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!

What I did on my summer vacation

This year has been a big home improvement year, and summer vacation was no different!

Over the 4th of July week I built a dog run (with about 4" of pea gravel at the base):

And we converted the boys' Train theme (complete with working train set around the top of the room) to a NASA theme.

We did have to buy the 4'x6' Shuttle for one wall, but the rest came out of my Lego/NASA/space collection and existing posters that the boys had. I did make the face for the clock on the wall, too, reusing the train clock they previously had. We also plan to get a futuristic bullet train to use with the existing track.

The last candidate release?

Norm Walsh has released DocBook v5.0CR5, which will (hopefully) be the last candidate release so we can get the official v5.0 ball rolling!

Please test this release thoroughly!

This release also incorporates recommendations on schema modularizations from the DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers. Much of the schema was already modularized, thanks to Norm's forward thinking and best practices.

Dealing with tokenize, atomic values and a for-each

I've been working on a little identity transform issue, where I needed to resolve some transclusions in an XML document. Some of the ref attributes in the doc also contained multiple space-separated values that needed to be processed separately.

After a few Googles and a great deal of hacking, I was able to process refs with a single attribute value. I Googled a bit more and found some help (including a great article from Bob DuCharme) to process the multiple values using the tokenize function in XSLT 2.0.

I kept running into an odd error though: "Cannot select a node here: the context item is an atomic value". I thought it was some kind of XPath issue, so tried a number of different hacks to get around the issue to no avail. Finally, I Googled on the error message and found the solution. Here's the code snippet that I used:

  <xsl:template match="widgetRef">
    <xsl:variable name="root" select="/"/>
    <xsl:variable name="widgetID" select="tokenize(@stuff, ' ')"/>
    <xsl:for-each select="$widgetID">
       <xsl:variable name="widgetNum" select="."/>
      <xsl:copy-of select="$root//widget[@id=$widgetNum]"/>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>

Hope this helps someone. It took me a while to discover that I needed to reset the context when using tokenize within a for-each.

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!

4.. 3.. 2.. 1.. Coming Home

Just watching the Live NASA TV broadcast of the shuttle landing at Edwards AFB while listening to "Major Tom" by Peter Shilling. The two media work well together! (This version with Apollo 13 is cool, too)

Earth below us
Drifting falling
Floating weightless
Coming home...

Come home safely, Atlantis!

UPDATE:Touchdown! Welcome home, Atlantis!

My new favorite Martini

I had the BEST martini ever at the Trinity (http://www.hobokentrinity.com/index.html) tonight.

It's called the Key Lime Martini, and contained: Stoli Vanil vodka, Malibu rum and lime juice. It tastes just like a slice of key lime pie!

I really liked the Celtic theme of the restaurant, which was also on Sinatra Drive, and had a great view of the Hudson... inside and outside ;-)

Hurricane-force winds and a new record low

Hurricane-force winds hit Colorado on Wednesday, though thankfully our house did not incur any damage. Denver 7 news reported:

Just above the surface, winds were equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. The National Weather Service Doppler radar measured a 142 mph wind gust 2,000 feet above the town of Louisville at 10:20 p.m. Wednesday.

We've always joked about the Superior Wind Tunnel (since we used to live there), where there is a valley that flows from the foothills toward Louisville/Broomfield. This time we weren't kidding! There's a reason the National Wind Technology Center is nearby!

We also had frigid temperatures with the passage of the strong cold front. This from the National Weather Service:

AT 544 AM THE TEMPERATURE AT DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT DROPPED TO 31 DEGREES. THIS SETS A NEW RECORD LOW FOR THIS DATE. THE OLD RECORD WAS 37 DEGREES SET IN 1974 AND PREVIOUS YEARS. THIS IS ALSO THE LATEST FREEZE ON RECORD AND ONLY THE THIRD TIME A TEMPERATURE OF 32 OR LOWER HAS BEEN RECORDED IN THE MONTH OF JUNE IN DENVER. THE PREVIOUS READINGS WERE 32 DEGREES IN 1919 AND 30 DEGREES IN 1951. RECORDS FOR DENVER GO BACK TO 1872.

Additional coverage on the storm can be found here: Denver 7 9 News

Walking with Tollers and Jack

One of the highlights of my day today was Addison's Walk at Magdalen College in Oxford. It was incredibly beautiful and filled with the scent of spring blossoms. The small stream flowing along the path was mesmerizing.

It was inspiring to walk on the same path that Tollers (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Jack (C.S. Lewis) discussed spiritual matters. I could just imagine my personal "Inklings" (Don and Cam) alongside me as well. Later we would also need to head to the Eagle and Child for a pint!

After Addison's Walk, I stayed for the Evensong service at the Magdalen College chapel. It was absolutely amazing! The voices of the choir were simply angelic and brought tears to my eyes. The Magnificat and Nunc dimittis were in a much more pleasing format than the Evensong I attended at Christ Church yesterday. I would highly recommend attending here (every night at 6pm!).

I'll post photos from my walk and one of the beautiful stained glass walls in the chapel soon...

UPDATE: Here is a link to my pictures from Magdalen College and Addison's Walk:
http://picasaweb.google.com/shudson310/MagdalenCollege

C.S. Lewis Tour in Oxford

I had a personalized 4+ hour tour with Ron Brind, founder of the C.S. Lewis Tour in Oxford today. In a word: Spectacular! Ron is a wealth of information, and provided the best opportunities for photos and even took a few for me so I could be in them!

If you get a chance to come to Oxford, this is a MUST SEE tour! Information on the tour can be found at: www.cslewistours.com or www.cslewistours.co.uk

One of the most memorable moments of the tour was seeing The Kilns (the home of C.S. Lewis) and the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve, with the woods that inspired Narnia!

Seeing the home where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy was also very cool, and of course, eating at the Eagle and Child pub where the Inklings met!

I'll post a link to my photos when I get them uploaded, and write a bit more too. I'm a bit worn out from a full day of touring! :-)

UPDATE: Here's a link to my pictures from the C.S. Lewis Tour:
http://picasaweb.google.com/shudson310/CSLewis
If you're planning a trip to the UK, make sure you allocate a day trip to Oxford and take this tour! It's absolutely worth it, and guide Ron Brind is extremely friendly and knowledgeable!