I presented at Balisage, earlier today, and can now focus on the markup holiday aspects of my trip. There are several interesting talks coming up and I’m having a great time.
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Balisage 2015
It’s the first day of Balisage (I missed the pre-conference symposium, sadly), and it’s a lot like a markup holiday. It’s great meeting old friends and new, and the two talks so far promise another great conference.
Ubuntu
I reverted back to Ubuntu after testing Mint 17.2 and deciding that while it looks good, I actually do prefer Unity these days. I really thought I would stick with Mint, you know.
New Laptop, New Linux Distro
Having returned to running my own company, I decided it was time to retire my 5-yo MacBook Pro and get something modern to run Linux in. After careful consideration I decided on a Dell Precision M3800 since it’s actually being sold by Dell with Ubuntu 14.04 pre-installed. The M3800 is thin and light, in spite of the 15.6″ screen, robustly built and includes a 4k screen. Simply put, it is gorgeous.
I didn’t order the Ubuntu version, though, partly since I actually need Windows every now and then, but mostly because there’s the “free” Windows 10 upgrade once it becomes available, and I’m curious. Instead, I added a second hard disk for the Linux install. The extra disk can be fitted if opting for a smaller battery, and the installation didn’t void the warranty, since Dell actually accepts that people will want to tinker with their machines (beat that, Apple!).
After careful consideration, a few live USB sticks and one test install of Ubuntu, I have now set up Linux Mint 17.2 as my primary OS. It handles the HiDPI 4k screen beautifully, except for some older apps with hard-coded font sizes and such (shame on you, Skype!) and most Java-based programmes I have tried so far. oXygen is pretty much the only Java app I really need, so for now I’ve doubled every font size in the preferences, which makes oXygen usable. The toolbars are still tiny, but I am now able to work.
All in all, I’m really pleased.
John Nash Killed in Crash
The American mathematician and Nobel Prize for Economics winner John Nash was killed in a car crash yesterday. Most people probably know the name from Ron Howard’s 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, but those of us with an interest in mathematics are more likely to remember him as one of the foremost minds in game theory.
Today is a sad day.
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
My paper submission to this year’s Balisage conference was accepted. It’s about an eXist implementation I did for the Swedish Federation of Farmers (LRF), and while I may not be completely objective, I think the system is very cool. From the conference blurb:
The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF) provides its 170,000 members with a web-based service to check compliance with state and EU farming regulations. These checklists are also produced nightly both as generic checklists with more than 130 pages and as individualised checklists for registered members. The system consists of an eXist database coupled with oXygen Author. The checklists and their related contents are edited, stored, and processed, published as PDFs, and exported to the SQL database which stores member registration, feeds the website, and does various other tasks. The system uses XQuery, XSLT, XInclude modularization, an extended XLink linkbase, and other markup technologies. It currently handles more than 40,000 PDF documents a year and many more than that in the web-based forms.
This is the second version of the LRF system. The first, presented at XML Prague in 2013, was XProc-based and represented my somewhat naive trust in the state of XProc in eXist, The new one I rewrote in XQuery, having tested (and failed miserably at using) the XProc module that is now available. XProc in eXist, sadly, is not yet ready for prime time.
Be as it may, I’m really pleased about both the system and my paper. and hope to see you there.
In the UK
I’m currently in the UK, spending a month on site to get to know my new client, LexisNexis UK. Legal publishing is a new field for me, I must confess, but they are using pretty much every XML technology there is and I’m a bit like a 5-yo in a toy store. It doesn’t hurt that the people I’m working with are both nice and knowledgeable, either.
oXygen XML Editor
My friends at Syncro Soft, the makers of oXygen XML Editor, very kindly provided me with an oXygen license to replace the one I used while at Condesign. As oXygen is my tool of choice and the one I use daily, as necessary for me as a C compiler is for Linux kernel programmers, I remain in absolute awe of both the product and the kind and generous human beings that make it.
Consider this post as my heartfelt thank you.
Clarkson Sacked, Part Two
Apparently Andy Wilman emailed the Top Gear staff the other day to thank them for the last 13 years. The BBC and Wilman both deny the email should be interpreted as a confirmation of Wilman leaving the show, but I have to say it’s very hard to read it differently.
XML Prague 2015 Impressions
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.