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.

Harder Than I Thought

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Getting rid of this ftp problem (see my previous post about updating WordPress) was harder than I thought. The answer was right in front of me, though. IF I had bothered to read the readme file rather than abusing Google, that is.

  1. Make sure that your wp-content folder and its contents use www-data:www-data for <user>:<group>.
  2. Copy the actual plugins and themes from /usr/share/wordpress/wpcontents to your wp-content rather than using the symlinks.
  3. Add this to your WP config file in /etc/wordpress:
    define( ‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’ );

This is a LOT better than using ftp or uploading plugins and themes manually.

My New Site

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Yesterday I got myself a shiny new low-end VPS at VPSDime to host my sgmlguru.org site. For now, I’ve installed WordPress (to which I am considering moving the blog you’re reading now, if it all pans out) and maybe some other stuff. We’ll see.

XML Prague 2015

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I finally got an approval from my boss to attend XML Prague 2015 and registered for it the other day. I’m not presenting this time around, just listening and learning, and looking very much forward to it.

ProXist v2

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For the last few days, I’ve been busy updating ProXist, my XProc abstraction layer and app for eXist. There is a new(-ish) XProc package for eXist that promises to support a lot of (Norm Walsh’s XProc engine) Calabash’s capabilities, so I decided it was time to test it out and do a new ProXist at the same time.

My XML Prague ProXist version supported only my custom document type and stylesheets, and barely those at that. It was meant to be a demo. For the new version, though, I’m thinking of doing a default implementation for DocBook, including some of the more commonly used stylesheets and a couple of standard pipelines, packaged so they can be used with ProXist–it should be a question of writing a ProX blueprint XML file, theoretically, plus something that helps me list DocBook resources included using XInclude.

At the same time, I’m finally updating the ProXist documentation. It’s written using DocBook, incidentally, and now part of the git repository.

ProXist is not even close to being finished, but at least I seem to have moved on from procrastinating to actually doing something.

I Guess I’ll Have to Find Another Email App

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About a year and a half ago, I bought Airmail to replace Apple’s standard Mail app as my primary OS X email client. Not only was it miles above what Apple could offer, it was a bargain at $1.99. It was a no-brainer; I would gladly have paid more, considering its great feature set.

Lately, though, the Airmail updates have done little to fix the bugs I’ve encountered, from unread post counts not matching the actual numbers and poor threading of mailing list posts to annoyingly slow performance with large inboxes, etc. These annoyances haven’t been enough for me to bother looking up another email client just yet, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy and keep hoping that an update will eventually fix the problems.

So imagine how pleased I was earlier today, when I noticed that a version 2.0 of Airmail is available from the App Store. Finally!

Except then I spotted the price tag. The upgrade costs $19.99, and yes, that applies for customers both new and old. Although, for a limited time, you can get it at a special introductory price of $9.99.

WTF?

I feel cheated. It’s not the money – a year and a half ago, I would have considered $19.99 to be more than reasonable – it’s that they want to make me pay twice to get what essentially is an upgrade, the first more major upgrade since I bought version 1.0. See, they’ve reworked the app “from the ground up” and there’s now a “faster engine”, that is, they’ve finally addressed the performance issues and maybe more, but apparently they think they didn’t charge their customers enough the first time around.

And what happens the next time they plan a bigger upgrade? What happens when they move to version 3.0? Do they expect me to pay for the damned thing again, a third time?

So, sorry but no; not only will I not be buying the 2.0, I will also uninstall the 1.0 and replace it with an email client developed by someone who isn’t planning to rip me off.