Author Archives: admin

GPS

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I’m sure you’ll all be thrilled to know that my new GPS is working perfectly. It found me a shortcut yesterday. Shorter AND better. Well, I’m thrilled at least.

But Tomtom’s strategy of selling map update services borders on the indecent. The first thing I did when I bought the thing was to update the maps. There’s a “latest map” guarantee, see, meaning that within 30 days of purchase, I’m entitled to map updates. So today I logged on to Tomtom and it hinted that my map was old (God forbid) and that for only €XX, I could have the latest.

If I hadn’t read the manual I would have thought that there was actually an update available, and that it would cost me money. As things stand, I do have the latest map and this was simply a sales pitch, appearing to be a map update. It looked like the update thing I’d seen earlier, so I thought I would have to pay for this one. Made me angry and disappointed, and very weary of anything they say.

I very much dislike software with built-in sales pitches. I don’t mind buying services when I need them, but I do think that I shouldn’t be fooled into buying them.

TomTom 730T and Linux

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Bought a TomTom 730T GPS device today. Very cool. Lots of well-considered features, great design, just what I wanted. I’m really looking forward to driving around for a bit tomorrow.

But then, I tried to install the TomTom Home 2 software on my Debian (Sid) Linux box, using wine. Didn’t work. I spent an hour trying to get around the error message (a rather crypic message involving some file from Visual C++) but couldn’t make it work.

Yes, TomTom, I do use a Windows box, too, at work, but I was hoping for you to return the favour (I bought your product, after all, didn’t I?) by supplying me with software for the operating system of my choice. It shouldn’t be that hard to do; after all, you did come around to recompile your software for the Mac.

Aren’t more people using Linux these days than Mac?

Dolby CP100

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I got hold of a Dolby CP100 cinema sound processor. It’s Dolby’s oldest Dolby cinema processor, introduced nearly 33 years ago. I don’t expect to actually use it a lot, but I’m very tempted to install it in the sound rack at the cinema, just to freak out visiting filmmakers.

In any case, I think it’s the most beautiful-looking processor Dolby has ever made. ::sigh::

Do You Still Believe MMR Vaccines Cause Autism?

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5683671.ece

Looks like Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who claimed MMR vaccines were to blame for the so-called “autism epidemy” manipulated his research data in order to get the results he wanted.

Not that I believe for one second that the MMR scare is now history, with nutters like watsername married to Jim Carrey running around crying wolf, but it still feels like a victory to me.

XML Prague

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I will present my whitepaper, Practical Reuse in XML, at XML Prague on March 21 (in Prague, Czech Republic, in case you didn’t guess that). XML Prague is a small conference but the speaker list is very impressive: Norman Walsh, Ken Holman, and Jeni Tennison will attend, among many others. I’m really looking forward to this one.

XMetaL and wine 1.0

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I’ve been trying to make XMetaL 3.1 work on wine 1.0, and have to say that I miss the days before the wine team replaced Internet Explorer with a wine-specific solution. Specifically, it appears that ActiveX handling has been changed to the worse.

I don’t know what’s wrong but I can no longer make XMetaL to run on my Debian/GNU Linux box.

What’s Wrong With Confidence?

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Read CNN’s web page, just now, and found the following, re the US presidential election:

McCain, meanwhile, continues to hammer his opponent for exuding confidence in the final days of the campaign. He has been repeating a standard campaign line recently, saying Obama is “measuring the drapes” for the White House.

My immediate reaction was: What’s wrong with confidence? I don’t understand. If you think you’ll win or, God forbid, if you think you’re right, what’s so terrible about it?

DITA in Review

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I’ve been thinking about DITA, partly because of the comments from Michael Priestley regarding my previous DITA post, but also because I recently had to prepare a quote for a prospective client.

On one hand, I still maintain that a generic structure can practically never be as immediately relevant to a client than a structure tailored for their needs. I’ve seen this happen many times in the past, having to compare various so-called industry standards with the actual needs of my clients. Structures have mapped poorly, which is to be expected, but the same has been true with meta-data which, in a way, is more surprising, considering that meta-data should be something the industry standards get right.

On the other hand, recently, after my latest DITA blog, a prospective client requested a quote for replacing their current CMS. They’ve been authoring topic-oriented pieces of information for online publishing, with the topics sometimes collected in larger PDFs printed out and placed in binders. What they wanted was better version handling, integration with PDM applications, and an environment that would better support the authoring of individual topics published in various contexts. There was very few obstacles in the way of company-specific structures or meta-data.

Individual, loose topics, published in various contexts and deliverables, mostly online, sometimes on paper but as collections in binders. Hmm… where have I heard this line of thinking before?

Knowing how several editors out there have feature-rich DITA support and are easily adaptable, the quote was quite easy to prepare. It’s certainly easier to offer a figure when many of the unknowns are already taken are of, and this one practically screamed DITA.

Maybe the RFQ was a practical joke from the DITA folks. You’d tell me, right?

64-Bit “Free”Applications

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Recently, I bought a new computer. It’s the modern kind, with a dual-core, 64-bit, processor, an Nvidia graphics card, a huge SATA drive, and everything else I could think of when placing the order. And of course, I installed the amd64 Debian GNU/Linux distribution, envisioning fast and trouble-free computing using my favourite Linux distribution.

Well, so I thought. Then I started putting all those small support programs in place, from Flash to Skype, and realised that none of them would install. See, they are 32-bit, made for 32-bit operating systems, and there are no 64-bit versions for Linux available.

Why is this?

Mind you, it is possible to run most of these in “32-bit mode”, using 32-bit libraries, but you also need a steady supply of Aspirins and such, because it takes a lot of extra work, tinkering, and cursing.

If a piece of software was truly open source and free, as in “free speech” (as opposed to “free beer”), someone would immediately rectify this by compiling a 64-bit binary for others to use. And if that binary had problems, someone else would come along and fix that, often in a matter of days, not to mention adding features and fixing bugs in the original.

As many Linux users will testify, this works extremely well. Me, I’ve been using open source for years now, professionally and privately, and have experienced significantly less downtime than many of my colleagues and friends stuck with commercial software, often from that large Redmond manufacturer, in spite of the fact that my Linux variant is Debian’s development branch, codenamed Sid (named after the kid from Toy Story who liked to break toys).

Yet the makers of those small bits and pieces of software that many of us rely on, software that some insist are “free”, will not provide the large 64-bit Linux user base with 64-bit binaries, or make available the source code so others can provide us with that service.

Why? And what’s free about these programs, anyway, when you can’t do what you want to with them?