November 30, 2004

EContent 100

EContent Magazine came out with the EContent 100, their annual list of "companies that matter most in the digital content industry." It's an interesting mix of technology and content companies, and also includes some of the smallest and biggest companies in the business.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:48 PM

November 29, 2004

This is Cool

Red Sox fans will appreciate this. You can read about the technology here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:10 PM

November 28, 2004

Little Feat

I don't get a chance to listen to much music. Sometimes, in the car, I get an uninterrupted 30 minutes or so, and I lean pretty heavily on the cassette tapes close at hand--a lot of Springsteen, some Dylan, and small equal parts of Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, and Van Morrison. I also like acoustic music; I could listen to Greg Brown all day.

Of course, I don't have all day, so a lot of stuff goes unlistened. Take Little Feat, for example. They were my lifeline, for a few years at the very end of high school and the beginning of college. Then founder and lead singer Lowell George died in my sophmore year of college. I wrote a horribly bad tribute to him for my college paper, but then moved on. By the end of college I was seven parts Bruce Springsteen to three parts acoustic music, and I haven't moved much from that since.

But Little Feat has such a great sound, and when I hear them I rocket back to a time when listening to music was pure joy. My friends and I had a blast, with Little Feat as a backdrop. Yes, if you know Little Feat you know the many obvious allusions to drugs in their lyrics. But it was more than that. It was offbeat, playful songs like "Dixie Chicken" and "Tripe Face Boogie," and sweet plaintive songs like Missing You."

Something the other day got me thinking about the Little Feat song Willin" and the silly little argument my friends and I used to have over the lyrics in the refrain. The correct lyric is, "And if you give me weed, whites and wine/ And you show me a sign/ And I'll be willin' to be movin'..." Some of us would argue that it wasn't "weed, whites, and wine"; rather it was "weed, rice, and wine" or "wheat, rice, and wine." I forget how we ever settled it, but we finally did.

I have this pet theory that the ready access to the Internet basically puts an end to all such squabbles. Have a question? Google it, and voila, there is the answer. So I googled the lyrics, and not only did I find the correct ones, but I also found a Google answers discussion correcting someone who made the "wheat, rice, and wine" mistake.

Here is the really funny thing, though. The "wheat" vs. "weed" line isn't even the tricky part of the lyric though. The refrain actually begins with a couplet that we obviously never figured out, and never even bothered to argue about:

And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonopah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the backroads so I wouldn't get weighed...

My recollection is that we knew to sing... "Tucson to Tucumcari," but the next line is only a vague memory. I asked my wife, also of that era, and she thought the line mentioned "Chesapeake," but I completely drew a blank. Did any of us even have a clue?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:25 AM

November 26, 2004

Writing Copy for Dummies

My friend and colleague Jonathan Kranz has a new book out, Writing Copy for Dummies. Jonathan is a very sharp guy, and principal of Kranz Communications, an award-winning writing firm that helps leading agencies tackle their most difficult marketing, advertising, and public relations assignments in numerous consumer and B2B industries. Like the other Dummy books, Writing Copy for Dummies is an expert's take on the subject, but written for people from other fields with a need to know. As Jonathan suggests, many people have to do some copy writing in the course of their work. This book is a great introduction to the topic, and very well written.

For more information on Jonathan's company, see his web site.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:19 PM

November 24, 2004

Multiple Content Repositories

My colleague Mark Walter has an excellent new case study over at the Gilbane Report web site. The case study is entitled, Wachovia's CAS: Harnessing the Value of Multiple Content Repositories Across a Large Enterprise. The abstract:

Wachovia's Content Access Services (CAS) infrastructure is a layer of middleware that provides a unified programming interface to a variety of content repositories spread across multiple business units of a large financial services company. Developed over a series of projects, CAS illustrates the speed to market that an effective enterprise content integration strategy can bring to organizations that grow through mergers and acquisitions. It also shows how content integration eases the transitions that organizations face as they retire aging systems and bring in new ones. Lastly, CAS demonstrates how content-integration services provide ongoing payback, cutting development costs by enabling new capabilities that leverage at a corporate level the investments that individual business units make in content management. Wachovia's recipe for success includes a pay-as-you-go approach to developing the architecture, a noninvasive approach to deploying it, and a progressive approach to continually improving it.

Mark is always worth reading, and Wachovia is an interesting case study.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:24 AM

The More Things Change

According to Google Zeitgeist, "perl programming" was the second-most popular technology search in October 2004.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:47 AM

November 23, 2004

Follow-up on DITA

I am winding down my work on DITA, and I wanted to thank everyone who has corresponded with me during this process. I will post a link to the white paper when it goes up on the Gilbane Report site.

