XMetaL Revisited

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I’ve had been busy doing not one but two authoring environments for XMetaL 5.1. I have to say that it’s been a very pleasant experience, in spite for my strong dislike for .NET Studio. I’ve criticized JustSystems for that before, though, so I won’t go there for the time being. Instead I’ll add my more recent (mostly positive) reflections…

The scripting/macro environment is dead easy to use, even for an amateur programmer like me. I’ve created dialogs that change content in various ways while traversing the document tree, I’ve added ID generation code for the my link target elements, I’ve implemented SVG viewing capabilities, and more, mostly without cursing. I’ve stopped trying to delegate every programming task to my colleagues, that’s how comfortable I am with it.

The editor itself is still the best XML editor I know of. If you are a professional (technical) writer there just isn’t anything better available out there. For shorter documents, sure, a text editor will do, or perhaps something like Oxygen, but for anything approaching book length, I much prefer a non-geek tool that allows me to focus on content rather than structure when writing, and structure rather than content when editing.

Found an old bug, though: You can still make XMetaL crash by trying to drag & drop a toolbar button on a new toolbar, if that toolbar doesn’t have the “flat look”. I think this one’s been an issue since 2.0 but I’d have to check my notes to be sure. (Just try exiting the toolbar dialog and KABOOM!)

And finally there’s another little thing bugging me: I have some old XMetaL dialogs that I like to use when needed, created using version 2.0. XMetaL can use them, no problem, but it can’t import them for editing in the new dialog editor. Fairly annoying, in my humble opinion.

Oxygen 9.0 Is Out

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Version 9.0 of my favourite XSL IDE, Oxygen, was released yesterday. Of course, I downloaded and installed it as soon as I could, having waited for an upgrade since 8.2 came out, some six months ago. I’ve written about Oxygen before; it’s the first decent XSL IDE available for Linux, and the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve come to depend on it. See, what I especially like is the fact that I no longer need Microsoft Windows to do my XML/XSL work. Oxygen works very well in Debian/GNU Linux.

And now, it looks like I can finally re-evaluate my XML editor needs, too. So far, I’ve run XMetaL in wine, which kind of works except that right-clicking the workspace still crashes the program (but that’s fairly OK since I seldom need to right-click anything while writing). As most things in wine, it’s beta quality, no more.

Now, however, Oxygen 9.0 comes with a semi-WYSIWYG view, with CSS formatting and start- and end tag symbols, making it the first real alternative to running Windows software in wine. It is reasonably fast, too, from what I’ve seen so far, and certainly more stable than anything run in wine. You do need an official Sun Java JRE, though; it will complain if you use some of the Java replacements available for Linux, and it doesn’t work with the GNU libgcj Java Virtual Machine.

I’ll give it a more thorough test run within the next week or so, but I’m hoping that it can deliver what it promises.

XMetaL 5

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I’ve spent the last few days tinkering with an XMetaL authoring environment for a client. The XMetaL version is the latest, 5.0, which is actually a lot of fun, but unfortunately it means that I’ve been forced back to Windows. What’s worse, it also means that I’m forced to develop in Microsoft’s exceedingly bloated Visual Studio .Net, surely a punishment for a previous life.

It’s beyond me to understand why JustSystems, the Japanese company that bought XMetaL from Blast Radius, insists on this dependency.

An XMetaL developer doesn’t need all the bells, whistles, and bugs that is Visual Studio, he needs a reasonably flexible scripting environment, easy access to modifying CSS stylesheets, writing (XML-based) toolbars and customizations, as well as the occasional form or dialog.

The thing is, different developers have different preferences. While I do believe that there are people that actually like Visual Studio .Net, not all of us do. Maybe we prefer other languages, or maybe we believe that forcing us to use the same tool for everything just isn’t the right way to go. After all, even if you own an 18-wheel truck, you don’t use it to drive to the supermarket to buy groceries. You use a car or a bus or a bike. Something that doesn’t get in the way.

Because that’s what Visual Studio does. It gets in the way, and more so when all you want to do is to tweak a CSS stylesheet. And I haven’t even mentioned how hard it has become to change the DTD and then recompile it and import it into your project.

And I won’t, because my blood pressure is important to me.

So while XMetaL in its latest reincarnation is very nice, I still consider version 3.1 to be superior for a number of reasons, of which one important one (to me) is that I can run it in and wine and Linux.

Global Warming for Gore?

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This is the Oscars weekend, and one of the nominated films is The Inconvenient Truth It’s now speculated that an Oscar could be his first step towards the White House., former US Vice-President Al Gore’s eye opener on global warming and the climate crisis threatening us all. The dramatically inclined even suggest that he could announce his candidacy on the podium, Oscar in hand.

I think it’s a great idea. Gore would probably be the best candidate in years, if he runs, a candidate with an agenda as important to the resat of the world as for the US. In his words (with diagrams of water flooding Manhattan in the background), is it possible that we should focus on other dangers than just terrorism?

