Archive for 2001

Design Your Own O’Reilly Book Cover

I’m hooked on DocBook.

Docbook is a form of XML meant for writing documents. You

write up your document using XML tags: Here’s the title of my

document, here’s part one, here’s part two, here’s a footnote.

Then you use an XML transformation tool to take your Docbook

XML file and transform it into a nice readable format like HTML,

PDF, or RTF. Or all three. The conversion tools do the grunt

work for you, setting up footnotes and internal links, creating

a table of contents, and all the other mundane tasks that make

creating and maintaining documentation such a chore.

This is particularly nice for something like your

resume, which, if you’re like me, you

begrudgingly maintain multiple versions of. With

Docbook, you only have to maintain one file. Then you

convert it to whatever formats you want for publication.

Today I found myself frustrated by the .asx playlists used at

Nugs.net. They’re meant for

Windows media player and as far as I can tell unsupported by

any of the linux mp3 players. Fortunately, .asx is an

href='http://www.xml.com'>XML-based

format (thanks, Microsoft). So I wrote up a little

xslt stylesheet that pulls out the URLs from an .asx

file and ouputs a valid m3u-formatted playlist. It’s available

here.

This has

got to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen my computer do.

Joel Spolsky’s company

Fog Creek Software just

released a new website content management system called

CityDesk.

There’s a free single-user version that let’s you create and edit a

website up to 50 pages. I took it for a spin at lunch today, using

a Windows computer at work.

The fruits of my labors can be seen here.

I just got the heads up that

Oxford Networks,

my ISP, is shutting down the network that this web server is currently

running on.

If I may rant briefly: I hate the instability of the telecommunications

industry. This will be the second time in a year I’ve had to find a new

ISP because my old one changed their business plan and stopped

providing fixed internet access, and during that time I’ve seen a few

other companies drop off the map completely. At this point it seems

like if you want a stable ISP your only option is to pick one of

the overpriced, functionally crippled plans offered by a

giant corporation like

Verizon

or Time Warner.

At this point I’m not sure what my best option is going forward. For

the benefit of my friends who have accounts and web sites on this

server I’d like to keep it going rather than switching

to a shared hosting setup. We’ll see.

Due to a death in the family I’m going to be away for most of this week.

I probably won’t be checking my e-mail very often during this time.

Please don’t take offense if it takes me a while to reply to you.

And to Mr. Fettig from Germany, who sent me a message regarding our common last name:

I’d like to tell you what I know about

my family history, but I can’t reply unless you give me your e-mail

address. :-)

One last

title='An Optical Illusion'>link before I head out (an optical illusion

from techinterview.org,

whose

puzzle archive is also worth a visit).

I’m showing XML-RPC to Glenn, updating my web log from the command prompt.

In preparation for an upcoming project with some friends I did some

research on video editing tools for Linux. And, surprise, they exist!

This morning I took Broadcast 2000 for a quick spin, since it seemed to

be the most recommended program. During a 15 minute break I was

able to open a .mpg video file, place a caption over a few seconds

of it (in the form of a PNG image, the first format I tried),

and add an mp3 audio track. Very slick, and not too bad of a

learning curve.

Unfortunately, the people that developed Broadcast 2000 seem to be

having some issues with lawyers at the moment. As far as I could

tell, they have had some issues with people holding them liable

for bugs in the software, even though it’s GPL’d and comes with no

warranty. Strange. Anyhow, they no longer have Broadcast 2000 up

for download on their site, so you’ll have to snag it from somewhere

else. Red Hat folks should be able

to find an RPM with no difficulty

at all. For Debian users, there’s a ‘bcast’ package available as part

of the Debian Multimedia Distribution.