I may still work on a resource list about DITA, but Robin Cover's list of DITA resources is already so good I may not bother.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:45 PM

November 19, 2004

Another Take on XForms

Phil Jones of the UK publication Infoconomy has a thoughtful article about XForms. (Requires free registration.)

(OK, OK, and he quoted me.)

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:44 PM

November 18, 2004

I Like a Company ...

... That's not afraid to choose a cute name. I always thought Stratify, while a fine company, was much better as Purple Yogi. But nobody asked me.

UPDATE: And then a Webinar invitation from this company lands in my inbox today.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:34 PM

November 17, 2004

Sports

Regular readers know I am a baseball fan. I have, at different times been crazy about all of the Boston teams, but the Red Sox have always been my one true devotion. My interest in every other sports waxes and wanes. I loved the Patriots as a little kid, and flirted with them again in my teens. I was rabid about the Bruins the whole time I played hockey, and into my early 20s. I am probably a fair weather fan when it comes to the Celtics; I have watched them in three phases of greatness that have coincided with my sports-watching career--the tail end of the Bill Russell era, the John Havlicek-Dave Cowens era, and the Larry Bird era.

I really don't watch much professional basketball anymore, and the professional hockey season is currently not happening and no one has yet noticed. Of course, I watch a lot of soccer and basketball because my sons play.

I watch the Patriots now. Partly because they are a dynasty in the making, of course, but also because my sons love football, and they love the Patriots. I can't say I blame them. Even with the Red Sox winning the World Series this year (wow, that was cool to type!), my boys have already learned the bittersweet reality of being a Red Sox fan. The end of the 2003 season devastated them, and as early as 1999 they watched the Sox flame out in the playoffs.

The Patriots, on the the other hand, are the anti-Red Sox. They win when they are supposed to win, and often win when they are not supposed to. Confounding, weird things happen to their opponents, and not to them. They are competent and uncontroversial. Their coach is a measured, intellectual guy. The owners are liberal-minded, successful, and fan-oriented. (Considering the Patriots were kind of the joke of professional football for their first 30-odd years, this is especially remarkable.)

This year, they also have the element I love to see in football--and that is the big, powerful running back. This year it is Corey Dillon. My first Patriots hero was Jim Nance, to my thinking the most underrated power runner of his time. Later, the Patriots had a big back named Sam Cunningham, whose nickname, "The Bam," pretty much summed up his style. When the Patriots had the ball close to the goal line, Sam was fond of leaping over the pile of players into the end zone. When he did this as a rookie, an opposing veteran claimed he would rid Sam of the habit by driving his helmet into Sam's Adam's Apple. But either it never happened, or it did and Sam didn't notice, because he kept doing that leap throughout his career.

Dillon, halfway through the season, already has 900 yards rushing, which would be impressive for an entire year. At this rate, he would get 1800 yards, which would be a Patriots record, I am quite sure, but who knows what the rest of the season will bring. We shall see. But it is a pleasure watching him run over people.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:05 AM

November 16, 2004

This is Great

One of my favorite series of books over the years has been the Paris Review Interviews, which have been rolled up into a series of books called, Writers at Work. Starting in the 1950s, then-editor George Plimpton and later others interviewed many of the great living writers. Now these interviews are becoming available on the Web. Some of the interviews up there already include Truman Capote, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, and Dorothy Parker.

I am still checking it out, but it looks like the interviews will be coming out in phases. The full interviews are downloaded as PDFs, which are nice and clear but don't look like the typography from the books. They do include a favorite feature from the books--most (all?) interviews began with a facsimile of a manuscript page, showing, typically, typewritten manuscript with the author's edits in pen or pencil. I always found the interviews--and the manuscript pages--a wonderful glimpse into the creative process of giants.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:58 PM

November 15, 2004

Ulysses, Redux

Well, I have been silent about Ulysses for a while, but I am making progress. I finished the Circe chapter last night, and have just started on the final section, The Nostos. I like how the opening chapter of The Nostos, Eumeus, is illustrated in the Ulysses for Dummies very very short version.

In other news, I am teetering toward pursuing a very old interest, collecting matchbooks. Long story, but I did this for several years as a kid, but lost my collection. We had our church fair this past weekend, and there was a massive collection for sale. I am ruminating about it as we speak.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:54 PM | Comments (2)

Acrobat 7.0 Announced

Adobe announced Acrobat 7.0 today. One of the interesting things about Acrobat 7.0 is that the forms designer product, Adobe Designer, is now part of Acrobat Professional. I will be getting a copy of Acrobat 7.0 Professional at the end of December and will let you know what I think.

