DITA Learning Content specialization open for review!

The OASIS DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization Subcommittee is proud to announce the availability of our specification for DITA Learning Content for public review.

The design and language specification for the DITA learning and training content is available here, and the DITA Open Toolkit plugin with working DTD, XSD, DITA content samples, and documentation is available here.

The goal of the subcommittee is to develop a general top-level design for structured, intent-based authoring of learning content with good learning architecture, following DITA principles and best practices.

This specification was formally submitted to the full OASIS DITA Technical Committee today, after we completed the designs, samples, and language specifications for the learning topic types, the learning map domain, the learning interaction domain, and IEEE LOM learning metadata. The intention is to have this specification approved by the TC for inclusion in DITA 1.2, though most of this work is built on the existing DITA 1.1 infrastructure.

Please send any review comments via the public comment facility.

Hometown Heroes and the World Series

I just wanted to provide an update to the World Series ticket fiasco and issue a few public Thank Yous. As you may have read in my previous post, the ticket system hung when I was about to submit my credit card info to complete the purchase. This is not a unique situation, and affected hundreds of other native Colorado Rockies fans. I just wanted to take my son to the World Series - a once in a lifetime opportunity, since it was the Rockies FIRST appearance in the World Series ever!

I sent emails to the Rockies ticket sales, VP Jay Alves, and several local Denver TV stations. I also mentioned my quandary to a guy in my office. He happened to get through with tickets and was willing to sell me 2 tickets AT FACE VALUE, because as he said, "baseball is about taking your kids to the ballpark". Jon didn't have to sell me any tickets at all, and he could have scalped them (like the jerks on StubHub) for up to $2,000 each! Jon is truly a Hometown Hero in my eyes!

I also need to throw out kudos to the Colorado Rockies organization, as they did call me back on Friday morning and wanted to make sure I was able to take my son to the game. I turned down the offer of additional tickets, since Jon was kind enough to sell them to me.

Yes, I could have gotten more tickets myself, but I wanted to give the same opportunity I had to others that might have been in my situation. Hopefully they were able to attend the game, and not get greedy and scalp the tickets themselves.

Even though the Rockies didn't win any games in the Series, it was still an awesome opportunity and a lot of fun. Connor even got to meet baseball legend, Dusty Baker!

More pics are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/shudson310/WorldSeries

Major League Fiasco!

Unbelievable. The Rocks and the Sox are going to be playing in Denver!

I was one of the frustrated fans to experience the Monday ticket fiasco (supposedly a Denial of Service attack), to then run into the SAME problem on Tuesday! I actually got in about 12:15, selected 2 tickets for my son and I, and then have the site crash when I went to register and put in my credit card info! My son and I should be sitting in Game 4, Section 401, Row 6, Seats 1-2.

I took a print screen of the page just in case, and am still hoping the Rockies will honor the transaction. Given how this whole mess has gone, I'm not expecting anything. This is really disappointing, and a shame that it makes the Rockies look bad, when we should be supporting the team and the fans!

I wrote to the Rockies, the VP Jay Alves and Call7forHelp. Don't know if they can do anything about my plight. Keep those fingers crossed...

At least I got to see Spamalot when it was in town. Not all ticket experiences are bad in Denver.

GO ROCKIES! Beat those Beantown Baddies!

Got R done!

Way to go Rockies! The Colorado Rockies have now won the last 21 of 22 games, and swept BOTH the Phillies and the Diamondbacks! Next stop, World Series!

The Rockies have come a long way since I saw them lose to the KC Royals earlier this season. Tulo should get Rookie of the Year for sure. Big kudos to the entire team, though!

There are enough divas in baseball, so it has been very refreshing to see just how much this group of players truly focus on the TEAM. I also appreciate their strong faith.

It was a pain that TBS took all the broadcast rights for the playoffs. I think that's bad for baseball -- it's hard enough to get the country interested in watching, and even more so if you take it away from the local stations! Thankfully Fox has the rights for the World Series. I like listening on 850 KOA, but I'd sure like to be able to watch the Series.

I haven't seen crowds this big since the games I saw back at old Mile High stadium when the Rocks were first getting started. I have many sets of inaugural baseball cards, but nothing from this season. Might have to remedy that...

Go Rockies!

Doc Standards Interoperability Framework whitepaper now available!

Jim Earley and I have presented about the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework at XML 2006, DITA West 2007, Open Publish 2007, OASIS Symposium 2007 and DITA West 2007.

