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Scotty's Engineering Log
Scott Hudson's blog on XML, DocBook, Sci-Fi and Storm Chasing | 
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 Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Delta II Launch Pads
See also: Space
To dream the impossible dream...
See also: Space
Boeing: Home of the "Can Do Team"
See also: Space
Launch Complex 14
See also: Space
The Original Mission Control
See also: Space
Sunset at the Cape
See also: Space Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Congratulations, Brandon!
Monday, August 15, 2005
Single Sourcing for Beginners
I'm often asked for good resources on writing modular documentation for single-sourcing, chunking, and reuse. It's a learned skill, and a task that takes planning and effort, but can be immensely valuable. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and has some Information Architecture and Schema development resources thrown in for good measure... If you want an exhaustive list, visit: http://www.xmlbooks.com
There is also a course/book called Information Mapping that is good for getting authors to think about writing self-contained information objects, too. For DocBook newbies, I'd recommend: Norm Walsh's Tutorials and, of course, DocBook: The Definitive Guide. For those of you in the industry, what do you recommend? See also: XML
DocBook XSL 1.69.1 available
This release was actually made available on Aug. 11 by Michael Smith, but I was working down at Cape Canaveral, and didn't get a chance to post on it. The 1.69.1 release is production-quality, and fixes a minor bug-fix to the 1.69.0 test release, after a performance issue was identified with annotation support in xsltproc. The annotation.support parameter is now off by default. I've been testing the 1.69.0 release on Saxon 6.5.4, and did not notice any performance issues. The latest stylesheets are available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/ Thanks Michael! See also: DocBook Sunday, August 07, 2005
For such a time as this
Timing. That's really what most of life is about. And only God knows the best timing for each of us. For me, this year I wondered when was the right time to leave Sun. It turns out, the timing was perfect. Since working at Flatirons Solutions, not only have I been able to go to Space Camp with my son, but now I'll be working on a project for Boeing at Cape Canaveral! So for bad timing, I didn't know when the Shuttle Discovery was scheduled to return when I bought my tickets, and it looks like I'll miss seeing the landing by about 12 hours (Godspeed and safe return, STS-114!). Then I scheduled my return home in time for the Perseid meteor shower peak (camping trip), but I'll miss the launch of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite N, or GOES N, for NASA and NOAA aboard a Boeing Delta 4 on Friday! Oh well, for good timing, I've always wanted to be an astronaut on Mars, so I'm hoping to catch the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launch on Wed, Aug. 10 at SLC-41, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. See also: Space Thursday, August 04, 2005
Definition: Cheesy Goodness
See also: General
Shuttle audio for HAMs
Just found a link with info on listening to audio from the Space Shuttle on your ham radio: http://www.amsat.org/amsat/sarex/shutfreq.html (145.460 MHz in Boulder). I'll have to try it out. I've been a little lax on turning on the radio lately. My primary reason for getting my ham license was for storm chasing. I wanted to be able to report in and warn people of dangerous weather. I've been a member of SKYWARN for a number of years, but seem to be under deadline at work when the best storms come up! I've always wanted to talk to the Shuttle or ISS, so I'll have to try it some time. In other space-related news, check out this cool blog: http://damarisbsarria.blogspot.com/. Good luck, Damaris! See also: Space Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Welcome to the Blogosphere, Dearest!
After much prompting, my wife has entered the blogosphere! She's been thinking about writing a book for a while, and I've been encouraging her to start with a blog, and see how it goes first. We've taken and taught Growing Kids God's Way classes together, which she's taken a few ideas from. She's also come up with a lot of her own great ideas on raising children. A lot of the techniques are tried and tested, on our kids as well as the Little Lambs (preschool) class at our church. The techniques are extremely effective, with the goal of raising children to be a blessing to everyone around them. When we read Seth's advice for authors, she decided to take the plunge. So, make way and please visit Shining Examples! See also: General Labels: church
eXtreme parsing: Saxon 8.5 now available!
Michael Kay has just released the Saxon 8.5 parser, in time for eXtreme Markup, too! (wish I could be there...) Saxon is by far the most powerful, and speedy XSLT parser I've ever used. Sure, I started with Xalan, but after working a lot with the DocBook stylesheets, Saxon is the best way to go. To be fair, I have also used xsltproc, but Saxon is usually my first "go to" parser. Oleg Tkachenko's blog has a much deeper explanation of new features, but basically Saxon 8.5 provides:
You can download the latest version of Saxon at: http://saxon.sourceforge.net/ See also: XSLT Labels: DocBook
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