Microsoft Vista Praise Could Go Here

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It seems that Microsoft is giving away brand-new Acer Ferrari laptops as Christmas gifts to some bloggers out there. These people have apparently been praising the upcoming Microsoft Vista operating system in particularly clever (and objective, I’m sure) ways, and so now get their rewards.

If you haven’t had the chance to drool over an Acer Ferrari yet, have a look and tell me that you don’t want one.

Look, Mr Gates, I know I wrote a little something about the Vista EULA some time ago, and I know I’ve been blogging about Linux every now and then, but is it really too late for atonement? Perhaps I could write some positive words about the XML-based new layout format you hope to backstab, I mean, replace, PDF with, or maybe I could join the MS choir about the benefits of the Office XML format? Or I could just write a blog about the Microsoft-Novell agreement where you hope to short-circuit the open source market?

Call me.

Social Stories

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Social stories are often used to explain the intricacies of social interaction and other abstractions to autistic people. They look a lot like a comic book; rather than using complicated words and thus the inevitable abstractions, often beyond the autistic mind, they use pictures and sometimes text to explain a concept.

A good example of a typical social story is the image to the left, developed to explain some simple similes for autistic children. Often, parents of autistic children will have ready-made images for various purposes, from brushing your teeth in the morning to welcoming guests to the house in a proper manner. Social stories can be an excellent, often invaluable, tool, and have saved the day for probably countless families with kids on the spectrum.

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, a company specializing in part on Asperger/autism literature, publishes a sizable portion of the available books on autism spectrum disorders, so it came as no big surprise to me to find Revealing the Hidden Social Code by Carol Gray prominently displayed. The book promises to explain “key elements of Social StoriesTM, review the guidelines for writing them, and help writers to structure and develop their stories”, and indeed, it would have been one of the more authoritative guides on the topic since Carol Gray is the originator of the concept, had it not been for a little detail.

TM.

Everywhere, those two letters. T and M. And Social Stories, capitalized. Jessica Kingsley Publishers or Carol Gray, or both, regard the concept as trademarked, and so, everywhere where the two words Social and Stories are mentioned in each other’s immediate vicinity, the letters T and M follow, superscripted. Bla bla Social StoriesTM bla bla bla bla Social StoriesTM bla bla. Bla bla bla bla Social StoriesTM bla bla bla Social StoriesTM bla. Social StoriesTM bla bla bla bla bla.

See what I mean? Once you’ve noticed, it’s impossible to not see it. See how those two letters stand out, see how they destroy whatever context the author wished to dwell in? You can’t not see it.

So, for me at least, it’s now impossible to buy that book because I’m afraid I’ll learn not about social stories as such, but about how important it is to preserve your questionable trademark, no matter the cost.

Blogger in Beta

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Oh, and in addition to upgrading to Iceweasel, I’ve also taken the leap to the new Blogger. It’s still in beta, but I’ve already noticed significantly faster editing and publishing. There’s a seemingly nifty layout function that goes beyond static CSS hacking, but I’ve not dared to try my hand on it yet.

A possible downside is that instead of a separate Blogger logon, they’ve integrated it with memberships and stuff. I’m not sure I like that, since it would appear that to have multiple Blogger accounts, I need a distinct email address for each and every one. (Why would I want that? Glad you asked; if I want to use and display different personal profiles, that’s what ‘ll need.)

So all I need now for my Google-induced happiness is a GMail account. But that’s not yet in widespread release so I guess I’ll just have to wait.

Iceweasel in Debian

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Long time no blog. Shocking as it may seem, I’ve not blogged since September. I’m sure you’ve all missed me.

Anyway, here’s why I blogged today. To put it simply, the Mozilla Foundation uses a trademarked Firefox logo that Debian team cannot distribute with its upcoming Etch release of the Debian OS, and therefore decided to rename the browser Iceweasel. The current license (of the logo) does not allow the reselling of software that includes the Firefox logo, so the renaming was the only option available to the Debian team if they wanted to distribute the browser. (For those of you not in the know, Debian is free software, and you can do whatever you want with the OS, including reselling it for a hefty sum of money.)

Unfortunately, Debian’s taking a lot of heat for the move. The decision to let Debian remain free and untainted by non-free licenses is called anything from “lame” to “disruptive”, and people are arguing that Debian’s strict license policy is hurting the open source movement since Firefox is its flagship product, soon to run on every desktop there is. And the policy is supposedly extra dangerous now, when Microsoft finally decided to upgrade Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately, people are missing the point. This is what open source really is about. The whole development model is about the freedom to do whatever you want with the software, including reselling it. It’s the “free” part that enables fast development, quick and efficient bug tracking, and new versions as fast as you can type apt-get.

Don’t let the open source ideals get lost because of some stupid image that will be changed and forgotten in a few version bumps, anyway.