Author Archives: admin

Clarkson Sacked, Etc

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I’m sure most of you know that Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson was sacked after a “fracas” with a producer.

I think it’s sad that the BBC chose a resolution that punishes pretty much anyone who likes the show. Clarkson, I suspect, will simply move on to somewhere else while enjoying a larger paycheck, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Andy Wilman (Top Gear producer), James May and Richard Hammond joined him to create a new show.

The old Top Gear, however, will have to reinvent itself, with new presenters and angry fans less likely to keep on watching. I’m pretty sure that the fantastic 350 million viewers worldwide every week figure will soon be a thing of the past and the BBC will have to get that particular piece of their weekly budget from somewhere else. Mainly, I suspect, from the viewers.

XML Prague 2015 Impressions

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XML Prague 2015 is over and I’m now at the Prague airport, waiting to board a plane. The weather is beautiful–from where I am, it looks like spring–and I’m on a high after my XML holiday.

Some impressions, in no particular order:

  • Being a participant rather than a speaker was a good thing, this year. I’ve been able to relax and focus on listening to the presentations without having to worry about slides or demos.
  • The presentations, for the most part, were great. There were some that weren’t spot on for me, but things like JSON in an RDFa context (Alex Milowski’s talk) were far more interesting than I’d have thought. I still don’t like JSON but Alex’s talk was interesting, entertaining and actually very cool.
  • Hans Jurgen Rennau suggested in his talk node searches in XPath preceding actual node construction, an extremely useful idea presented in his usual well-thought and rational manner. I liked this one a lot, and it is a suitable continuation of his XQuery Topic Tools concept first presented at Balisage last year.
  • Michael Kay started and ended the conference. The first talk of the conference was about XSLT parallel processing and the last was an update on the XSD, XSLT, XPath and XQuery specs work at W3C. Michael’s presentations are always interesting and always well presented. It is fititng that he is the foremost veteran speaker of the conference, having presented at every XML Prague since it started.
  • Norm Walsh talked (almost as fast as Alex Milowski; no wonder he finds the time for the W3C work, XML Calabash, his day job and, presumably, some free time doing photography and such) about progress on XInclude 1.1 and the eagerly anticipated XProc 2.0. Very interesting.

I’ll probably write more later. Time to board a plane.

Festival Midpoint

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It’s the evening of the fifth film festival day as I write this, and here are my (technical) reflections this far:

  • Swedish short films are still bad, generally speaking. The technical quality and craftsmanship is poor, to put it kindly.
  • Come to think of it, Swedish feature-length films are not much better.
  • Finland, on the other hand, still outputs feature films to very high technical standards. The images are gorgeous and the sound mixes precise and crisp. It is obvious that their people know what they are doing.
  • If you disregard their independent productions, American films tend to look surprisingly bland on screen. Their catering budgets equal a minor third world country’s, but the images are featureless and boring. It is as if they had tried (and succeeded) to replicate the increasingly poor multiple generation 35mm prints of the last few years before the media died.
  • Digital cinema is here to stay. Unfortunately. I will not screen a single new 35mm feature this year. Not one. Can you imagine how sad this makes me feel?

I will probably post more comments later, at some point.

How to Read SPL Files

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I learned how to recover files from failed printer queues today. The printer in question, a HP Laserjet, had been offline for two weeks at least but Windows 7 had happily added to the queue in the meantime, never bothering to tell the user – my wife – that it had somehow managed to disconnect the printer from its local network. The other computers in the household – a couple of Macs and Linux boxes – had no issues.

The observant reader might, of course, ask the obvious question: how come it took her two weeks to notice? It is a good question, with the answer being that in this household, things get printed out and then forgotten. The printer is in our basement and apparently it’s easier to think “I’ll grab it later” than to make sure the printout is OK. In other words, most of the printouts really aren’t all that important.

This time around, she had printed out a receipt for my son’s online purchases for the up and coming film festival. Several shows were at stake; he had spent a lot of money. The receipt was needed because there was no confirmation email in my son’s inbox (he had probably entered the wrong email address) and the box office, of course, requires some sort of proof of purchase before handing out the physical tickets. All this brings us neatly back to the printer queue with two dozen files in it, none of which was any closer to reaching the printer today than two weeks ago. The printer tray was empty.

Panic ensued and I was enlisted to see what could be done. I found the printer spool in Windows\System32 and was soon able to locate the right date and the prime candidate file, a Windows SPL file, that is, a file in Windows printer spool format. A quick glance in a text editor confirmed that it was indeed a receipt, but how should one read an SPL file? Or would it be better to troubleshoot Windows 7 for printer connectivity.

The latter, I knew, was almost guaranteed to require a reinstall of the printer drivers, most likely resulting in a deleted queue and I wouldn’t be anywhere closer to a solution.

The former, however, turned out to be easy. All I had to do was download something called SPLView, a printer spool file reader, open the SPL file in the program and print it out from there. Once I had reinstalled the drivers, that is.

Feeling Like A (Real) Programmer

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I’ve spent most of tonight writing an XQuery script that reads stuff from a linkbase I’m using to keep track of resources in eXist. It’s not much yet, just a couple of queries to get resource URIs based on various conditions, but it strikes me that doing an extended XLink implementation in eXist really shouldn’t be that hard. Even by a non-programmer such as yours truly.

Updating an eXist-DB System

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We’re doing a major overhaul on an eXist-DB system we built for the Swedish Federation of Farmers. There’s a bit of everything in this one. There’s XProc running nightly conversions and on-demand publishing with FO, an oXygen editing environment based on DocBook, and XForms and XQuery for various administrative tasks. It’s a pretty cool system already, and now we’re making it better.

Looking forward to this one.