn't seen it before. It's worth seeing once, but not
worth $9 or buying the DVD, IMO. It had some decent sci-fi themes,
which were interesting, but some heavy 70's surrealist scenes. The
nudity wasn't gratuitous, and helped promote some of the storyline, but
I think the R rating was justified.
By far, the best Sci-Fi of the week was "Sky Captain and the World
of Tomorrow". Filmed completely in green screen, I was quite impressed
with the classic Flash Gordon look and feel. In the credits, I counted
at least 14 different special effects companies that worked on the
film, including Industrial Light and Magic. The result is spectacular,
and it's good, clean fun, too. I think I could actually take my kids to
see this movie. I hope Hollywood takes notice, and produces more of
this caliber of film. We don't need all the violence and sex that
they've been churning out for so long, IMO.
One other sci-fi note. There is discussion of rating Star Wars
Episode III as PG-13. This would be unfortunate, since I want to take
my boys (6 and 3) to see it. I know it will be a darker film, since
Anakin turns into Vader, but I'm still hoping it can be done in a PG
format. We don't need excruciating detail of Anakin burning in lava, to
know why he wears the life-support suit. Mr. Lucas, despite all of your
critics, I think the story should still cater to the imaginations of
the younger audiences. I liked Episode 1 and 2, and can show them to
the boys without concerns of too much violence.
So in a nutshell: Go see Sky Captain, get Battlefront on your favorite platform, don't pre-order DVDs, and skip buying THX-1138.
See also: Sci-Fi
Labels: Sci-Fi, starwars
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Star Wars Battlefront and the Trilogy
Ahh, today is a good day for many a Star Wars fan. Not only is the
original Trilogy (okay Special Edition) available for the first time
ever on DVD, but the spectacular Star Wars Battlefront game is
available to experience the movies yourself! Check out this cool
article on the gaming experience: http://www.starwars.com/gaming/videogames/news/f20040920/index.html.
I wasn't going to be allowed to get Battlefront until I conquered Disney's Kingdom Hearts
on PS2, but thankfully I completed it this weekend! Kingdom Hearts is a
terrific game, that I would highly recommend after it took me 60 hours
to complete.
For a comical look at the controversial changes to the Star Wars Trilogy, check this out:
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2374
Also, theforce.net reported some audio changes to the DVDs, and this quote from Lucasfilm:
We are always impressed with how closely fans listen to
the many different sound mixes we have made for the Star Wars movies
over the years. It is flattering to know that, indeed, the audience is
listening. Consequently, each mix comes out differently and any changes
that you hear on the all-new Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround EX tracks on
the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set are deliberate creative decisions. We can
confirm that there are no technical glitches as has been reported.
Unfortunately, amazon.com says I won't get my Trilogy DVDs until
9/28, so I can't confirm any of the changes ;-). I will be going to get
Battlefront today, though! I won't be able to play it tonight, because
I'm going to the theater re-release of THX-1138, George Lucas' first
film. Like SW Special Edition, this version of THX-1138 has a lot of
computer enhancements.
See also: Sci-Fi
Labels: Sci-Fi, starwars
Monday, September 20, 2004
DocBook XSL 1.66.1 released
The latest release of the DocBook stylesheets has moved from the
test release to production with version 1.66.1, available now from http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/.
An gracious member of the DocBook community also posted an RPM spec file at: http://www.madboa.com/geek/specs/docbook-style-xsl.spec.
To quote from the mailing list...
If you're running Fedora Core or Red Hat, it's easy to use:
# the two wget invocations should each be on a single line; I
# apologize for any line wrapping
#
cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
# download the source, e.g.,
wget http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/docbook/docbook-xsl-1.66.1.tar.gz
cd ../SPECS
# grab my spec
wget http://www.madboa.com/geek/specs/docbook-style-xsl.spec
# build/install the package
rpmbuild -bb docbook-style-xsl.spec
rpm -Fvh ../RPMS/noarch/docbook-style-xsl-1.66.1-1.noarch.rpm
Fellow DocBook TC member Jirka Kosek also posted an older paper on the extensions used by DocBook stylesheets at: http://www.kosek.cz/temp/extensions-api.html
See also: DocBook
Labels: DocBook, XSLT
Friday, September 17, 2004
Think Topic Maps
I looked a little deeper into musicplasma that fleers blogged on yesterday. Very cool site, that similar in some respects to the TMNav application of the TM4J project!
Turns out, musicplasma uses a product called ThinkMap,
which based on J2EE. ThinkMap's whitepapers make no mention of whether
they are using Topic Maps, RDF, OWL or some proprietary technology
under the covers. They do have an XML configuration file that makes it
very easy to use, combined with CSS styling for the presentation.
