Life’s but a walking shadow…

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)

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?

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

I received a politely worded letter from Eircom telling me how happy they are to spam me with “special offers, price reductions and new products and services”. In fact, they’re so happy to do it that they’re going to do it even if I stop using Eircom.

Since I want to contribute to Eircom’s bottom line on my terms, not their’s, I’m sending back the opt-out form to the curiously named “Customer Suppressions Department”.

What, then, do they call the people who do the spamming? The “Customer Oppressions Department”?

I was going to do this on the day of the anniversary of my leaving Sun but, you know, I was too busy at the time.

In the past year I have:

• Helped companies and organisations in the USA, England, and France with their XSLT, XSL, and XML, including:
  • Making transforming to HTML go faster for an online retailer
  • Reviewing XSLT stylesheets and suggesting improvements for a major library
  • Writing XSLT for XML-XML transformations for a journal publisher
  • Specifying and implementing XSLT transformations for an archive service
  • Augmenting a XSLT-based automated schema documentation system that produces both HTML and PDF
  • Providing expert help to get a Perl XML::LibXSLT project off the ground
• Presented on XSLT profiling and unit testing at XTech 2007 in Paris in May
• Been selected to present training sessions on transitioning to XSLT 2.0 and on testing XSLT at XML 2007 in Boston in December
• Rejoined the W3C XSL FO subgroup as an invited expert
• Made four xmlroff releases, with another happening any day now
• Learned more about VAT and PRSI than I ever wanted to know (okay, maybe that’s not such a high point)
• Participated in the Workshop of the W3C Japanese Layout Taskforce in Tokyo in September
• Helped kids by completing two projects with the International Telementor Program

This is also the point at which I retire the “RIF” blog category as it has become irrelevant.

I have been selected to present two back-to-back training sessions at the XML 2007 conference in Boston in December: except, for, some, ne, \w, xsl:function: XSLT 2.0 for XSLT 1.0 practitioners and Testing XSLT.

The first one will, as the title says, be for people who know XSLT 1.0 and want to transition to using XSLT 2.0, and the second one will be a more practical expansion of the material covered in my XTech 2007 talk, My Stylesheet Runs, But….

In a week in Tokyo, I observed these signs that a foreigner may be a long-term resident:

• Carries an umbrella on the same days as everyone else
• Uses a “Suica” smartcard instead of individual tickets on JR trains
• Carries a flip-style phone (though may not spend entire train trips sending and receiving messages, as many Japanese do)
  • Extra points are awarded for having trinkets dangling from the phone

In Tokyo for the W3C Japanese Layout Taskforce meeting, I went to the first day of the Sumo basho with a friend. Firstly, I was amazed by the number of foreigners in the audience (as opposed to the number of foreigners competing), and secondly I was flabbergasted when one North American told his friends just as the top division was getting started that he was going to leave because his camera battery was going flat.

Whatever happened to experiencing something for its own sake? Is the experience only real if you can take photos of it? Is it only real if you can put photos of it on your social networking site? What about just staying with your friends while you all watch something unique to the country you are visiting and that you may never see again?

In Montréal for Extreme Markup 2007, I went to Marché Atwater to buy some maple syrup. When I wanted to know the weight of a pack of 8 cans of syrup, the syrup seller took me and the 8-pack next door to the fishmongers, and the fishmonger put the cans on her scale. She even set the price to $2.20/kg so I could see the weight in pounds if I’d wanted.

Since it was at that point I agreed to make the purchase, I’d say I did buy the maple syrup in the fishmongers.

After quite a few years with Hostway, I’ve changed over to WebFaction.

The good news is that the menteith.com website is now a Trac so I can host the tdtd code in public for the first time (and possibly also host the xslide code here), plus I expect better spam filtering and the blog software is more fully featured.

The bad news is that URLs to existing pages have had to change because I’m using a Trac and that I couldn’t properly export my blog entries from the previous benighted blog software, so blog entry URLs also changed and I lost the few non-spam comments that the entries had received.