The whitepaper is now available at:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/downloads/Interoperability_Framework.pdf.
This whitepaper contains greater detail on the business case for interoperability, as well as specifics on the framework. If you are interested in exchanging content between DocBook, DITA, ODF and/or other document standards, you should definitely check it out!

We are still working on the charter for the proposed OASIS Doc Standards Interoperability TC. Hopefully we can get that finished soon to form the TC before year-end.

Motorcycle safety: Star Wars style!

One of the key aspects of motorcycle safety is VISIBILITY. If you've been reading my blog, you know I recently completed the Basic Rider Course (certified by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation) from Thunder Mountain Harley in Loveland, CO. After taking this course, I have a keen understanding of the need for safe riding skills and proper riding attire.

After I got my motorcycle endorsement on my license, I bought a Scorpion EXO400 full-face helmet so I could begin test riding bikes and figure out which bike to buy. I wanted to make sure I would be visible to other motorists, but also wanted to demonstrate my affinity for Star Wars!

Above is the result. Compared to Boba Fett's helmet, I think I'll be much more visible! For Fett, visibility would be bad, but for a motorcyclist, visibility is paramount.

First, I picked out a pattern thanks to the Boba Fett Fan Club. Next, I found some high reflectivity tape (though a 6x6 sheet would have been easier). I lined up the tape on the back of a printout of the logo, and then used an Exacto knife to trace the paper pattern onto the tape. I carefully cut the design out with scissors and laid out the pieces.

I placed the pattern on my helmet first, to make sure it fit (should probably have done this first!), and then carefully placed the tape on the helmet, lining up each piece to minimize error.

This just goes to show, you can still make a visible statement while being safe! You don't have to just put on boring squares of tape to be visible. Pick out a pattern and make a statement! I also chose the helmet, because it will be the highest location for motorist headlights to see. Because of the large (and skull-like) pattern, I think I can guarantee that I'll be noticed!

For more information on reflective tape and safety through visibility, see:

• http://www.streetglo.net/reflective.tape/
• http://www.streetglo.net/boat-names.html
• http://www.streetglo.net/bicycle-reflective-decals-stickers.html
• http://www.streetglo.net/reflective.motorcycle.frame.kit.html
• http://www.streetglo.net/streetglo_files/helmet.flame.decal.htm
• http://www.streetglo.net/

A powerful ally, this Padawan...

Impressive. Most impressive.

Connor faced Darth Maul in The Trials and successfully completed his training at the Jedi Training Academy!

Red Bull Air Race in San Diego!

We happened to be on vacation in California the week of the Red Bull Air Race in San Diego. Thankfully, our itinerary already included 2 days in San Diego, and the entire family was interested in seeing the race instead of going to the Wild Animal Park.

We even got to see it for free! You could buy tickets to watch it from the Embarcadero, but we went to Seaport Village and found a spot near a fountain where we could see the entire course! It was absolutely incredible. These guys fly at 300+ MPH and have to do very tight maneuvering in a timed course.

We could only see the Pre-Qualifying runs, since we had to start driving back the next day, but it was one of the best, cheapest events of our vacation!

UPDATE: I've made a public album of race pics here.

Ready to RIDE!

I have never ridden a motorcycle before this weekend, but thanks to high gas prices and a gas-guzzling V8 Dodge Dakota, I was highly motivated and even got the nod from my wife to go ahead!

This weekend I took the Basic Rider Course (certified by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation) from Thunder Mountain Harley in Loveland, CO.

It was an AWESOME experience! The instructors, Jeff, Tom and Betty were outstanding. I feel quite prepared for riding a motorcycle safely and responsibly. Here are a few pics:

We rode Buell Blast cycles, and I was the only one in my class to score 100% on the written exam! I did get docked 5 points for going too slow negotiating a curve during the riding evaluation, though. In all, a complete success and I can get my motorcycle endorsement on my drivers license!

Next on the agenda: save up for a bike!

UPDATE: Got my license today, so now I just need gear and that bike!

David Megginson's cool new Airport website

David blogged about an issue with Google maps and their use of a mercator projection (a problem if you want to use Google maps in aviation). His post, which was very interesting, also pointed me to a new website he has created: http://www.ourairports.com/.

