13949712720901ForOSX

What does the title of this post mean? APPLE, GIVE US JAVA 6 IN LEOPARD OS X!

For more details, see:

• http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/lars/entry/apple_give_us_java_6
• http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/vote_for_java6_on_leopard
• http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/10/30/No-Leopard

DocBook on Mac OS X

Eric Johnson posted a question to the DocBook list about using DocBook on a Mac. I hadn't really looked at this much, because my Mac is primarily for home use. Sure, I've used jEdit and oXygen on the Mac to edit XML, but that's about it.

Thanks to Google, I found Project:Omega DocBook-X. It's a project dedicated to DocBook on the OS X platform. There is a single .dmg file to download and install the necessary tools. You can get to the project home page at:
http://projectomega.org/subcat.php?lg=en&php=products_docbook.

There is also an interesting article on Processing and Managing DocBook XML Documents linked from the same page. I'll have to give it a try!

UPDATE: Sean Gilligan sent me a note that:

Project Omega has been dormant for years, and I wouldn't recommend it. (I was the last one to submit improvements on it and I gave up years ago.)

I've since rolled my own Apache Maven 1.x plugin, called maven-dbsuite-plugin which I've published in fairly rough form as Open Source on Java.net.

Inside the new Boulder Apple store!

I was one of the first 1000 to get a free shirt! Check out store info here: http://www.apple.com/retail/twentyninthstreet/week/20061015.html

Categories: General

The line wrapped around the building...

Standing in line at the Boulder Apple store grand opening. I was #14. Check out store info here: http://www.apple.com/retail/twentyninthstreet/week/20061015.html

Categories: General

Boulder Apple store grand opening (line)

Standing in line at the Boulder Apple store grand opening. I was #14. The first guy in line had been there since 5am!Check out store info here: http://www.apple.com/retail/twentyninthstreet/week/20061015.html

Categories: General

Essential Apps (PC edition)

After numerous Blue Screens of Death in my work Win XP system, I have had to start with a clean slate.

Though I don't quite have the luxury of choosing Linux or Mac, like Mark Pilgrim or Tim Bray or Rich Burridge, I still use quite a few open source apps in my day to day work. If the 10 years I spent at Sun taught me anything, it had to be how to work/survive with OpenSource software. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues and clients still use WinXP and I have to be guaranteed to be able to exchange data with them, and have my system be supported. Thus, I have to use WinXP and MS Office for some things, as well as some non-open source apps.

Due to the re-install, I've narrowed the list of essential apps I want installed on my new system. Here are my essential PC apps:

1. Google Pack
2. Mozilla Firefox
3. Mozilla Thunderbird
4. oXygen XML Editor
5. GVIM
6. Google Desktop
7. Trillian
8. FoxIt Reader
9. CygWin
10. Gimp
11. TurboXML

In the past, I've also used jEdit, but now exclusively oXygen... I would also consider using OpenOffice, but as I mentioned, I'm required to use MS Office. I also wish they made Omnigraffle for Win...
and now for the fun apps:

12. iTunes
13. Picasa
14. WebShots
15. Google Earth

For essential Firefox extensions, I use:

1. Web Developer
2. X-Ray
3. IE Tab
4. del.icio.us
5. DownloadThemAll!
6. Forecastfox
7. Adblock
8. Google Browser Sync

What other essential WinXP apps should I be considering?

Thanks to Nederhoed, it looks like I should give Inkscape a try. I think Rich Burridge had also recommended FreeMind. Any others?

UPDATE:Plaxo and SnagIt are some additional apps I've found essential!

Categories: General

Oxygen 6.2 now available!

The folks at SyncRO Soft have released the 6.2 version of oXygen, my personal favorite XML/XSL/Schema editor! Details on the new features are available at: http://www.oxygenxml.com/index.html#new-version.

What I like about oXygen is it's standards support (especially RelaxNG!) and it's highly configurable parsing features. It has Xerces, Xalan, Saxon, FOP , Jing, Trang and xsltproc built in.

It's extremely powerful, including support for XML 1.0, namespaces, DTD, XML Schema 1.0, Relax NG, XSLT 1.0 and 2.0, XPath 1.0, XSL-FO, XQuery 1.0, SVG 1.1, WSDL, CSS, Unicode 3.2, DocBook 4.3, TEI and Schematron!

My other favorite feature: it's multi-platform. I have personally run it in Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windoze.

This editor isn't as user-friendly for the common author as Arbortext Epic, but for XML hacks, I'd say oXygen has all the other editors beat - hands down.

Try it for yourself. There's a free 30-day trial available on the site. I'd be interested in your comments on oXygen and other editors, too.

See also: XML

My new favorite app

Google has really done it now. Not only is Blogger extremely easy to use for blogging, but they've come out with Picasa and Hello to make it even easier!

I really don't want my blog to turn into a photo blog, but as busy as I've been, I'm finding less and less time available to blog. I have many emails in my gmail box reminding me of cool things I've found that "I should really blog someday..."

Picasa is my new favorite app. I've been managing all my photos on the iMac with iPhoto, but Picasa (even though it doesn't run on Mac, yet. GRRR. HINT, HINT Google dev guys...) goes a step further. Not only can you assign Keywords for metadata, create slideshows, organize, touch up, burn CDs, backup, create posters and collages, and more, but with Hello, can also publish straight to your blog!

This feature alone makes it worth moving all my pics to Picasa. If I get too busy to do updates, but actually have had a semblance of a life and take pictures, I can slap on a caption and post!

I wish there were some blog templating things I could do around the photos (like adding my XML wrappers), but it posts the captions, and that's usually enough. I'd like to auto-assign or templatize the addition of technorati tags, though.

I also found another cool tool called Google Earth, but I haven't had time to play with it yet...

See also: General

Neo/J and Frangelico releases

Busy day today! Norm Walsh has announced the sixth release of DocBook NG, dubbed "Frangelico" (see http://norman.walsh.name/2004/10/18/frangelico), and Tim Bray has a post about the new NeoOffice/J patch 3 release (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/10/17/NeoOfficePatch3)

It's interesting to see that Norm has included XLink and extendedLink in this version. I hope to get some testing in on this one. I think it's also time for another run at Simplified DocBook NG, which is still at the "Bourbon" release. Wish Norm could hire me to do that!

NeoOffice/J is amazingly cool. I tried using the X11 version of OpenOffice on the Mac, but it was slow and painful. NeoOffice/J has all of the functionality, and is fast. Check it out!

See also: DocBook

Fighting with Firefox

I noticed the new binaries for Firefox 0.9 have been contributed to mozilla.org for Solaris, so I jumped at the chance to try it out. Unfortunately, it hasn't been as smooth as the Firefox 0.8 upgrade. When I tried to launch the browser, I got:

./firefox
Killed
Error opening libgdk-1.2.so.0: no such file or directory

Since I used pkg-get to install gimp earlier today, I was able to put a symlink in to point to the correct lib. I still get a Killed message in the command line, but at least it runs now!

You can switch to an alternate stylesheet on the fly in Firefox 0.9, by clicking on the artist pallette icon in the lower left corner of the browser! Very cool.

I haven't noticed a huge performance increase with 0.9, but haven't had a chance to poke around (yet). I am hoping that the binaries for Thunderbird 0.7 get contributed soon. There are supposed to be major performance increases there. Thunderbird 0.6 is great, though. The Weather plugin is a very nice feature.

The new versions for both are out for Win and Mac, so I'll have to install them on my iMac and Win boxen @ home.

See also: General