Life’s but a walking shadow…

The W3C XSL FO subgroup is working towards XSL-FO 2.0. The first public working draft of the XSL-FO 2.0 Requirements document was published at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20-req/ back in March. The best way for the Requirements document, and an eventual XSL-FO 2.0, to reflect peoples’ needs is for people to read the document and provide feedback.

Two of the best ways for you to provide feedback about XSL-FO and the requirements for XSL-FO 2.0 are:

• Indicate which areas of XSL-FO are important to you by completing the survey at http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/xslfo20requirements/
• Provide feedback on individual requirements using the W3C public Bugzilla system

xmlroff is available prepackaged for Ubuntu 8.04! Instead of my reciting the list of packages that you need to build xmlroff, I just need to tell you to install it from the ‘universe’ repository using the Synaptics package manager.

Thanks must go to W. Martin Borgert and others of the Debian XML/SGML Group for doing the packaging work so that Ubuntu could pick it up as well as to the Ubuntu folks for including it.

Translation: I came, I saw, I posted about it on a collaborative site.

Cf. Wiki, Vidi, Veni (Place or event reviewed on a collaborative site, I saw, I came)

Why should you prefer an XSLT unit testing framework that uses more that just XSLT? Two reasons: xsl:message and multiple output documents. Read the rest of this entry »

I first saw this book when someone was reading it on the train a couple of years ago. The title, Who needs Irish?, was intriguing, so I borrowed the book when I saw a copy in the Skerries Library. The publisher describes the book as “a collection of essays in English for all those interested in the Irish-language today.” However, maybe the title should have been “Why you need Irish” since all of the essays are in favour of Irish. Read the rest of this entry »

Nuance, makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking, are running a “Do you speak Dragon?” competition.

They did a similar contest last year to collect favourable accounts of using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It must have made the Nuance marketing people feel all warm and soft inside to read the accounts, but you still had to already be at the Nuance web site before you could see what people had said in the hope of winning a prize. I did enter last year: it was one sentence, it was genuine, I didn’t gush, and I got the dragon fingerpuppet that every entrant received and that was all that I was after.

Actually, having just read some of the entries for this year, some of the accounts would make just about anybody feel warm and soft inside. Not the sort of accounts of aspiring novelists who have completed even more novels that will never be published in less time than previously, but the accounts from people with dyslexia, MS, or deafness for whom the dictation software really is making a difference.

Someone in Nuance marketing presumably has read about viral marketing. The difference this year is the extra category, and biggest prizes, for accounts posted on personal blogs, as reviews on sites such as Amazon, on Facebook, etc., or on YouTube. So the nice things that people are saying in the hope of winning a prize are now (or so the Nuance marketing team must be hoping) being spread around the web without any indications that at least some of them were put there because of a competition. Perhaps it’s a shade better than Nuance paying influential bloggers or a viral marketing company to spread the warm and soft feelings about the software (and it’s probably a lot cheaper), but I really would prefer if the positive reviews that I read on the web are put there because the software (or whatever) is genuinely good, not because of the dangling carrot of winning a video game.

This is a blog entry about Dragon Naturally Speaking. If I entered, do you think I could win?

Balisage is the Entmoot of markup. The 2008 schedule is available at http://www.balisage.net/At-A-Glance.html.

For the second time in four months, I went to Boston and come away with a 900-page book. The second visit was a W3C XSL FO subgroup meeting, and the second book was Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment (2nd Ed.) (ISBN 0-201-43307-9).

The book is exceptional, and it has already been useful on one of my client projects. The only possible downside is that delving into this 900-page book further delays my completion of the other 900-page book.

The <oXygen/> documentation has an example of setting up an “External Tool” to run Ant. The example is simple enough to illustrate its point, but there’s more that can be done, especially if you write the Ant build file knowing that it will be run from <oXygen/>.

This example is from the <oXygen/> “project” that I used for organising the exercises for my “Testing XSLT” tutorial at XTech 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Running some JUnit tests with Ant 1.6.5 gave this error when the <junitreport> task ran:

build.xml:160: The following error occurred while executing this line:
build.xml:367: Could not find a valid processor version implementation
from net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl

I know of two possible solutions:

• Upgrade to using Ant 1.7.0, or
• Set ANT_OPTS thus:

  declare -x \
  ANT_OPTS=-Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerFactoryImpl