Spectacular re-entry over Colorado

Several news choppers caught the re-entry of a Russian SL-4 rocket body on tape! You can see the incredible video clips here. Unfortunately, it happened before I got up. Once I saw it on the news, I was sure it wasn't a meteor, as it took too long to burn up on re-entry. Very cool!

Just call me Mercury Man

I've been trying to eat healthier over the past year, so I've been eating a lot of tuna. Specifically I've been eating the StarKist Lunch To-Go kits. These kits come with tuna, crackers, mayo, relish and a mint. I don't like mint, so I always toss them in my drawer.

So how much tuna did I eat? I counted 83 mints in my drawer! Considering I travel every third week, that's a fair amount of tuna.

I've been able to tell a difference in the tuna that is a "Product of Ecuador" and the "Product of Thailand". I much prefer the tuna from Ecuador. The Thailand ones taste metallic. Just call me Mercury Man.

Going into overtime!

The game wasn't supposed to be that close, but the game went into overtime. Guess we got our money's worth for New Years! Too bad the game ended the season for the Broncos. Hopefully we will have a better season in 2007.

Give me an "F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G"!

This image is blurry because my hand is shaking from the cold! It's all because we wore regular shoes instead of snow boots. Wet socks for 4 hours is a good way to get chilled...

New Years Eve at the Broncos!

Dawn and I went to the Broncos game to celebrate our New Years Eve.

First Candidate for the Next Generation!

Norm Walsh has posted the first candidate release of DocBook v5.0! We are getting very close to releasing the next generation of the DocBook standard.

You can download the new schema from: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0CR1/

There are a few outstanding issues we will be voting on in January, including:

• The creation of a new generic container as a sibling to chapter, etc. vs. creating an acknowledgements element at the same level
• Allowing info in HTML tables (they are allowed in CALS and would be useful for metadata)
• Allowing task to be a sibling of section

Dreaming of a White Christmas

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas, and I'm going to get it! A massive storm has hit Colorado, and we have 25" so far as of 11pm. It's supposed to continue snowing until noon tomorrow, and the rate so far has been 1-2" per hour! Here are some pics:

Update: the snow is tapering off as of 9am on 12/21. Storm total: 26" with drifts to 4'!

The Proliferation of Social Bookmarking Sites

Do we have enough social bookmarking sites yet?!?

I am a frequent reader of Rich Burridge, who provided a Roller template for adding social bookmark links to your blog posts. I thought I'd give it a try on Blogger to see how it works, too. Here's the Blogger template if you want to do the same. Just add it at the bottom of your post template:

<div>
  Share and enjoy: 
  <a href="http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Title=<$BlogItemTitle$>;Url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Blinklist"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-blinklist.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Blinklist" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Submit to Bloglines"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-bloglines.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Submit to Bloglines"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&simple=1&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Blogmarks"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-blogmarks.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Blogmarks" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://co.mments.com/track?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Track with co.mments"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-co.mments.gif" width="16" height="16" alt="Track with co.mments" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?v=4;url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Del.icio.us"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-delicious.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Del.icio.us" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Submit it to Digg"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-digg.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Submit it to Digg" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&new_comment=<$BlogItemTitle$>&new_link_other=&linktype=Misc" title="Submit it to Fark"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-fark.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Submit it to Fark"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&u=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Furl"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-furl.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Furl" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/bookmarklet/add?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Ma.gnolia"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-magnolia.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Ma.gnolia" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.maple.nu/bookmarks/bookmarklet?bookmark%5Burl%5D=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&bookmark%5Bname%5D=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Maple"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-maple.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Maple" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&h=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it at NewsVine"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-newsvine.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it at NewsVine"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it at reddit.com"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-reddit.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it at reddit.com"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it at Simpy.com"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-simpy.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it at Simpy.com"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?v=3&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Spurl"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-spurl.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Spurl" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Submit it to slashdot"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-slashdot.jpg" width="16" height="16" alt="Submit it to slashdot" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Track with TailRank"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-tailrank.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Track with TailRank" /></a>
  
  <a href='http://technorati.com/search/$utilities.encode("<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>")' title="See who links to it via Technorati"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-technorati.png" alt="See who links to it via Technorati" height="16" width="16" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://wists.com/r.php?c=&r=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it with wists"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-wists.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it with wists"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&t=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Yahoo! Bookmarklets"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-yahoo.png" width="16" height="16" alt="" /></a>
  
</div>

The question is, do we really need all of these social bookmarking sites? Seems like we have a lot of duplication of effort and proliferation of similar services...

