wp.jochen.hayek.name/blog-en

Category: Uncategorized

  • weird error messages during the DocBook Website compilation batch…

    Sometimes you really didn’t change anything crucial, and you find the new error messages just too obscure, then do this:
    $ make clean
    $ make realclean
    And most of the time the error messages ar gone. That worked at least for me.

  • “Judaism deals better with sex than Christianity”, says Swedish prof

    Interesting article in a way, but then: we are in the 21st century – WTF^H^H^H who cares for Stone Age books and their ancient morals?

  • 3rd party Facebook applications – use with caution!


    Right now there was yet another Internet service with a big Facebook button…
    When you press this button, and they ask you in a very tiny print, whether you allow them to pull your friendlist on Facebook, then press     Stop without further hesitating! They are simply bad. You don’t want get your friends dragged into your experiments, right? Sometimes they also say: “Let’s find you some friends?” That’s about the same. Don’t! Just don’t!

  • using SVG for graphics within HTML generated from DocBook Website

    I learned the hard way, that SVG graphics must get referenced via EMBED, not via IMG. I do that now.
    But still…
    I created a “generic logo”. It’s white on a transparent background, the real background determined by the context. That’s the idea. But I found this on the web – now I am confused:

    How do I set the background color of an SVG image?

    Sadly, SVG does not support directly specifying an image background color. With aiSee, however, you can easily work around this drawback by artificially enlarging the layout plane as follows: Open the SVG file with a text editor and manually adjust the four values of the viewBox attribute. This attribute is to be found in the third line of the SVG file.

    The idea is to share this logo with the DocBook community. So far all new DocBook Websites are branded NM like Norman Walsh, that’s because he started that software. I asked him for the sources of the logos a couple of days ago, but he couldn’t find them, and they were GIMP XFC anyway, and not scalable as SVG. SVG is the hit IMO. I thought I should mention this: I am using O’Reilly’s SVG Essentials, that’s IMO a great book, and you can read and print it for free on their O’Reilly Commons wiki.

     

  • editing XML documents in emacs using nxml-mode / cont’d

    I was suffering for many weeks now with emacs on Snow Leopard, as I had forgotten that nice customizable variable nxml-sexp-element-flag. Setting that one to t (Lisp, yes!!!) really gives XML editing a boost. Now you can “move” forwards and backwards beyond entire tags enclosing huge amounts of text. I had been too lazy digging into that thing the first time, I noticed XML editing on my Snow Leopard MacBook is harder than on my openSUSE Linux ASUS notebook. I do confess that. Being lazy is always bad.

  • this was a rather good day DocBookWebsite’ing

    Migrated all relevant web-sites to DocBook Website. Simple HTML from DocBook documents looks quite a little different and not so appealing. I can only recommend using DocBook Website.That’s another good reason, why I want to spread the good word of DocBook in Berlin. Have a look at the block “my most exciting web-sites” in the right column here!
    Update / 2010-07-15:
    If goals are easy to achieve, you don’t delay them for very long, you just do them. With DocBook Website things are easy to achieve, and I keep simplifying, improving, and renovating my web-site(s). I guess, the need to change will saturate rather sooner than later.
    Hayek.name is now as short and as nice, as it has never been before.
    BTW: Now I removed xmllint‘ing my documents from my Makefile, as it kept spitting out weird messages. Alright, I agree, that sounds rather silly, but … I use nxml-mode, and that constantly validates my documents, so I assume, I am on the safe side.

    The next step:
    Continuous Integration. That means, each web-sites gets recompiled, as soon as its sources got modified. Pretty cool stuff, serious!
    For now I am using the Unix batch command. Pretty neat as well, of course, but not as neat as Continuous Integration, that’s for sure.

  • an interview with Stevan Little about Moose

    Starting my day with an interview with Stevan Little about Moose, an idea I picked up from a tweet from perlbuzz, the twitterer.


