Author Archives: admin

The Sopranos Ending

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I watched the final episode of The Sopranos last night, for the fourth or fifth time. Now, I know some people say Tony died in the end of that episode, but I just don’t see it. Yes, I know how one uses POV shots (I’ve made my share of films), and yes, I know the Members Only jacket guy looks shady, and yes, I know that there is a not-so-subtle reference to the first Godfather film, but I just don’t see it.

I think the ending was made ambiguous on purpose. We can all interpret it pretty much how we want and go on with our lives, and should David Chase decide to revive the Sopranos as a feature film, we can all go and see it, and make Mr Chase an even richer man. And go on discussing that.

Inline Tagging

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Here’s a trivial little piece of inline tagging that is nagging me:

<emph><super>2</super></emph>

It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem, really. The tagging is commonplace enough; it’s trivial, crude, even, and represents an emphasised and superscripted number, but should the number be emphasised first and then superscripted, or should it be the other way around, like this:

<super><emph>2</emph></super>

I know, I really shouldn’t bother, but it is precisely this kind of nested inline tagging that can completely stop me in my tracks. In a wider context, the question is: is the order of nesting important? That is, semantically speaking, is there a difference? Am I saying that an emphasised (in other words, important) number happens to be superscripted, or that a superscripted number happens to be emphasised (important)?

More often than not, this type of inline tagging is about formatting, not semantics, so it probably doesn’t matter. Also, emphasis as an inline tag is dodgy at best because while it says that the highlighted text is important but fails to mention why, and the “why” is what is important if we want semantics, if we need intelligence. It’s the same with superscript and subscript elements, and quite a few other common inline elements that are about how things should be presented rather than structured.

But then, of course, formatting is useful, too, because it can visualise abstract concepts.

Chicken or egg, folks? Me, I don’t know. I only wrote this because I needed a break form designing an export format from a product database, a format where I need to visualise data.

KDE 4.2

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Some time ago, I made the upgrade to KDE 4.2 from 3.5. It was made available in Debian’s Unstable branch so I figured “why not?”

Why not, indeed?

Well, for starters, I can’t figure out how to make it react to audio CDs in the CD drive. KDE 3.5 offered a dialog where I could choose what to do with the damned thing. With this one, it’s beyond me; nothing happens. I’ve toyed around in the Settings, but to no avail. I’ve googled around. I can’t make it work.

Just now, I received an email with a MS word attachment, a .doc file. KMail offered Kate as the default choice, a bloody text editor, but the thing is that not too long ago, KMail knew that OpenOffice works for anything with that suffix, and furthermore, KDE knows, from what I can see in the File Associations settings, that OpenOffice is the right application to use. But it doesn’t. It won’t.

The refurbished Kicker menu gets stuck on the desktop after I click it, until I click on it somewhere near the Search edit box. On my laptop, the task bar (or whatever they want to call it, these days, never remembers how wide it should be if I use the laptop on an external screen (with a different resolution) in addition to the built-in one. For some reason, something switched the sound settings on the Audigy card to the Digital output after I upgraded to a 2.6.29 kernel, without telling me, so I went through hell to get my sound back, before I discovered the switch (that, by the way, is not available on every mixer there is) that needed a click.

Or all those settings that used to require a root password, to change how KDM behaves. Or whatever. Lots of things have gone wrong with the KDE upgrade and I don’t know how to fix them, not without some surfing on the net, and I can’t be bothered. I think of myself as a power user, I have used computers in various forms since the late seventies and Unix in a number of incarnations through the years, but surely it shouldn’t be like this?

And no, I don’t want to switch to Gnome because I hate it, I think it treats me lika an idiot, but maybe I need to? What say you? I don’t want to spend all my free time on the bloody Internets, trying to find the answers to each and every little problem there is.

Put XSD 1.1 On Hold

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In his latest blog entry at O’Reilly, Rick Jelliff asks W3C to please put XSD 1.1 on hold and address the deeper underlying issues that make schemas practically useless.

I’d like to go one step further and encourage the schema working group to consider Relax NG, compact syntax, instead, as a more sensible and compact alternative to XSDs. It does everything we need from a schema language, without being impenetrable or impossibly verbose. If W3C actively endorsed Relax NG, maybe we’d get the software manufacturers to support Relax NG on a wider scale. Yes, I know, Oxygen already supports it, but there are plenty of manufacturers out there that need to follow suit.

Please.

Jean Michel Jarre

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I went to see Jean Michel Jarre perform in concert, earlier this week. I’ve been a fan since the 70s when Oxygène came out but I never thought I’d experience him live. Göteborg’s too small a city for the kind of thing he is famed for, painting the Houston skyline with lasers or transforming London’s Docklands to a gigantic concert venue, so I was pleasently surprised when he announced his “In-Door” tour, a series of performances indoors, on a fairly small scale.

The Scandinavium is not what I’d call small (U2 paid a visit 18 years ago, and I listened to Paul McCartney dust off his Beatles repertoir there, close to 20 years ago), but I still thought it wouldn’t be enough for Jean Michel Jarre.

Boy I was wrong. From the laser harp (you have to see and hear it; there’s no way I can make it justice here) to the analog synthesizers, from Oxygène to Rendez-vous… it was all perfect (well, actually he slipped while playing that laser harp, just once, but it happened) and I really only wrote this to gloat.

Slow Keys

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The KDE 4.2 desktop on my Debian/GNU Linux laptop install (Sid, the unstable flavour) practically died the other day, after a dist-upgrade. Well, actually, the keyboard stopped responding while the touchpad continued working perfectly. A first Google search (sloppily performed, I’ll admit) hinted at changes done in Xorg 1.6 but while I found a few hints, nothing I did with the xorg.conf file could revive the keyboard.

After a few hours of experimenting and general panic, I stumbled on an older post on a KDE message board. The author had managed to turn on the Slow Keys feature in KDE 4, a set of functions designed for the disabled, which resulted in a very slow keyboard. I checked my settings and yes, the feature had somehow been turned on.

Now, relieved as I was, I’m also pretty sure that I have not been anywhere near that checkbox. How is this possible?

Out of Print

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I like O’Reilly’s books. They’re well-written, well-researched, and a lot of fun to read. They are also very cool, because O’Reilly, probably better than anyone else in the IT publishing business, know how to market their books (think The Camel Book if you don’t believe me, and resign yourself to “I need to find another blog to read” if you don’t get this particular geek reference). I would love to write for them some day.

In the meantime, I frequently surf over to their site, reading the blogs, browsing the catalogue, and planning my next buy. And sometimes I just read stuff here and there. Today, I browsed the list of out-of-print books and found this:
I LOL’d, as they say. Yes, a book from January 1900 is probably out of print by now, but I had no idea that XML was that old.

Anticlimax

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My persistent Debian-related WiFi problems finally got solved. The other day, I sat at a restaurant, working away, and decided to try the WiFi. The laptop connected, immediately, with no problems whatsoever.

This got me thinking.

Apparently, Debian and the Intel drivers couldn’t be to blame. It had to be a router issue. So I upgraded my Netgear router firmware (I have both a gateway and a repeater, so there were two machines to consider), and voilá! I had a working WiFi connection at home.