One other cool feature, is that the new Blogger beta allows you to label posts, similar to the way Roller and MovableType let you categorize your posts. Originally, I had to use my tag cloud in del.icio.us to provide a similar categorizing scheme on Blogger.

New Discussion List: OASIS DITA S1000D Interoperability

I've kicked off a new discussion list at OASIS to address interoperability between S1000D and DITA!

The address of this list is:
dita-s1000d-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org

Anyone, including OASIS members and non-members, may subscribe to this list in order to discuss the merits and possibility of the proposed project. The list is now open, and can be joined by sending a message to:
dita-s1000d-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org

Here is the official statement of scope:

DITA is an OASIS XML markup standard designed for topic-based authoring and re-use. It is also designed for interoperability, with a highly flexible specialization mechanism. For more information please see: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita

S1000D is also an XML markup standard designed for re-use. This standard is aimed primarily at civil and military equipment documentation. It is also focused on Data Modules and a Common Source Database. For more information please see: http://www.s1000d.org/

This discussion list is intended to facilitate an effort to graft S1000D type modules onto the DITA type hierarchy. The result would support content that's completely interoperable and provides a relatively good transform target (because of similar semantics and structure). This approach will have significant long-term benefits toward interoperability of content and authoring tools between the two standards.

Categories: DITA, S1000D, OASIS, standards, interoperability

Sing-Along Messiah

A friend of ours wanted to celebrate her birthday yesterday by getting a group together for a sing-along of Handel's "Messiah".

At the Boettcher Theater, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, soloists and the audience held a “sing along” of Handel’s beloved masterpiece. We had a good mix: 2 Bass, 2 Soprano, and 3 Alto. We sat together for Part 1, since we wanted to enjoy the time together, instead of splitting up to sit by SATB sections. Cindy even brought full scores for everyone to sing from! The problem, is that we happened to pick the Tenor section. We had a very good, strong tenor right behind us, and the two of us Bass singers kept getting thrown off our parts.

For Parts 2 and 3, the two of us Bass singers moved to the Bass section. It was much easier to sing on key and at the right time! We had a great time, and even got to sing the Hallelujah Chorus twice, as an encore.

You can also attend and just listen, but singing was very fun. I would highly recommend this next year!

Categories: Music

Happy "Holly" Days!

We welcomed a new member of our family this weekend: Holly!

She's a Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier, and absolutely adorable.

We were planning to surprise the kids on Christmas Day with a puppy, but saw her this weekend and decided it would be better to go with a puppy we really liked early, rather than wait and have one not be available, or have no choice in the personality. Holly and our collie, Duncan, get along famously. They already run and play together.It's fun having a puppy again, except for a few accidents and waking up at 2am, she is very well behaved. I think she has made a great addition to the family. Merry Christmas and Happy "Holly" Days!

Categories: General

XML 2006: DocBook Dinner

We had a great time at the DocBook Dinner at XML 2006. Attendees included: Norm Walsh, Nancy Harrison, Gary Cornelius, Elliotte "Rusty" Harold, Michael Smith, Bob DuCharme, Liam Quin, Jean, Paul Downey, myself. (I think I'm missing at least two others, so please help me complete the list!).

UPDATE: Doh! Eliot Kimber was sitting right next to me, and we chatted quite a bit. Sorry, Eliot!

We dined at Legal Seafoods, and had quite the variety of topics to discuss!

XML 2006: Boston

The view from above. They put me on the 29th floor, so I had a very nice view!

Categories: XMLxml2006

If you're not RelaxNG, you are working too hard!

After reading Elliotte Rusty Harold and Tim Bray's blog entries, I'm glad I'm no longer in the minority!

I've been preaching the adoption of RelaxNG as your native schema format since Norm Walsh created the initial drafts of DocBook v5.0. It just makes sense. And for those of us who have always been more comfortable with DTD-like syntax, Relax NG Compact is definitely the way to go!

Long live RelaxNG, and down with XSD!

Categories: XML

DocBook from the DocBook Wiki!

This is way cool: Norm Walsh upgraded the DocBook Wiki to a newer version of Moin Moin. This upgrade now provides support to export DocBook! From Norm's blog entry:

Go to a page in the wiki and, click on the “More Actions:” pulldown, choose “Render as DocBook” and voilá DocBook source.

Thank you, Norm!

Categories: DocBook

Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza

What did you do for Thanksgiving this year?

We decided as a family that we wanted to give because we have been so blessed already. We spent the week of Thanksgiving with a team of 45 people from Rock Creek Church on a mission with IFM to help the people of Juarez, Mexico (more pictures from the trip can be viewed here).

