olpa, OSS developer

Inspired by Google feature of converting units, such as “20 euro to usd”, I tried to ask for “Sat, 1 Jul 2006 14:01:40 -0700 PDT to GMT”. Unfortunately, Google don’t understand it.
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Aggressive antispammers are much more worse than spammers. My xmlhack.ru and uucode.com providers are victims of them. Now I lose a part of my incoming email, and people sometimes don’t get my messages. I’m furious.

Looking into DocBook SVN, I’ve found an interesting development: “[docbook]/trunk/xsl/highlighting” with the comment “Initial support of syntax highlighting of programlistings”. Being the author of “Syntax highlighting for DocBook program listings“, I’m going to ping Jirka Kosek. Oh, there is also a project named “XSLT syntax highlighting“.

My home page and resume are re-factored and updated. It’s something what should be done regularly, but I’ve found time only now.

Time to time I order translations of xml.com articles. It’s not cheap, and I try to reduce costs. One of the most obvious approaches is to ignore code listings when calculating the price. Till recently, I did it as follows.

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I’m tired of “favicon.ico” entries in error_logs of my sites, so I’ve decided to fix this problem.

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For important texts, I prefer to print them on paper and read in peace. The last time I did it was for the XTech 2006 slides. Unfortunately, I didn’t find how to print several slides on page in ooimpress, so I implemented a workaround:

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I leave the home today and go to Amsterdam. The bad news is that I can’t take my notebook with me, so Developers Corner might miss TeXML. I hope I’ll be able to borrow a notebook at the place, but the probability of this solution is low.

Yet again, I’ve been affected by an xsltproc bug. If the result is empty, then the output file isn’t changed. As result, sometimes chained transformations continue with the wrong data. It is reported to libxslt bugzilla, but, unfortunately, it’s WONTFIX.

$ xmllint --noout http://googletalk.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://googletalk.blogspot.com/atom.xml:32: namespace error :
  Namespace prefix o on p is not defined
<o:p/>We've been collecting suggestions ...

I think the specification is enough to convert Open Office documents, but the books also might be useful:
* OASIS OpenDocument Essentials
* OpenOffice.org XML Essentials

The most popular type of postings in xml-dev starts with “[ANNOUNCE] Hello Everyone, Stylus Studio has just…” And now I found them in my Russian-speaking (!) forum. Now I’m in doubt. Should I say kudos to their marketing department, or should I treat them as usual spammers?

I’ve got a translation of the Uche’s article “Microformats in Context“.

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Code examples are more readable when code is highlighted. To assist with highlighting, I’ve just released a simple online colorizer tohtml.com. Comments are welcome. Feel encouraged to populate this link.

Now I’m not so excited as earlier, but I can’t miss Dr. Macro’s post about Roomba.

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I’ve purchased a Virtual Private Server for my new project. The first thing to do is to make mail working. Initially, I want the most trivial setup: all domain mail should be forwarded to my gmail account.

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I like not to read from screen, but to print and read texts offline. Today I tried to print an usenet discussion from the Google groups interface. Unfortunately, there is no printer-friendly version, and copy-paste to OpenOffice is very ugly. Finally, I made copy-paste of text content of each message. Very frustrating.

I sometimes need to convert a lot of files from one format to another. When the task is a one-time task, it’s better to use the “for” loop in shell, but when the task is repeating, it’s better to use a make file. Here is one of such make files.

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Screen Captures (pdf)

This document is about making screen captures for technical writers working primarily in a Microsoft Windows environment. The tools targeted include Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, along with Techsmith’s SnagIt, Adobe Photoshop, and Ulead’s PhotoImpact 4.2.

Certainly, the thoughts and techniques mentioned herein can be applied to other professions, other operating systems, and other tools.

Adobe Illustrators seems to be a very good tool, even although I’ve never used it. Unfortunately, I have problems with AI results exported as SVG and EPS.

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