This is a very cool website for many reasons:

• You can plot where you have been in the world (via aircraft) and get a KML file of it quickly and easily
• You can get search on any airport and get aviation info, accident history, photos and many other facts!
• You can read comments from other members who have visited these airports

Thanks for creating such a useful service/site, David! I plan to use it for all of my trip planning and tracking! Also, if you are interested, you can see all the airports I've been to here:
http://www.ourairports.com/members/shudson310/

Legacy

Legacy, originally uploaded by shudson310.

I wanted to be able to create a calendar of all my Star Wars motivators, and had 11 completed. I needed one more, and realized I had not created any entries for my favorite character, Jango Fett. Although this is the most sad part of the film for me, I thought this was a very poignant statement and tribute. It's also a little humorous, in that what Jango really left behind was his head...

The question is still quite valid: What will you leave behind?

Now I'm Lijit!

Saw an interesting news item from Bloglines that referred to wanderingstan and Lijit. I went to high school with Stan, but had sort of been out of touch with him. Looks like when he wasn't wandering, he kept pretty busy!

I checked out the company he founded, Lijit, and it's a very cool web service! Check it out and you can be Lijit, too!

Plaxo now uses OpenID

The folks at Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com) have done a really nice job with their 3.0 beta. I like the new calendar sync features, and the ability to sync across multiple services (Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, etc.)

I also like the fact that they are now using OpenID! Life is starting to get easier, now that all of these cool services are coming together!

Flatirons Solutions presenting at DITA East

Flatirons Solutions will be presenting at the DITA East conference on October 5-6.

Publishing Technical Documentation with Bookmap and DITA 1.1
An overview of the new Bookmap specialization standardized as part of the OASIS DITA 1.1 release. Details about what is contained in the Bookmap DTD, and ways to think about structuring your data for maximum benefit when producing “printed” (PDF) format technical documentation, as well as on-line format documents. Features examples of how to produce high quality printed representations using Arbortext Publishing Engine.

Tying a Bow on It: A Case Study of a Successful Conversion to a CMS Based DITA Implementation
A case study of the challenges, methodologies, and successful techniques used by a project that was designed to convert the existing documents of an engineering technical publishing group from Framemaker into DITA using the soon to be finalized Bookmap standard, and store them in a CMS repository designed for content reuse. The end to end implementation included migration of the documents into a Documentum CMS, use of Arbortext Editor and Publishing Engine and the DITA-OT to modify and render the content back into its current PDF and JavaHelp “published” form, and packaging the technical content as DITA XML files for exchange with other vendors.

Doc Standards Interoperability Framework
Interoperability is critical when sharing information with partners, OEMs or even groups within the same company. It is especially critical if the parties involved are using different content standards. The presentation will describe an approach to defining a Doc Standards Interoperability Framework, including: current support for interoperability, mappings between DocBook, DITA and ODF, preserving migrated semantics, base classes and structure of the interchange format, stylesheet transforms, and an example of interoperable content.

Come check it out!

DITA 1.1 Officially Released!

It's been a lot of work, but we've finally released version 1.1 of DITA! I've been involved heavily in DITA 1.1, as well as the Learning Content specialization subcommittee.

The full press release is available here:
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-08-13.php

Key features of this release include:

• Enhanced print publishing capabilities with the new DITA Bookmap specialization, including extended book metadata.
• New elements (<index-see>, <index-see-also>, and <index-sort-as>) for "see" and "see-also" references.
• New elements (<abstract>, <data>) for defining structured metadata, as well as the ability to add new metadata attributes through specialization.
• New elements for image scaling.
• The glossary specialization, adding new elements for glossary entries.
• Support for foreign content vocabularies (<unknown> element)

UPDATE: The DITA OpenToolkit 1.4 has also been released, including support for DITA 1.1. For more information, please see:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=724798

Wikispaces uses OpenID!

This is cool. From my previous blog entry, I had set up an OpenID. Now, it turns out that wikispaces.com can use OpenID for single sign on!

Woohoo! I've been waiting for this technology to finally hit mainstream, and now I have a practical use. I'm not at liberty to share a link to the wikispace I've been working on feverishly for the summer, but hopefully you'll see a post on that soon, too.

Czech Comments for Office Open XML (in English!)

Jirka Kosek has graciously provided an English translation of the Czech Standards Institute's comments on the Microsoft-created Office Open XML standard.

The English version is here: http://xmlguru.cz/2007/08/czech-ooxml-comments-in-english

I also thought it was interesting to visually see the size of this monster spec. See the photos here: http://xmlguru.cz/2007/07/czech-comments-ooxml

Personally, I'm glad Microsoft finally got around to providing the specs for their XML export from their products. I also despise the markup, but at least it's documented. I also thought it was a bit underhanded and deliberate to name it "Office Open XML" which is so incredibly similar to the Open Office product that uses the OASIS Open Document Format. They could have just named it MOM - Microsoft Office Markup language...

