Corena S1000D User Forum

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Earlier this week, I spent two days attending the Corena S1000D User Forum in Kongsberg, Norway. As product-specific user forums go, this one was quite informative and I remain impressed with the Corena product line. They certainly offer a good mix of S1000D functionality, with clear promises of getting better in many areas of the spec (my current favourite is the applicability editor), and it seems to me that few products out there can match theirs.

And of course, Svante Ericsson, a leading authority on the S1000D standard, gave a talk that in itself made the drive to Kongsberg worth my while. Svante is a former colleague of mine from my days at Information & Media (now Sörman) and knows better than most out there what he’s talking about. He’s also a lot of fun to listen to.

Integrated Logistic Support

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I’m spending this week in Malmö in southern Sweden, participating in a course on Integrated Logistics Support (ILS). ILS, basically, is about planning for and supporting a product’s whole lifecycle, from its early planning stages and onwards to the deployment (called “employment plan”, a phrase that to me meant something very different until today), the product’s useful life, including maintenance and support, and the product’s eventual disposal. As always, the idea is to create a better and more cost-effective product, meaning more money to you. See, what’s really interesting is how the results of an ILS analysis, called LSA (don’t you just love acronyms?), can be put into the design of the product itself and how a proper analysis can help significantly reduce cost.

ILS is traditionally about military products, preferably state-of-the art helicopters or perhaps a large frigate but an ordinary rifle can benefit, too, and so is the course I’m attending, but it’s easy to see how ILS can be put into good use elsewhere. It’s fascinating stuff. Obviously it’s a bit early for me to comment on anything factually relevant, being a complete newbie in all things ILS, but I can see a relevance to document management and the systems I help build when I’m not in Malmö¶.

As I said, fascinating stuff.

More on KDE 4.3

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I like KDE 4.3. Let’s make that perfectly clear, because after reading this, you might get the wrong idea.

KDE 4.3 ha a far more finished look and feel than 4.2. Things seem to be better integrated and the crashes are fewer, with fewer causes. I’ve finally got the hang of Dolphin (that tricky address bar, for one thing), and I even got Kscd to work.

But.

There are many annoyances as well:

  • KMix mutes the master volume on every startup (I only have to unmute it and turn the volume up, but this is very annoying to do on every startup).
  • Okular won’t accept (or remember) landscape print settings (Document Viewer from Gnome, that uses the same printer drivers, as far as I can tell,has no problems).
  • The eye candy on Desktop settings usually crashes parts of the KDE environment, with the taskbar going first, if you try more than one or two settings.
  • The PulseAudio/Phonon combo is very unreliable. With GStreamer, it won’t output sound, but with the Xine backend, it usually does.
  • Amarok no longer knows how to play CDs. I tried to use Rhythmbox but it chops up CD audio in 15-second bursts with a 200 ms pause between every one, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

Some of the eye candy issues could easily be related to the (very) buggy Intel Xorg driver, but I still think that KDE shouldn’t crash as a result.

On the whole, I like the environment, though. 😉

KDE 4.3…

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…is a big step forward. Finally things are starting to actually work. Now, if they could only reimplement the CD player functionality in Amarok I’d be even happier. (And to be honest, I’m not sure I like Amarok’s new look.)

The Sopranos Ending

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I watched the final episode of The Sopranos last night, for the fourth or fifth time. Now, I know some people say Tony died in the end of that episode, but I just don’t see it. Yes, I know how one uses POV shots (I’ve made my share of films), and yes, I know the Members Only jacket guy looks shady, and yes, I know that there is a not-so-subtle reference to the first Godfather film, but I just don’t see it.

I think the ending was made ambiguous on purpose. We can all interpret it pretty much how we want and go on with our lives, and should David Chase decide to revive the Sopranos as a feature film, we can all go and see it, and make Mr Chase an even richer man. And go on discussing that.

Inline Tagging

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Here’s a trivial little piece of inline tagging that is nagging me:

<emph><super>2</super></emph>

It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem, really. The tagging is commonplace enough; it’s trivial, crude, even, and represents an emphasised and superscripted number, but should the number be emphasised first and then superscripted, or should it be the other way around, like this:

<super><emph>2</emph></super>

I know, I really shouldn’t bother, but it is precisely this kind of nested inline tagging that can completely stop me in my tracks. In a wider context, the question is: is the order of nesting important? That is, semantically speaking, is there a difference? Am I saying that an emphasised (in other words, important) number happens to be superscripted, or that a superscripted number happens to be emphasised (important)?

