Push Button Paradise

NoteLiner gets go-ahead

In my spare hours, I'll be helping out the friendly Chandler folks by designing a "NoteLiner" parcel--part notepad, part outliner. At the early stage, I'll probably spend a good deal of time just staying in sync with the changing tree, but at the same time I'll get to help figure out how things will work.

A good part of this stems from my frustration with today's batch of tools for simply keeping track of basic information. Most people don't even realize how much they need this software... -m

Under the deceptively simple heading of "Log Format Roadmap", Sam Ruby has started the ball rolling on a new format that will be all the things that RSS was supposed to be.

I'll start by suggesting a few requirements:

1. The format should be readily displayable by applying CSS to the raw XML


2. The format should be readily editable by standards-based tools, including XForms

In Amsterdam...

In Amsterdam all week, at an XHTML and XForms face to face meeting. Lots of goodness coming soon on both fronts. -m

Another great xml.com episode this week.

I am naturally partial to the part of Kendal Clark Kent's article which states:

The mention of YAML was enough to send many XML-DEV participants off into another (fairly dull) discussion of the documents versus data perspective. That conversation didn't yield much new except for Micah Dubinko's half-serious suggestion that there should be a YAML syntax for RDF, which led Dubinko himself to suggest a CSS syntax for RDF, specifically as a way of integrating RDF and XHTML. We may be hearing more about approaches like this in the future.

OpenOffice on OS X

Here's a hint that doesn't readily appear on Google:

If you are running OpenOffice 1.0.1.3 Final Beta for OS X, and using the Apple X11 implementation, then you must ignore the following instructions for running in a shell, which appear at the end of the OpenOffice install:

% setenv DISPLAY localhost:0
% setenv DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.1/program:/Applications/
    OpenOffice.org1.0.1/program/filter:/usr/X11R6/lib
% cd /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.1/program
% sh soffice

salogl.cxx/GetOGLFnc():  Could not load symbol glFlush
dyld: /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.1/program/soffice.bin Undefined symbols:
OpenGL undefined reference to _gll_noop expected to be defined in /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib
OpenGL undefined reference to _gll_pkey expected to be defined in /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib
Trace/BPT trap

Come see me at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, which has now completely subsumed the X'Tech conference. My half-day tutorial session, "Putting XForms to Work", is Tuesday morning, July 8, 2003. -m

First weekend on a Mac: Impressions after one weekend of Mac usage.

Fantastically good: The hardware is wonderful. The 15.2 inch screen is huge, the biggest non-CRT monitor I have. The picture is sharp, bright, and Aqua can't be beat for a sheer good-looking interface. The memory handling and multitasking puts Windows XP to shame. Instead of quitting often-used applications, I can just Apple+H (hide) them off the screen. Battery life is good at about 2hr 40min, with continuous Wi-fi and hard drive access.

Different: I miss home, end, page up, and page down keys. I tend to do alot of keyboard navigation, reading long documents, and having to two-hand the fn+arrow key is annoying. I'll also have to come down on the side of preferring 2-button mice, and I really like having a mouse wheel. I picked up a tiny USB optical mouse.

Bad: This machine just barely pre-dates the 10.2 update. Have you noticed how much Apple software doesn't work with 10.1? Safari, Java 1.4, X11, and realistic write access (without ._* files) to Windows shares. 3rd party software, namely OpenOffice, also isn't supported on 10.1, which has put a kink in my work style. I've already paid the OSX task and ordered a Jaguar upgrade. By the time I get settled with that, 10.3 will be out...

Overall, this is a solid machine that I expect will last for several years, in contrast to my prior HP piece of junk. Predictably, Apple lowered prices immediately after I bought, but since I picked up a slightly-older model, I still came out ahead of even today's lower prices.

Now, back to work. -m