DocBook v5.1 is now an official OASIS Standard!

OASIS is pleased to announce that DocBook Version 5.1. has been approved by the membership as an OASIS Standard [1].

The call to vote was made on 09 November 2016 [2] and the ballot closed on 22 November 2016. A minimum of 42 affirmative votes was needed in order to win approval. The finally vote tally was 63 affirmative votes with 4 abstentions. 

Our congratulations to the members of the TC and to the community of implementers, developers and users who have brought the work successfully to this milestone

DocBook is a general purpose [XML] schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications).

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

The Technical Committee provides the DocBook 5.1 schema in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema and an XML DTD, but the RELAX NG Schema is the normative schema.

URIs:

The prose specifications and related files are available here:

DocBook Version 5.1

HTML (Authoritative): 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.html 

PDF: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.pdf

Editable source:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.xml

Schemas: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/schemas/

DocBook V4.x conversion tools: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/tools/

Distribution ZIP files

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.zip

Voting opens for DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS Standard

The ballot to approve DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS standard is now open, starting at 09 November 2016 at 00:00 UTC. The ballot closes at 22 November 2016 at 11:59 UTC. 

This is a call to the primary or alternate representatives of OASIS Organizational Members to vote. 

If your company is a member of OASIS, please encourage your representative to vote in favor of this standard at: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=3010 

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

To view the specification, please see:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/cos01/docbook-v5.1-cos01.html

A Geek Force for Good

I want to give a shout out to the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), which helps communities with their technology infrastructure after a disaster.


I found out about the group during the 2013 floods in Colorado, where we specifically deployed to Lyons, Jamestown and Boulder.

The ITDRC has Field Disaster Response Teams (FDRT) and Remote Response Teams (RRT) from all across the United States and are comprised of service oriented IT and AV Professionals from many technology disciplines who volunteer their expertise and skills in times of disaster. We use our tech skills to help communities and small businesses continue operations and successfully recover from disaster.

If you have any technical expertise (especially with wifi, networking, radio communications), we would love to get you on board! Visit http://itdrc.org/volunteer.html for more info. We also love equipment and financial donations. See if your company would be willing to help us help those in need!

This past weekend, we held an Operations Field Exercise in Richardson, Texas. It was a great time to connect with other tech geeks and learn about our deployment kits and mobile command centers.

Staking my Claim

Thanks to a post from Jeni Tennison, I found out about claimID and openID. I've created a claimID page here: http://claimid.com/shudson310. It's also cool that it sets up an hCard for you on the same page!

Struck by Lightning!

In a good way! I just found this extension to Thunderbird (my preferred mail client):
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/.

From the project home:

Lightning brings the Sunbird calendar to the popular email client, Mozilla Thunderbird. Since it's an extension, Lightning is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing it to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks.

I haven't had the best luck with Sunbird in the past, but Lightning works REALLY well! I can import my appointments from LookOut, er, OutLook, and can also view my Google Calendar in one interface that I always have open!

I voted for an RFE to make the calendar panes dockable, so I hope that feature gets incorporated soon. It's a terrific little extension, so I encourage you to check it out!