More often than not, this type of inline tagging is about formatting, not semantics, so it probably doesn’t matter. Also, emphasis as an inline tag is dodgy at best because while it says that the highlighted text is important but fails to mention why, and the “why” is what is important if we want semantics, if we need intelligence. It’s the same with superscript and subscript elements, and quite a few other common inline elements that are about how things should be presented rather than structured.

But then, of course, formatting is useful, too, because it can visualise abstract concepts.

Chicken or egg, folks? Me, I don’t know. I only wrote this because I needed a break form designing an export format from a product database, a format where I need to visualise data.

KDE 4.2

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Some time ago, I made the upgrade to KDE 4.2 from 3.5. It was made available in Debian’s Unstable branch so I figured “why not?”

Why not, indeed?

Well, for starters, I can’t figure out how to make it react to audio CDs in the CD drive. KDE 3.5 offered a dialog where I could choose what to do with the damned thing. With this one, it’s beyond me; nothing happens. I’ve toyed around in the Settings, but to no avail. I’ve googled around. I can’t make it work.

Just now, I received an email with a MS word attachment, a .doc file. KMail offered Kate as the default choice, a bloody text editor, but the thing is that not too long ago, KMail knew that OpenOffice works for anything with that suffix, and furthermore, KDE knows, from what I can see in the File Associations settings, that OpenOffice is the right application to use. But it doesn’t. It won’t.

The refurbished Kicker menu gets stuck on the desktop after I click it, until I click on it somewhere near the Search edit box. On my laptop, the task bar (or whatever they want to call it, these days, never remembers how wide it should be if I use the laptop on an external screen (with a different resolution) in addition to the built-in one. For some reason, something switched the sound settings on the Audigy card to the Digital output after I upgraded to a 2.6.29 kernel, without telling me, so I went through hell to get my sound back, before I discovered the switch (that, by the way, is not available on every mixer there is) that needed a click.

Or all those settings that used to require a root password, to change how KDM behaves. Or whatever. Lots of things have gone wrong with the KDE upgrade and I don’t know how to fix them, not without some surfing on the net, and I can’t be bothered. I think of myself as a power user, I have used computers in various forms since the late seventies and Unix in a number of incarnations through the years, but surely it shouldn’t be like this?

And no, I don’t want to switch to Gnome because I hate it, I think it treats me lika an idiot, but maybe I need to? What say you? I don’t want to spend all my free time on the bloody Internets, trying to find the answers to each and every little problem there is.

Put XSD 1.1 On Hold

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In his latest blog entry at O’Reilly, Rick Jelliff asks W3C to please put XSD 1.1 on hold and address the deeper underlying issues that make schemas practically useless.

I’d like to go one step further and encourage the schema working group to consider Relax NG, compact syntax, instead, as a more sensible and compact alternative to XSDs. It does everything we need from a schema language, without being impenetrable or impossibly verbose. If W3C actively endorsed Relax NG, maybe we’d get the software manufacturers to support Relax NG on a wider scale. Yes, I know, Oxygen already supports it, but there are plenty of manufacturers out there that need to follow suit.

Please.

Jean Michel Jarre

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I went to see Jean Michel Jarre perform in concert, earlier this week. I’ve been a fan since the 70s when Oxygène came out but I never thought I’d experience him live. Göteborg’s too small a city for the kind of thing he is famed for, painting the Houston skyline with lasers or transforming London’s Docklands to a gigantic concert venue, so I was pleasently surprised when he announced his “In-Door” tour, a series of performances indoors, on a fairly small scale.

The Scandinavium is not what I’d call small (U2 paid a visit 18 years ago, and I listened to Paul McCartney dust off his Beatles repertoir there, close to 20 years ago), but I still thought it wouldn’t be enough for Jean Michel Jarre.

Boy I was wrong. From the laser harp (you have to see and hear it; there’s no way I can make it justice here) to the analog synthesizers, from Oxygène to Rendez-vous… it was all perfect (well, actually he slipped while playing that laser harp, just once, but it happened) and I really only wrote this to gloat.

Slow Keys

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The KDE 4.2 desktop on my Debian/GNU Linux laptop install (Sid, the unstable flavour) practically died the other day, after a dist-upgrade. Well, actually, the keyboard stopped responding while the touchpad continued working perfectly. A first Google search (sloppily performed, I’ll admit) hinted at changes done in Xorg 1.6 but while I found a few hints, nothing I did with the xorg.conf file could revive the keyboard.

After a few hours of experimenting and general panic, I stumbled on an older post on a KDE message board. The author had managed to turn on the Slow Keys feature in KDE 4, a set of functions designed for the disabled, which resulted in a very slow keyboard. I checked my settings and yes, the feature had somehow been turned on.

Now, relieved as I was, I’m also pretty sure that I have not been anywhere near that checkbox. How is this possible?