Thanks for the comments on the standard, Jirka!

New DocBook XSL 1.73.0 released!

The latest version of the DocBook XSL stylesheets, v1.73.0, has been released!

The .0 designator means this is the beta version, and should be tested. If no bugs are found with the new distribution, a .1 release will be issued shortly!.

Hopefully a new version of the namespace-aware stylesheets for processing DocBook v5.0 documents will be following soon. UPDATE: The 1.73.0 namespace-aware version is also available now!

The stylesheets can be downloaded from here.

Features in this release include:

This release includes important bug fixes and adds the following significant
feature changes:

New localizations and localization updates

    We added two new localizations: Latvian and Esperanto, and made updates to
    the Czech, Chinese Simplified, Mongolian, Serbian, Italian, and Ukrainian
    localizations.

ISO690 citation style for bibliography output.

    Set the bibliography.style parameter to iso690 to use ISO690 style.

New documentation for processing instructions (PI)

    The reference documentation that ships with the release now includes
    documentation on all PIs that you can use to control output from the
    stylesheets.

New profiling parameters for audience and wordsize

    You can now do profiling based on the values of the audience and wordsize
    attributes.

Changes to man-page output

    The manpages stylesheet now supports single-pass profiling and single-pass
    DocBook 5 namespace stripping (just as the HTML and FO stylesheets also
    do). Also, added handling for mediaobject & inlinemediaobject. (Each
    imagedata, audiodata, or videodata element within a mediaobject or inline
    mediaobject is now treated as a "notesource" and so handled in much the
    same way as links and annotation/alt/footnote are in manpages output.) And
    added the man.authors.section.enabled and man.copyright.section.enabled
    parameters to enable control over whether output includes auto-generated
    AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT sections.

Highlighting support for C

    The highlighting mechanism for generating syntax-highlighted code snippets
    in output now supports C code listings (along with Java, PHP, XSLT, and
    others).

Experimental docbook-xsl-update script

    We added an experimental docbook-xsl-update script, the purpose of which
    is to facilitate easy sync-up to the latest docbook-xsl snapshot (by means
    of rsync).

New DITA information resources

Bob Doyle has created several new DITA information resources:

• DITA News is a resource website and industry newsletter.
• DITA Blog - blogs about DITA
• DITA Wiki
• DITA infocenter - a searchable knowledgebase for DITA users
• DITA Users - helping authors get started with topic-oriented structured writing
• DITA Tutor - self paced and instructor led DITA tutorials and workshops

DITA News will also aggregate posts that use the tag DITA. Check 'em out!

Publishing Word docs direct to blog via Google Docs

Here's the first test:

OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers

Background

For more than a decade, DocBook has provided a structured markup vocabulary for hardware and software documentation. DocBook is now widely used in both commercial and Open Source environments. DocBook has a very broad element set, and applies to much more than just technical documentation. The DocBook TC is engaged in evolving the suite of DocBook specifications. The community benefits from having a standard, open, interchangeable vocabulary in which to write structured content. DocBook has been, and will continue to be, designed to satisfy this requirement.

The OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers is chartered to develop and maintain official variants of DocBook in support of the publishing industry. Specifically, the subcommittee will focus on schema and stylesheet customizations to support: periodicals as regularly published technical notes or journals, book publishing (such as business, legal, medical, and other non-technical domains), educational textbooks and other document types as appropriate for this industry.

Scope of Work

This subcommittee will submit additional enhancements back to the full DocBook standard as appropriate. The scope of this DocBook subcommittee is publishing industry content. Broadly, this includes books, journals and other related publications.

This effort will deliver on the following goals:

• Build official DocBook variants, based against the DocBook v5.0 schemas.

• Address issues and enhancement requests that have arisen from experience with real-world DocBook implementations.

• Add support for features specific to the publishing industry.

I can also link directly to the doc here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcjvrqnt_3d7zv3w

With Blogger, your best option is Google Docs. If you have a gmail account, it should be pretty easy to set up:
http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-docs-spreadsheets-in-your-blog.html

From my gmail account, I click on Documents.
then click Upload
From the upload page, I can browse to a Word doc and name it
Then in the Google Docs page, I can select Publish and set it up to Publish to my blog!