Scotty's Engineering Log: January 2005

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Contemplating a move...

Hello out there in blogger.com land!

My current blog is hosted at: http://blogs.sun.com/shudson310

I'm contemplating moving my blog here to blogger.com. Not only could I get some Google AdSense ads, but could cover more personal topics, without toeing the corporate blog line.

Stay tuned. I'll be moving a lot of my old posts over, and adding new content shortly.

Friday, January 28, 2005

Mystery of the Technorati Tags solved

Dave Levy mentioned in his blog that the Technorati Tags weren't working for him.

I, too, had added Technorati Tags to my blog (check out the "See also:" links at the bottom of each post!), but when I clicked on the links, Technorati said no posts were available for that tag!

Here's the fix: I went into my del.ico.us bookmarks, and made sure my tag names matched those on my blog. Originally, I had all my del.icio.us bookmark tags in lowercase. On the blog, however, they were mixed or init cap. I like the way they are on my blog, so I changed the tag names for my del.ico.us bookmarks and voila! The tags and entries now work on Technorati!

DocBook v4.4 is out the door!

The OASIS DocBook TC approved the release of DocBook v4.4 as a Committee Draft this week!

The next step is to go for OASIS Standard, but I imagine that process will take longer than the Committee releasing DocBook v5.0...

You can see the specifics on Norm's blog: http://norman.walsh.name/2005/01/28/docbook44 , read the specification at: http://www.docbook.org/specs/cd-docbook-docbook-4.4.html and get the schemas at: http://www.docbook.org.

Enjoy!

Monday, January 24, 2005

OpenOffice to DocBook released under free license

Laurent Godard announced on the docbook-apps list about the freely-available ooo2dbk tool to transform OpenOffice.org documents to DocBook:

ooo2dbk is a tool allowing the transformation of OpenOffice.org documents to docbook. Based on Eric Bellot's work, it has been widely extended and allow enhanced export
http://indesko.com/sites/en/downloads/ooo2dbk___generating/view
Supporting XML docBook V4.3, it allows to generate both article and book documents A lot of features are available such as handling preface and appendix elements, metadatas as OOo user fields also

ooo2dbk is an independant script allowing then batch processing of OpenOffice.org documents

I contributed some code to the xmerge project a few years ago, but haven't had time to play with it for a while. It would be interesting to see where the filter is at now, and contrast it with the ooo2dbk tool...

Sampling some Cider

Norm Walsh has published a new DocBook NG release: "Hard Cider"

DocBook NG is a preview of DocBook V5.0 using the RelaxNG schema.

Details are available at http://norman.walsh.name/2005/01/18/hardcider and the schema is available at http://docbook.org/docbook-ng/hardcider/index.html.

Norm has also created a DTD version so folks with DTD-based validating editors can try it out.

From Norm's post:

In addition to the DTD, there are a number user-visible changes in the “Hard Cider” release:

Allow <colophon> at the end of an <article>, RFE #1070458.

Allow navigation components (<index>, <glossary>, etc.) at the end of sections.

Allow xml:space (with the value “preserve”) on verbatim environments.

Make <revnumber> optional in <revision>, RFE #1055480.

Added “protocol” to the list of class values on <systemitem>.

Add <citation> and <citetitle> to <attribution>.

Added <alt> and <annotation>.

Added rowheader to <table> and <informaltable>.

Made <title> required on <preface>. It always should have been.

Added <contractsponsor>, <contractnum>, and <mediaobject> to the content of <info>.

Allow text where a proper date used to be required (<pubdate> and friends).

Allow endterm on <link>.

Allow <refsection> as a “start” element.

Allow <initializer> in <paramdef>.

Most of these changes make DocBook NG more compatible with DocBook V4.x.

The Simplified DocBook NG release is still at the "Bourbon" version. I mentioned to Norm at XML 2004 that I'd like to take a stab at updating it, so I'll try to get some spare time to go and sample some Cider!

I'm very excited with the direction of DocBook v5.0 since it's using RelaxNG. The hard part is getting Relax NG adopted and supported out there. The best editor I've used with Relax NG support is Oxygen. Most of the projects I'm on are also "standardized" on W3C schema, so getting Relax NG accepted is a tough battle...

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The Time Patrol

After several months of reading (hey, I've got a lot of hobbies...), I finally finished "The Time Patrol" by Poul Anderson.

It's a compilation of short stories that I got when I joined the Science Fiction Book Club.

The story chronicles the efforts of Time Patrol agent Manse Everard to restore timelines that have been damaged by evil time travellers.

Though it was graphic in a few spots, the majority of the stories were very well detailed, and an interesting read. I'd recommend it, especially if you like historical fiction as well as science fiction.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Care for some delicious bookmarks?

For those interested, I've converted my blog bookmarks (and some additional entries) into del.icio.us bookmarks at: http://del.icio.us/shudson310/

If you haven't heard about del.icio.us, it's a very interesting social bookmark manager. You can add create a personal collection of links, categorize those links with keywords, and share those categories and links with others!

You can also view the links collected by others, see who else bookmarked the same sites, and subscribe to other people's link collections.

In some ways, I see this very akin to a Topic Map, where you are mapping Topics to Occurences and the del.icio.us service creates the Associations between the Topics and the collection lists.

I think it would be very cool if the site provided the data, expressed in a Topic Map as an additional service...

Friday, January 07, 2005

A really Big Idea!

Our family LOVES Veggie Tales. We have all of the videos, and the Jonah movie, and have attended several of the new video launch parties. The 3-2-1 Penguins videos are also some of our favorites.

If you've never heard of Veggie Tales or 3-2-1 Penguins, they are created by Big Idea Productions. They are very family friendly, and teach values: something severely lacking in much of today's entertainment programming. As their tagline says, "Sunday morning values, Saturday morning fun!"

There's a new service available where you can get personalized Veggie Tales music CDs and adventure books! They actually have recorded your child's name for the audio, and insert your child's name and other information into the story for the books.

For those of you in the Denver area, go to Flatirons Crossing and look for the booth, or visit: http://www.justmemusic.us/ndenver/index.php. If you see Curt, tell him Scotty from Sun sent you! :-)

For those of you elsewhere, check out: http://www.justmemusic.com

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

USS Enterprise in bricks

One of my favorite Christmas presents this year: the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 D from MegaBlocks!

I'm really hoping they come out with a Klingon Bird of Prey next!

One of the other MegaBlocks sets I've been really impressed with is the USAF A-10 Thunderbolt (it's in my office at work...)

And now, what you've been waiting for, the pics:

Monday, January 03, 2005

Hi Eve!

I had the pleasure of dining with Eve and some of my Sun colleagues at the XML 2004 conference this year.

Not only is Eve the author of Developing SGML DTDs, but she helped create XML and DocBook! She's also the curator for the Art Show at the XML Conference, which you can view at: http://www.snee.com/xml/xml2004art/index.htm

Check out her blog, Pushing String at: http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/