    (Do I really have to keep in mind, that this will be picked up by ironman.enlightenedperl.org? BTW it’s bad, that they even match “perl” within words of my blog-articles, even if that does not have anything to do with perl as a programming language.)

    Listening to the “perlcast”,
    reading the text at the same time
    (keep in mind: I am not a native English speaker/reader/listener, so that helps!!),
    drinking my breakfast coffee …

    »Audrey coined the term “O-fun,” optimized for fun.«
    “O-fun” – I think I will use this term a lot from now on.

    »We’re hoping that Moore’s Law will catch up, and we’ll have a break.«

    »I didn’t want it to have “feature-itis”«

    »It’ll probably be a good idea to let people know where to go to get started if they wanted to learn about Mouse. …«
    »… Yes, we have the Moose.Perl.org domain. …
    The IRC channel has Moose on IRC.Perl.org. …
    And the mailing list.
    The mailing list has been getting a lot of traffic lately,
    which I’m very happy about
    because that means we have a lot of indexed content in there.«

    (wow, I am still learning how to make better use of my Mac keyboard.
    what do you think, where are these “guillemet” quotation characters hidden?
    at q like quotation, of course … .
    have a good laugh: at some stage, when I tried using that, I confused the Alt and the Cmd key, and … ;-( my browser shut down,
    but luckily enough it restarted with all the right places.)

    that perlcast was a very good thing to start my day with.
    it boosted my motivation to use Moose.

    this article was actually first “prepared” as a Google Buzz.
    follow me there, if you want!
    I would welcome that very much.

  • DocBook Website

    All the relevant pointers in one place:

    • Norman Walsh’s example on SourceForge – enjoy it!
      (IIRC he says, you shouldn’t regard the information contained in there as up-to-date)
    • the example within the Website release on SourceForge is slightly more extensive
    • the release notes for the current release on SourceForge
    • Bob Stayton’s book DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, chapter 31. Website
      (I do own the dead tree version of it, and if I got a bundle price for the PDF, I would go for it)
    • searching Bob Stayton’s book: “site:www.sagehill.net sitemap“
    • Dave Pawson’s article How to use the DocBook Website system
    • searching Dave Pawson’s article: “site:www.dpawson.co.uk website sitemap“
    • …

    DocBook, The Definitive Guide (the book) (I honestly do own various versions of it):

    • http://docbook.org/tdg/ – the book’s website
    • http://docbook.org/tdg5/ – the new book’s website (DocBook 5, The Definitive Guide)
    • http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html – the new book as HTML
    • http://docbook.org/tdg51/en/html/docbook.html – the book in progress as HTML
    • http://docbook.org/tdg51/en/html/variants.html#s.variants – Website only gets mentioned there
    • …
    General pointers:
    • http://wiki.docbook.org
    • …

    Update / 2010-07-24:

      I found the mailing list docbook-apps hosted on oasis-open.org very, very valuable.
      I read the mailing list archive via my newsreader at news.gmane.org.
      Not that you want to know that, but my newsreader is Gnus.

    • defunct Ethernet cables because of broken “thingie”

      Over the last many years quite some of my Ethernet cables got defunct because of that broken “thingie”, which should in theory make the plug stay in the jack. If you don’t replace the plug yourself (which looks quite difficult to me), you can just through the entire cable away. No shop offers a service to fix that. Why should they? They earn more money selling you new cables. Does anyone know of such a service anyhow?
      And if you tell me the proper name for that “thingie”, I will happily use it from now on.

    • DocBook Berlin – created the Google Group for the 1st regional DocBook User Group

      I am very excited about this.

      There is an exploding number of web views on that Google Group.
      Keep your fingers crossed, that there will be frequent activities soon.

      DocBook Website is going to revolutionise the activities necessary to set up static and almost static web-sites, it will not stay the gold mine for a few – it will be affordable for the many.

      DocBook Slides is the new way to create slides, forget everything before!

      Tell everybody about this user group in Berlin! Join “us” for learning and helping each others!