It is disturbing and amazing to see the living conditions of the people there.Many of them live in "pallet homes" made from shipping pallets, cardboard boxes, and any other material they can find. Water is delivered once a day for 10 pesos, and is stored in a plastic barrel at the corner of their property. Sometimes they have to sleep in their cars because the wind blows so hard, or because of the cold. Of course, you can also expect to see a fair amount of lice because of the unclean conditions. They were also heavily impacted by the extreme flooding earlier this summer.

Our schedule on the trip was very full: Saturday: travel by bus to the House of Cornelius base in Fabens, TX.

Sunday: indoor and outdoor mercados in Juarez, Mexico

Monday: food and ministry to the people of La Colonia Granjas del Desierto

Tuesday: food, medical, health fair and ministry to the people of La Colonia Granjas del Desierto

Wednesday: Brother Ray's Feeding Center in Juarez, Mexico (pictured is Jenny, Ray's widow)

Thursday: Thanksgiving and day of rest at House of Cornelius

Friday: ministry, puppets, tea party and Christmas gifts at an Orfanatorio (orphanage) near Colonia Granjas de Desierto

Saturday: leave for home

The scary part, is that they were relying on my Spanish to get us across the border for 4 of the days! (Yo hablo un poquito español!) We made it across each of the days, though.

Elvia, translated for us on two of the days. She is such a neat lady.

We made a great friend, Eric, who also works at the Feeding Center.

He taught us a great song:

Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza, Eso lo dice El Señor

Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza, Eso lo dice El Señor

Tú le dirías, a la montaña “muévete”, “muévete” Tú le dirías, a la montaña “muévete”, “muévete”

Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá

Translated, it means "If you have faith like a grain of mustard, this says the Lord: If you say to the mountain, "Move", the mountain will move"

For me, this trip has been very moving indeed.

Categories: General

Another handy shortcut for DITA and Firefox

I posted about the custom DITA search engine and firefox plugin yesterday, but there's another very handy Firefox feature that I use regularly to get information on DITA (I use the same feature for DocBook as well).

In Firefox, create a new bookmark for http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/langspec/%s.html, and then give it a keyword (I used "dita"). Then you can type things like "dita topic" or "dita othermeta" into your address bar to go to the topic or othermeta language spec page!

Categories: DITA

DITA Search and Firefox plugin!

Since Chris Chiasson and David Cramer built custom search engines for DocBook, I thought it might be useful to create one for DITA, too! I frequently search the Language Specification, and it would also be handy to search the mailing archives. To that end, I present my custom Google Co-op search: DITA Search!

The DITA Search homepage is available here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Ahu_dvbft4pu

If you would like to have a search plugin for your browser, save the following as an xml file to your C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profilename\searchplugins directory:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
  xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>DITA Search</ShortName>
  <Description>Search DITA1.0 Language Specification, DITA Wiki, DITA Focus Area and more! </Description>
  <Contact>scottys.log@gmail.com</Contact>
  <Developer>Scott Hudson</Developer>
  <LongName>DITA Search</LongName>
  <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

  <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/custom?cx=015401811188033694464:hu_dvbft4pu&q={searchTerms}&sa=Search&cof=CX%3ADITA%2520Search%3BFORID%3A0&hl=en&client=google-coop" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

I've also created a DITA Documentation search (lang spec, toolkit, other official docs) here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Acm02go-4hv8

Here's the plugin code for DITA Documentation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
  xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>DITA Documentation</ShortName>
  <Description>Search DITA1.0 Language Specification, DITA OT, and other official docs.</Description>
  <Contact>scottys.log@gmail.com</Contact>
  <Developer>Scott Hudson</Developer>
  <LongName>DITA Official Documentation Search</LongName>
  <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

  <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Acm02go-4hv8&q={searchTerms}&sa=Search&cof=CX%3ADITA%2520Docs%3BFORID%3A0&hl=en&client=google-coop" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

Enjoy!

NOTE: you must change the & to & in the Url template string...

Categories: DITA

Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

DocBook Search plugins for Firefox!

Chris Chiasson has created custom Google search engines for the DocBook-apps mailing list archives and the DocBook Official Documentation (including Norm's "DocBook:The Definitive Guide" and Bob's "DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide").

David Cramer then took them a step further and created Firefox search plugins for these pages! The plugins are available here: http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/. Very cool! Thanks guys!

Categories: DocBook

If you strike me down...

Categories: Sci-Fi