UPDATE: One of my favorite speakers, Chuck Myers, Technology Strategist in the ePaper Solutions Group at Adobe, will be demonstrating some of the new Acrobat 7.0 eForms features as part of my eForms panel at the Gilbane Conference.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:24 PM

Your Thoughts on Enterprise DRM Panel?

We have a panel on Enterprise DRM at the upcoming Gilbane Conference. I will be moderating it, and we have the following panelists:

I will start out by asking at least two panelists to answer the following questions, and have told them they can all jump in on any of these questions.

By this point, I think the audience is going to be chiming in, so I am going to be very flexible after the first few questions. However, I will have a number of other questions ready to ask, depending on time, the themes that come up, etc. Here are a few more I will have ready, and please let me know if there are others you would like me to bring up.

Other topics people would like to see discussed?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:28 PM

November 12, 2004

Firefox

I have whined here in the past about my battles with spyware. This led me to switch to a Netscape browser on my home machine, but I have continued to run IE on my (Windows XP) notebook. Yesterday I was having sporadic problems reaching Google, and after a little analysis, decided that my browser had been hijacked again. So I took a colleague's advice and installed Firefox.

Lo and behold, I still had trouble getting to Google, but, damn, I like Firefox. (Not sure what the network problem was; it affected the three machines on my home network, and was resolved overnight.) I have not done any blow-by-blow analysis yet of Firefox vs. IE, but Firefox seems much more responsive. The application starts much more quickly, and I can add new windows (Ctrl+N) immediately. (This is something I do all the time when I am researching and writing. If I find something of interest, I leave the window open and start a new one. Another nice feature of Firefox is that the new window reverts to my start page and not the page currently displayed, which is also very useful.) The built-in popup blocking is quite good, and I really like the download manager.

So I am going to stick with it. I have noticed a couple of small things already. I can't run my Onfolio tool from withink Firefox (maybe I need to reinstall it? I will check), and it looks like some favorite pages work a little differently. But I may have myself a new browser.

UPDATE: I found the answer to my Onfolio question. They have a new beta coming out that will support Foxfire.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:32 PM | Comments (4)

November 11, 2004

Manufacturing and Content Management

I am doing some writing on content management and manufacturing companies. My premise is that more B2B Ecommerce is happening impersonally, so a manufacturer's or distributor's web site has to be rich with product information.

I would love to speak with people who have some persective on this. Please post here or email me at btrippe@nmpub.com if you would like to discuss this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:19 AM

November 9, 2004

XML and Multilingual Documentation

I have a new article in Transform magazine about how Mercury Marine is using XML and a content management system from Vasont to improve development of multilingual documentation. To quote briefly from the article:

People who know boats probably know Mercury Marine, and if they own one of the company's sterndrive, outboard or inboard engines, they also know that it comes with a lot of documentation. What they probably don't know is just how hard it is to deliver those documents.

Like most durable goods manufacturers, Mercury has to develop owner's manuals, service manuals, parts catalogs and other owner and dealer publications both in print and online, and in as many as 15 languages. With so much publishing, Mercury faced growing problems. A legacy Interleaf system simply could not produce some of the foreign languages. Moreover, the company discovered that many groups were handling publishing on their own, and there were multiple authoring and composition systems in use.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:18 PM

November 4, 2004

Upgrade XMLSpy?

I am not a power user of XMLSpy, by any means, but I do several projects a year with it and have had very good success. I am still running XMLSpy Enterprise Edition, version 2004, release 3, but they have come up with a new release. Are people going with the upgrade? If so, why? If not, why not?

Thanks,

Bill

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:33 AM

November 3, 2004

One Last Baseball Quote for Now

I often share the following quote with friends at the end of the baseball season. Like the one in the previous entry, it is from the late (and great) A. Bartlett Giamatti, who in his lifetime was a Renaissance scholar, President of Yale University, and the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. If there were a baseball team of intellectual gods, Giamatti would hit cleanup in my lineup.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today... a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM

Another Baseball Quote

"Much of what we love later in a sport is what it recalls to us about ourselves at our earliest. And those memories…are not simply of childhood or of a childhood game. They are memories of our best hopes. They are memories of a time when all that would be better was before us, as a hope, and the hope was fastened to a game. One hoped not so much to be the best who ever played as simply to stay in the game and ride it wherever it would go, culling its rhythms and realizing its promises. That is I think, what it means to remember one's best hopes, and to remember them in a game, and revive them whenever one sees the game played, long after playing is over."

A. Bartlett Giamatti, from his book, Take Time for Paradise

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:48 PM

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