Dionys: Sorry to hear about missing the LPI exam again. And no, that I know of, there is no equivalent to LPI for the BSD world.

nymia: I think we are all on a journey to find out the message... best wishes for your journey.

Windows ssh and WinCVS - I am trying to advocate that some Windows-based folks consider using CVS. In order to do so, I needed to set up a sample environment. I have Win2K running in a VmWare session on my Linux laptop, so I followed the SourceForge instructions on setting up ssh to work on Windows. Then I set up WinCVS to work. And after a bit of tweaking of ssh (i.e. finding a program that would actually generate RSA keys), it all worked well.

The only thing that did not work is the display of files in WinCVS. I don't know if anyone else out there uses WinCVS, but once you import a module, it nicely shows up in the left pane. In the right pane, you see subdirectories of the module, and it seems like you should see files as well and be able to act on them. I don't see any files, though. If I switch to the Explore view, I do see them, but I would expect to also see them in the regular "Modules" view.

If anyone reading this has experience with WinCVS and has any ideas what is up, please email me. I am using WinCVS 1.2. Thanks.

More reasons NOT to use SVG - Beyond Kodak, now another example of why the SVG format should be avoided: LWN mentions that Apple has a patent that they will license under RAND terms. Read about it here and here.

Interestingly, Chris Lilly from the W3C indicates in his message that Kodak has released their claim on SVG and the SVG committee worked around Apple's issue. So perhaps the issue is a bit better than it appears. It would be nice if it were, as SVG seems to be an interesting format.

XSLT - During a break this afternoon, I took 10 minutes to enter an XSLT stylesheet found in O'Reilly's new "XSLT" book that counts up the elements in your XML file. Rather cool. Here is a taste of the output:

    $ xsltproc element-list.xsl sample.xml

     Summary of Elements

    Element author occurs 1 times.
    Element book occurs 1 times.
    Element bookinfo occurs 1 times.
    Element chapter occurs 1 times.
    Element emphasis occurs 2 times.
    Element imagedata occurs 2 times.
    Element para occurs 11 times.
    <output snipped for brevity>

     There are 45 elements in all.
    $

Now what is much more interesting is when I do it on the DocBook XML file for our user manual, as that is a much bigger file. What is useful to me is that I can see, for instance, that I have 93 <mediaobject> elements, yet only 92 <textobject> elements, meaning one of my images will not have an ALT attribute in HTML... so I can fix that. Rather cool stuff.

The West Wing - I thought the special episode they aired last night on terrorism was very well done. It dealt with the issues around terrorism and did so in, I thought, a balanced and thoughtful way. Quite good.

The only very minor quibble I had with it was with their geography at the beginning of things. Something bothered my last night at the very beginning when the FBI agent said that a suspected terrorist had crossed from Ontario into Vermont, but I couldn't place it. This morning's paper had the solution... Ontario does not have a border with Vermont! Vermont touches the Quebec border. Minor detail... and not something that detracted from the rest of the show.

Enterprise - Speaking of TV, I have now taped the 2-hr premiere of Enterprise and also the episode last night. I haven't had time to watch either, but look forward to doing so soon.

Time to go to OCLUG...