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Top Gear and Nearing 50

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Watching an old episode of Top Gear on BBC as I write this. Currently, James May is racing two twentysomethings, driving a Peueot 207. The twentysomethings are running, jumping over cars, buildings, that sort of thing, while Captain Slow is following the Liverpool roads. Typical Top Gear, I’d say.

Now, my daughter says I’m old. Age-old, in fact, long past the age when I understood even the slightest bit about anyone in her generation. Me watching Top Gear is all the proof anyone would ever need, she says. It’s a old man’s show but also a geek’s show, and of no interest whatsoever.

I was rooting for Captain Slow right from the start. Young kids in funny clothes jumping from roofs? Oh please. Some dignity, please. And, for pete’s sake, they are racing a car. Even Captain Slow can’t lose that.

Right?

During the challenge (that’s what they call it), it struck me that I may be choosing sides because of my age. It’s a case of identification. May is roughly my age while the kids in funny clothes are probably more than 20 years younger. What if mine really isn’t the only possible vantage point? What if someone, oh, I don’t know, a younger person, would quite naturally hope the kids won? What if there was a TV series focussing on the kids and the grumpy old men were there to provide the stars with a challenge, not the other way around?

The kids won. Thankfully there’s always another episode to look forward to.

Writing Copy

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I’ve been busy writing commercial copy for our service and product portfolio. This is very hard. How does one express the advantages of our rather technical offerings without resorting to empty clichés and, frankly speaking, an unidentifiable product?

Unidentifiable? Well, yes, because at the core, the content management system we develop is far from being unique when described in market-speak. Nor are our services so different from those offered by our competitors when one is only allowed a bird’s view, and a stratospheric bird’s at that. Whatever our advantages, they start on a purely technical level and any explanation that won’t immediately put the casual observer to sleep will, at best, be so superficial it borders on generic and therefore not unique.

This is why I don’t usually write marketing copy. While I’ve often claimed not to be a programmer, I am certainly not a copywriter. I don’t do the kind of head-first marketing that shamelessly exploits one cliché after another and claims everything to be either my invention or my company’s, and, of course, bigger than, oh, I dunno, teh interwebz.

Because someone will always see right through you. In my case, it might well be someone I know.

Buy our products. They are awesome.

Balisage Impressions, At Long Last

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I tend to write these “long time no post” posts from time to time. It’s a guilt thing, I suppose, and it’s how this post began life.

This time, though, I did have things to write about. There is the Balisage 2012 markup conference I attended two weeks ago, and it would be such a waste not to post something on it. I gave a paper there, my little something on how to implement XProc with more XML, and I even participated in MarkLogic’s demo jam with even more of the same. Great fun, that.

The most fun I had at Balisage had to do with listening to others give papers, however, with special mention having to go to Wendell Piez‘s talk about how to process LMNL (non-XML) markup. LMNL is all about overlapping structures, the kind of thing that XML just won’t do, and it’s absolutely awesome. For some reason I’ve not given the overlap problem (or, for that matter, the related problem with discontinuous structures) much thought lately. I should have. LMNL, it seems to me, should be very useful for analysing dead languages such as Middle Egyptian where overlapping markup could be used to present alternative interpretations for grammar, pronunciation, and so on. There’s a paper begging to be written, right there. Next year, maybe.

It is good sometimes to remember that XML is not the answer to everything.

But there was more, a lot more. There were some excellent presenters, such as Steven Pemberton discussing abstraction errors (among others, in the C language), Norm Walsh with his compact XProc syntax proposal, and, of course, the undisputed king of keynotes, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, who, as Eric van der Vlist tweeted, “has a special gift to make each presenter feel clever in his closing keynotes.” And so many others.

And I really should mention Betty Harvey’s talk about implementing low-cost electronic documentation for a DoD contractor. In glorious SGML. I love history lessons, especially in my chosen field, and Betty’s was a stroll down memory lane.

Anyway, Balisage was fun and you really should have been there. Or maybe not if you aren’t into markup, but if so, why are you still reading this?

Early Submission

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I submitted the final version of my Balisage paper yesterday, no less than nine days before deadline. It felt good but also quite odd; my usual MO is to edit until the last possible moment before submitting, checking and rechecking, editing and re-editing.

Review Angst

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The Balisage paper acceptance email I got a few weeks ago contained not only the good news and some practical information with deadlines and such, but also peer review comments. When I first opened the email, I consciously avoided reading the comments, instead enjoying the moment and wondering about practicalities. I thought I’d start revising later; there was, after all, plenty of time.

A week went by and while I did think about ways to improve my paper, especially what examples and code to include in the presentation, I did not read the comments. After the second week, most of which I spent busy in customer projects, I still had not read the comments. Yes, I did think about my paper and I did take care of the practicalities, from passport to registration to hotel room reservation to booking flights, but I did not read a single comment.

It then dawned on me that my unconscious was hard at work avoiding them.

Peer reviews are the kind of feedback I tend to care about, and care about a lot. They are the exact opposite of your mum complimenting on your doodles on paper (“very nice, dear”), because they are written by people who a) know the field and b) want to understand what I’m trying to say, but also c) attempt to determine the validity of my ideas. Effectively, d) they decide my fate, not just the paper’s.

Sounds dramatic, right? It is, because I care very much about what I do, and I’d like to think that my ideas are worthwhile, that they add something. In my mind, the acceptance of the paper itself is secondary; it is instead vitally important that what thepaper represents is accepted, that the ideas are sound. Make sense?

Yet, paradoxically, when using those same ideas in my work I’m self-confident and usually will have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t. I’m not particularly sensitive about them and will change them if needed, without bruising my ego too badly. It’s natural for ideas to evolve and to change; it’s natural to adapt.

Why are peer reviews different?

By the way, I did read the comments, eventually, and survived. They were quite useful, actually, and entertaining, too.

The Final (?) Take on Film Markup Language

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As some of you may know, I sometimes project films at the Draken cinema when I’m not busy doing XML stuff. Also, as I’ve noted before, film projection is moving from analogue to digital and it’s all happening very, very fast. The commercial cinemas, multiplexes all of them, now run films on hot-swap hard drives in servers coupled with ugly digital projectors, and the one remaining 35mm cinema, an art house, is rumoured to close soon.

So today, after a call from the city council’s school cinema group, I started thinking and realised that while I did consider the advent of all things digital when I first wrote Film Markup Language, even updating the DTD to include some rudimentary support for 2k and 4k projection for my 2010 presentation on it in Prague, it’s too late to actually modernise the DTD or the spec for what’s actually going on today.

See, the digital thingies do use XML. It’s inconsistent and looks like some weird kind of committee hack, though, the kind of XML you might find in Java config files, but it’s XML and it seems to be enough. So, Film Markup Language is dead for all practical purposes.

It’s kind of sad.

Balisage 2012

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I’ll be presenting a paper at Balisage 2012 in Montréal, Canada, in August. For those of you who have no idea of what I’m talking about, Balisage is is a conference on markup, a sister conference to XML Prague, and, together with the latter, a markup geek’s wet dream. The conference is not just about XML (although quite naturally, XML takes up a lot of space), there are all kinds of topics related to markup theory and practice, including all those semantics you really can’t formalise using XML.

Balisage, along with XML Prague, is also a conference where the discussions that inevitably follow the presentations are actually on topic and intelligent. It’s a very humbling experience to stand before a crowd of experts that can and will spot any flaws you might have in your slides, suggest improvements you never thought of and generally offer valuable insights. It’s a forum for learning, whether you are a presenter or a part of the audience.

I’m really, really looking forward to August.