Very cool product. It would be nice to see some of the same visual presentation features in TMNav, or Ontopia's Omnigator.
Further digging revealed another product called The Brain, which also looks interesting, but unknown what it's based on under the covers.
Correction: Just got a comment from the musicplasma
guys that they are NOT using ThinkMap engine, but have rolled their
own. It was the Sony Music License engine, that used ThinkMap. Still,
all of these visual representations certainly resemble Topic Maps. It
would be nice if they could all adopt the Topic Map standard for
interoperability, instead of going the proprietary route.
Update: Just heard from the ThinkMap folks, and
they said, "Thinkmap does not use topic maps, but rather uses tables
from a relational database (or practically any other data source, for
that matter)." Ditto my comment above. Hopefully some of these
companies will adopt some of the Semantic Web standards, to enable
interoperability.
See also: TopicMaps
Labels: TopicMaps, XML
naDev tlhIngan Hol jatlhlu'! (Klingon spoken here.)
Interesting story on Reuter's Oddly Enough, about a German site that has added Klingon information! The site is at: http://klingon.dw-world.de/english/index.php.
If you are a huge Trek geek like me, try taking up Klingon from these sites:
Or read Marc Okrand's most excellent book: The Klingon Dictionary
Amazingly enough, a search for Klingon on amazon.com yields 864 resources!
Qapla!
See also: Sci-Fi
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Storm Chasing with Supercomputers
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Storm Chasing from Space
Monday, September 13, 2004
New DocBook Stylesheets (version 1.66.0)
DocBook expert Bob Stayton has just released a new version of the DocBook Stylesheets at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/. The .0 is a test release, so expect a 1.66.1 release soon...
Lots of bug fixes and new features in this one! Here are the release notes:
Release 1.66.0 A number of important bug fixes, documented in WhatsNew.
Now xml:base attributes that are generated by an
XInclude processor are resolved for image files.
Rewrote olink templates to support several new features.
Extended full olink support to FO output.
Add support for xrefstyle attribute in olinks.
New parameters to support new olink features:
insert.olink.page.number, insert.olink.pdf.frag,
olink.debug, olink.lang.fallback.sequence, olink.properties,
prefer.internal.olink.
See the reference page for each parameter for more
information.
Added index.on.type parameter for new type
attribute introduced in DocBook 4.3 for indexterms and index.
This allows you to create multiple indices containing
different categories of entries.
For users of 4.2 and earlier, you can use the new parameter index.on.role
instead.
Added new
section.autolabel.max.depth parameter to turn off section numbering
below a certain depth.
This permits you to number major section levels and leave minor
section levels unnumbered.
Added footnote.sep.leader.properties attribute set to format
the line separating footnotes in printed output.
Added parameter img.src.path as a prefix to HTML img src
attributes.
The prefix is added to whatever path is already generated by the
stylesheet for each image file.
Added new attribute-sets
informalequation.properties,
informalexample.properties,
informalfigure.properties, and informaltable.properties,
so each such element type can be formatted
individually if needed.
Add component.label.includes.part.label
parameter to add any part number to chapter, appendix
and other component labels when
the label.from.part parameter is nonzero.
This permits you to distinguish multiple chapters with the same
chapter number in cross references and the TOC.
Added chunk.separate.lots parameter for HTML output.
This parameter lets you generate separate chunk files for each LOT
(list of tables, list of figures, etc.). Added several table features:
Added table.table.properties attribute set to add
properties to the fo:table element.
Added placeholder templates named table.cell.properties
and table.cell.block.properties to enable adding properties
to any fo:table-cell or the cell's fo:block, respectively.
These templates are a start for implementing table styles.
Added new attribute
set component.title.properties for easy modifications of
component's title formatting in FO output.
Added Saxon support for an encoding attribute on the textdata element. Added new parameter
textdata.default.encoding which specifies encoding when
encoding attribute on
textdata is missing.
Template label.this.section now controls whole
section label, not only sub-label which corresponds to
particular label. Former behaviour was IMHO bug as it was
not usable.
Formatting in titleabbrev for TOC and headers
is preserved when there are no hotlink elements in the title. Formerly
the title showed only the text of the title, no font changes or other
markup.
Added intial.page.number template to set the initial-page-number
property for page sequences in print output.
Customizing this template lets you change when page numbering restarts. This is similar to the format.page.number template that lets you change how the page number formatting changes in the output.
Added force.page.count template to set the force-page-count
property for page sequences in print output.
This is similar to the format.page.number template.
Sort language for localized index sorting in autoidx-ng.xsl is now taken from document
lang, not from system environment.
