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.
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.
Miss it.
LinkedIn seems to be testing new ways to make money after their recent revenue forecast cuts. My inbox had a “sponsored message”, something I don’t recall having seen before.
Sorry, LinkedIn, but you’ll have to come up with something else. I’d rather delete my account.
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.
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.