One year ago today... my wife Lori and I (and our greyhound Atticus) crossed the U.S./Canada border at the tiny border crossing of Rock Island, Quebec. We stopped there for about an hour while they processed my work authorization (at which point I could work in Canada!), and then drove to our temporary home for six weeks at the Les Suites hotel in downtown Ottawa.
What an incredible year it has been! And now we love Ottawa and seriously are considering staying here for quite a long time... and I have to say that this company is by far one of the best groups of people with whom I have ever had the privilege to work! It is truly a great place to be.
Save LWN! - In their latest edition of LWN, the folks there put out a call for help about how to stay in business. Personally, I view LWN as one of the best resources for news that we in the Linux community have, and would encourage everyone to take a look at what they wrote and join the discussion. Somehow, we need to keep them with us.
DocBook resources - Learned of two new online resources for people working with DocBook:
- Tim Waugh's "Selfdocbook" - Available at http://cyberelk.net/tim/docbook/selfdocbookx/. Tim is the packager of Red Hat's DocBook tools and has been trying to keep up with patches, etc., to make sure that the latest tools are available. This guide he wrote is a "self-documenting introduction to DocBook (XML)". In a quick look through it seems to be a nice example that people can use to learn by example... especially if they are interested in breaking a DocBook document out into multiple smaller files that are integrated together. It is nice to see him reference DV's libxslt.
- Dave Pawson's DocBook FAQ - Available at
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/.
Dave has been a long-time participant in various DocBook
mailing lists and
has been involved with SGML/XML/DSSSL/XSLT issues for
quite some time. He is
building out a FAQ to hit major questions people have
about DocBook. It is
just starting out, but should be quite a helpful resource
over time.
W3C Patents - It is good to see that Bruce Perens is joining the W3C Patent Policy Board. Very good news, indeed.
XML-RPC - I find myself very interested in XML-RPC for some different ideas. I found this HOWTO particularly helpful. I downloaded the latest python library to try it out. Interesting stuff...
Upgrading to Red hat 7.1 - As I got myself into RPM dependency hell last week, I decided to upgrade my desktop system at work from RH 6.2 to RH 7.1. It was quite interesting to browse through all the choices of packages as I was deciding what to add (or subtract) to (from) my system. But two CDs for the install... it's a long way from that Slackware install I did onto a laptop using, I think, 14 floppy disks!
Upgrade went well... only annoying thing is that now 'onsgmls' is more particular about SGML validation. It will no longer let me do:
<imagedata fileref="foo.jpg" format="JPG"/>
But instead I need to do the correct SGML form of:
<imagedata fileref="foo.jpg" format="JPG">
which creates a problem when I want to have one file that is both SGML and XML. Weird thing is that it worked fine with the version of openjade that I compiled myself. Now it will not.
Misc...
jfleck: Well-written article! I enjoyed reading it (the one you wrote about the geologist). Thanks for the pointer.
jooon: Ich wuensche Ihnen viel Glueck! Als es nicht viele Deutschspraecher im Ottawa gibt, kann ich mein Deutsch nicht benuetzen oder ueben. Ich werde schon viel vergessen.
Ilan: I always liked that quote from Dune, too.
Off to another night of curling...