Numbering and formatting of normal
and ulink footnotes (if turned on) has been unified.
Now ulink footnotes are mixed in with any other footnotes.
Added support for renderas attribute in section and
sect1 et al.
This permits you to render a given section title as if it were a different level.
Added support for label attribute in footnote to manually
supply the footnote mark.
Added support for DocBook 4.3 corpcredit element.
Added support for a dbfo keep-together
PI for
formal objects (table, figure, example, equation, programlisting). That
permits a formal object to be kept together if it is not already, or to
be broken if it
is very long and the
default keep-together is not appropriate.
For graphics files, made file extension matching case
insensitive, and updated the list of graphics extensions.
Allow calloutlist to have block content before
the first callout
Added dbfo-need processing instruction to provide
soft page breaks.
Added implementation of existing but unused
default.image.width parameter for graphics.
Support DocBook NG tag inline element.
It appears that XEP now supports Unicode characters in
bookmarks. There is no further need to strip accents from
characters.
Make segmentedlist HTML markup
more semantic and available to CSS styles.
Added user.preroot placeholder template to
permit xsl-stylesheet and other PIs and comments to be
output before the HTML root element.
Non-chunked legalnotice now gets an <a
name="id"> element in HTML output
so it can be referenced with xref or link.
In chunked HTML output, changed link rel="home" to rel="start",
and link rel="previous" to rel="prev", per W3C HTML 4.01
spec.
Added several patches to htmlhelp from W. Borgert
See also: DocBook
Labels: DocBook, XML, XSLT
Real Men Wear Kilts
My family and I attended the Longs Peak Scottish/Irish Highland Festival this weekend. I think it was one of the best we've ever been to!
We started on Thursday with the Tatoo (The word means: evening drum,
bugle, or piper signal recalling soldiers to quarters. The earliest
form of the word is from the Dutch "tap toe" which literally means to
"close the tap" of the cask in the barrooms.). This spectacular event
featured the King's Own Scottish Borderers Pipes and Drums, 78th
Highlanders Pipes and Drums, 78th Highlanders Drill Team, Marine Band
Twentynine Palms, Fort Carson Mounted Color Guard, cannons, HeadTalk-a
drumline, and Dogs of the British Isles. Also quite moving was Isla St.
Clair singing "When the Pipers Play".
On Friday, we went to the Field Day, taking in Scottish athletics
(Caber toss, Sheaf toss, Stone throw), more bagpiping, shopping for
Scottish items, and Scottish food. The weather was overcast and
drizzling -- perfect Scottish weather. Then around noon, the sun broke
out and warmed everything back up -- perfect Colorado weather!
My mom wanted to try Haggis, but changed her mind when she found out
it was boiled. I passed as well... We bought the boys their own sets of
armor to defend their "little princess" sister, and I got a Utilikilt!
I first found out about Utilikilts when Eliot Kimber wore one while
presenting at Extreme Markup. The pockets are cool, and hold more than
a Sporran. I got the Mocker version (seen here with Collin at the Estes
parade)
Saturday we went to the parade. I usually march with Clan Cameron,
but decided against it this year. I've got Cameron, Robertson, Baird,
Sinclair, and Watchman clan blood, so it's hard to get kilts for all of
them. Maybe I should get a kilt pin for each and pin it to the
Utilikilt ;-) All of you Scots just winced, I know...
The festival is always the weekend after Labor Day in Estes Park, Colorado. Make plans to attend next year!
See also: General, Scottish
Labels: Colorado, family, Scotland, Scottish
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Welcome to Topic Maps, Norm!
I'm very excited to see Norm Walsh's post about Topic Maps today!
I've been trying to get Topic Maps adopted in our Services
organization for several years, but RDF/OWL seem to be the heavy
hitters so far.
I think Topic Maps are extremely valuable, and offer a number of advantages over RDF. (see my previous post)And
it's an ISO standard to boot! (ISO/IEC 13250). Now that Norm is
experimenting with them, perhaps topic maps can get more traction at
Sun.
Murray Altheim has also been a big proponent of topic maps, but ran into a lot of the same hurdles I have.
If anyone else at Sun has experimented with Topic Maps, or would like to learn more, please contact me!
See also: TopicMaps
Labels: Sci-Fi, starwars, TopicMaps
Embedding SVG trees in DocBook
Jirka Kosek has written another spectacular article for XML.com entitled "Automated Tree Drawing: XSLT and SVG."
What's really cool, is that he's embedded the tree markup in a
DocBook document, and then used a customization layer for the DocBook
Stylesheets to render it!
