Push Button Paradise

Chapter 4 is complete, or as close as it gets on the first pass. -m

Avoiding Writer's Procrastination

Sharyn McCrumb writes:

In 1986 when a publishing company accepted my four-page book proposal, the catch was this: In order to meet their spring deadline, the editor would need the completed novel in six weeks. I did not have six weeks to devote to writing a novel. I was working full time at the university. I was teaching a night class in fiction. I was taking two graduate English courses that semester, both requiring research papers. I had an eight-year-old daughter. I was six weeks pregnant, and I felt awful.

I wrote the book in six weeks.

But they didn't have blogs back in 1986... -m

If anyone here hasn't yet checked out the fresh Schema for XForms, I highly recommend it. There's already been lots of excellent feedback that I have yet to go through and incorporate. Thanks, and keep it coming! -m

New Stuff Up: XML Schema

A good chunk of chapter 4, covering XML Schema, is now online in the usual place. -m

Some amazing things that can be done with Mozilla bookmarks, JavaScript, and form submission. -m

Live from O'Reilly Open Source XTech convention

I'm really not much for live blogging. Conferences are just too exhausting as it is, so this will be short...

RMS donned holy garb. Some guy had an XForms presentation with standing room only. You heard it here.

Decent coverage. -m

The First Draft of my XTech presentation is now online. -m

Bob DuCharme kindly makes available his 99 page introduction to Emacs. -m

Windows CE Still Sucks

First impressions after playing around with a Windows CE device: Two crashes so far, one instance of the backlight mysteriously deactivating itself, one screen barely readable under direct overhead lighting, one instance of disappearing Start menu items, two instances of accidentally recorded audio, and I still can't get the 802.11 card to talk to my network. And still it gains market share from Palm.

There's also a petition. -m

Flash is now scriptable in Mozilla. Interesting. -m

Spam Getting Worse

My Yahoo! bulk mail filters are helping me track an unpleasant trend. Spam is getting bigger and more frequent. The average size of each piece of mail is 7.3Kb, multiplied by 169 messages for per week. (That only counts messages automatically caught by the system. Add about 15 more that slipped through and needed to be deleted manually).

That rate would completely fill a default sized mailbox in a month, or a much shorter time if you have the nerve to keep around useful things for storage. Ugh. -m

New draft up of an accessibility article for Doctor Dobb's. Comments welcome. -m

I'm thinking about using Python for a little project I have simmering. Some Python links:

Official Tutorial
Instant Hacking in Python
Dive Into Python (with XML examples)
The O'Reilly "Learning Python" book is also highly recommended. -m

ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. Free for personal use. -m

All links and no commentary lately. Oh well.

Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today. Wiggins has some good points, but that article has some glaring flaws. "No best browser?" (!) Has he heard of Mozilla? Also, he doesn't mention the two biggest problems: the need to compile device drivers and terrible built-in fonts.

Also worth reading: Why Aren't All Our Moms Running Linux? -m
-m

Dare Obasanjo on XPath pitfalls -m

Francis Norton's Locally Linked Infosets -m

Building Web Services the REST Way

By Roger L. Costello
-m

Some sage CSS advice from Ian Hickson

Micah Dubinko wrote:
>
> <input>
> <label>some text</label>
> <::pseudo-elem/>
> ...
> </input>

Horizontal, with the label on the left:

input { display: block; }
input > label { display: inline; }
input::pseud-elem { display: inline; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: table; }
input > label { display: table-cell; }
input::pseud-elem { display: table-cell; }

Horizontal, with the label on the right:

input { display: block; direction: rtl; }
input > label { display: inline; direction: ltr; }
input::pseud-elem { display: inline; direction: ltr; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: block; }
input > label { display: inline; }
input::pseud-elem { float: left; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: block; position: relative; height: 1em; }
input > label { position: absolute; top: 0; right: 0; width: 50%; }
input::pseud-elem { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 50%; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: table; }
input > label { display: table-caption; caption-side: right; }
input::pseud-elem { display: table-cell; }

Vertical, with the label on the top:

input { display: block; }
input > label { display: block; }
input::pseud-elem { display: block; }

Vertical, with the label on the bottom:

input { display: block; }
input > label { display: block; }
input::pseud-elem { display: block; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: table; }
input > label { display: table-footer-row; }
input::pseud-elem { display: table-row; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: block; position: relative; height: 2em; }
input > label { position: absolute; top: 0; height: 50%; }
input::pseud-elem { position: absolute; bottom: 0; height: 50%; }

...or variations on the following theme:

input { display: table; }
input > label { display: table-caption; caption-side: bottom; }
input::pseud-elem { display: table-cell; }

Thanks! -m

Wireless LAN resources for Linux

A big part of the reason for keeping a blog is for my own reference, and not necessarily for the two or three people who regularly visit this site.

DocBookLite tools check:
Don't use <informalexample> or <informalfigure>
Don't use numeric character references. Use named references.
A <title> on a <note> or <warning> will be ignored
Always use a cols attribute on <tgroup>