Here's an example from the article:
I think this would be extremely handy if you need to describe any
kind of hierarchy. Hopefully, you are already using the industry
standard DocBook or Simplified DocBook schemas for your computer
hardware or software documentation...
See also: DocBook
Labels: DocBook, XML
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Shark Bytes in a Savage World
My friend Paul, of the famed "Games of James Bond" website and long-time colleague at Sun has been published again!
This time, Paul was the Editor for the first edition of Shark Bytes,
a fanzine for the Savage Worlds role playing game system.Paul also
created the James Bond conversion, Savage 007, based on the Savage Worlds system
Check out Shark Bytes #1 at: http://www.deadlands.com/Downloads/Sharkbytes/sb1_083104_final.pdf
Editing 60 pages for the first edition was a lot of work. Good job, Paul!
See also: General
The Genesis Torpedo
 != 
Doh!
Thankfully it's not the Genesis Device from Star Trek II and III or we'd all be protomatter...
The Genesis project
gave new meaning to the name "Dugway Proving Ground" in Utah, as it
"dug way" down into the Proving Ground after its two parachutes failed
to open during re-entry today. The full report can be found at: http://www.space.com/news/genesis_captured_040908.html
At $260 million, it is disappointing to be sure. Too bad the shuttle
fleet is still down, or they could've inserted it into a retrieval
orbit for one of the shuttles to grab, without risking the chute
failure...
See also: Space
Labels: NASA, Sci-Fi, Space, startrek
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
History of Star Trek
I've
been a member of Bill Petro's mailing list since I worked with him at
SunSoft in Colorado Springs. His history articles are always
interesting and informative.
Today's post is the History Of Star Trek. Very interesting read.
In other news, Slashdot reported on a new Star Trek MMORPG today. Wonder how similar it will be to Star Wars Galaxies? I'd like to play, but I only do PS2 now. I couldn't keep financing the PC upgrades...
I started watching "The Day the Earth Stood Still" last night.
That's got to be one of my favorite Sci-Fi's of all time. I can't wait
for Destroy All Humans! to be released. The soundtrack is supposed to be similar to Bernard Herrmann's themes.
BTW, if you ever go to Disneyworld, make sure you eat at the Sci-Fi
Diner in MGM, near Star Tours. I've been there twice now, and it's
always a treat!
See also: Sci-Fi
Labels: Sci-Fi, startrek, starwars
Bittersweet Summer's End
I'm
blessed to have a few friends in high places. My friend Blaine had some
extra tickets to the Colorado State University vs. University of
Colorado, also known as the Rocky Mountain Showdown! He and I took our
sons to the game (46 yardline!)
What a game! It started out as a blow-out, but the Rams hung in
there and overcame a 17 point deficit in the 2nd half. Unfortunately,
Holland's interception earlier in the game and being unable to stop
Bobby Purify's runs really hurt us. It went all the way down to 8
seconds, 3rd and goal at the 1 yard line. Instead of spiking the ball
and coming up with a plan, Holland took a gamble and tried a handoff to
Houston, that failed. Still, we gave it the good old college try, and
we really should have won that one. Details here.
Thankfully the weather held out this year. I got soaked at last
year's Rocky Mountain Showdown, when my wife surprised me with tickets
for my birthday. It was freezing!
Speaking of freezing, we had planned to go to Waterworld
on Aug. 28, but a strong cold front came through, and dropped temps to
58 F. Thankfully we had good weather on Labor Day, so we took my son as
a reward for learning to swim this summer. I've never officially
learned how to swim (I only dog-paddle), and still regret. We had a
blast, though my wife and I got pretty good sunburns.
All in all, a great weekend to end the summer, and the sunburn hurts worse than the Rams defeat!
See also: General
Labels: chasing, Colorado, storm, Weather, WX
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Sun and Colorado State University
Sun
recently contributed to the Colorado Grid Computing Initiative at CSU.
Sun provided two 6800s to create the initial node of a statewide grid
computing system that will support the education
of college students across Colorado in a variety of disciplines and
allow universities
to expand their interaction with K-12 schools.
Sun donated hardware and software to other Colorado schools and
technology initiatives, but as a 2nd generation Ram, I had to brag
about this one!More information should be available at: http://www.coloradoit.org/ and http://cogrid.colostate.edu/.
In addition to the hardware and software donated by Sun, we are also
providing each grant project with complete installation, training and
service support.
Hopefully we will see a lot more involvement and donations to my alma mater!
I am involved in the Online Mentoring Program with the Department of
Journalism and Technical Communication.If there are any CSU TC students
reading this blog, please contact me! I'm here to help.
BTW, Go RAMS! Beat the Buffs this weekend! :-)
See also: General
Labels: Colorado
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