August 31, 2007
DCL's DITA Test Drive
Over at The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel shares his enthusiasm for the "DITA Test Drive" offering from Data Conversion Labs.
Sometimes the sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming. Even with the help of Google Alerts and RSS feeds, it’s easy to miss interesting news. That’s likely the reason we failed to notice this especially interesting offer from the folks at Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). It’s called the DITA Test Drive Challenge, a program that allows content-heavy organizations a shortcut to DITA. For $3000 (okay, $2995, technically), DCL will convert 500 pages of legacy content to DITA and perform a Content Reuse Analysis on 2500 pages of legacy content. Wow! That’s quite an offer. Why would you want to take advantage of this offer? Because there’s a dirty little secret in XML authoring land. It’s next to impossible to evaluate an XML authoring tool without actually using some of your own content in it. Testing an XML editor with your own content will help you avoid selecting the wrong authoring tool for your organization. Those who skip this step generally purchase software based on the opinions of others and sometimes after having downloaded a free trial version of the software (which is pretty useless without your own DTD and some real content).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:39 PM
August 25, 2007
Calling all DITA Tutorials
Bob Doyle is organizing a DITA Tutorial Project.
Will you help us to develop tutorials for DITA Users? Have you prepared a presentation or written an article on DITA that could be the basis for a tutorial? Have you recorded a webinar (vendor webinars are welcome - if they teach DITA using their product). Read more
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:23 AM
August 23, 2007
My bad...
Someone had a birthday yesterday and I forgot!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:51 PM
August 20, 2007
Unicode and Microsoft Internet Explorer
A scientific publishing client writes:
"We are making great progress converting all our documents to HTML (from SGML). One challenge we are facing is how to convert Unicode character entities into characters displayable in Internet Explorer. It appears that Netscape and Firefox work much better than IE in displaying Unicode. One option is to create glyphs for all of the non displayable characters; but, there are hundreds of them and that is not realistic for us.
Do you know how other publishers are handling the display of these special characters? If the characters appear in display equations, we are creating gifs. Our challenge is for those characters that appear in text, which are now displaying as boxes in IE. For example, the entity bsime is used for similar or equal to. Unicode represents this as ⋍ and it should display as ⋍ (Editor's note: you are seeing this if you viewing this in Firefox or Netscape!)
Are there plug ins or sites that have all the glyphs or does Microsoft have special setups, etc? We have the same question out to a few of our vendors to see if they can help as well. This has become the critical path for us."
Thoughts?
UPDATE:
I forgot to post this awhile ago. My colleague Marc Dashevsky worked with the client and they came up with the following:
In short, the problem is solely with Internet Explorer V6.x. The Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7.x all display the same subset of Unicode. Following is a description of the testing.
He set up his system as follows:
* The font Arial Unicode MS was already installed on his system.
* He explicitly set, in Internet Explorer, Arial Unicode MS to be the Web Page Font (Tools->Internet Options->Fonts).
* He ensured that Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape were all using UTF-8 encoding.
He then visited a web page that lists many characters in ISO 8859-1.
Just as the client had experienced with with uncommon characters displayed in its HTML pages, on this page the Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7 displayed many characters not displayed by Internet Explorer V6. All browsers successfully displayed all characters listed in the Latin Extended-A block. However when he got to characters in the Minimum European Subset (a.k.a. the Multilingual European Subset No. 2), Internet Explorer V6 displayed open rectangles while Mozilla browsers displayed appropriate glyphs. (An open rectangle means that Internet Explorer knows what character it has encountered, but it cannot find a glyph to display it.)
There clearly is some problem with Internet Explorer V6, and it is not likely that there is a work-around for it. Microsoft fixed the problem in V7 and he is certain they have no interest in retrofitting it to V6.
Marc's solution is to have everyone switch to Firefox.
Makes sense to me.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM
Semantic Web Strategies Conference Program is Ready
Bob DuCharme reports that the Semantic Web Strategies program is ready.
I'm very happy to announce that the program for the Semantic Web Strategies conference in San Jose September 30 - October 2nd is finished and available. For keynote speakers, we've got some well-known names who all bring a combination of experience and creativity to their semantic web work: Eric Miller, Nova Spivack, and Kingsley Idehen. We also have presentations on many interesting projects from large and small organizations and well-known semantic web companies such as TopQuadrant, Zepheira, and Access Innovations (of DataHarmony fame) as sponsors.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:57 PM
August 17, 2007
The Times are Never So Bad
This is cool. A new documentary about my man, Andre Dubus, debuted this month. It looks like I will have a few chances to see it this fall. I took a minute to update my Dubus aStore to include two Hollywood films that have been made, based upon his work.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 AM
August 11, 2007
Comcast Hates You: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts
Well, they do if you use their high-speed Internet service and want to send email.
I have Comcast at home for cable, Internet, and digital phone. I haven't been an unhappy customer by any means, though I have always found them expensive and Luddite. I got a kick out of it a few weeks ago when they called out of nowhere to announce a price drop, but this was on or about the day my city government approved Verizon to provide FIOS service here. Competition is a wonderful thing.
So anyway, yesterday I was working at home and I found my email was not sending successfully. I didn't fuss it with it much for a bit, as I was busy with some work. When I started to debug it, though, I was able to figure out it wasn't local to my machine. We have three machines on a secure wireless network hung off the cable modem, and none of the three was successfully sending email. So I got online to chat with Comcast.
This was the start of my fun. Here's the Reader's Digest version of a much longer and more frustrating conversation I had:
Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express (the only email client they officially support, as they distribute it)?
Still Agreeable Me: No, the problem is not with the client. I have several machines with different clients, and they are all having the same problem.
Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: Since you don't need help configuring Outlook Express, bye and have a nice day!
Still Agreeable Me: Wait! None of the email clients work and they have all worked fine for years. What is the difference?
Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: (Long delay, mumble, mumble.) Oh, you were sending too much email (more than 100!), so we blocked your access to port 25.
Still Sort-of-Agreeable Me: Oh? I suddenly became a spammer after several years of never having been one? I run up-to-date security software on all my machines. Which one caused the problem?
Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: Comcast values your security [Ed note: Clearly a cut and paste!] and we cannot tell you that. However, if you follow this 12-foot-long instruction and send an email from your Comcast email, it will direct you to a URL that will explain how to unblock port 25.
I don't use Comcast email, but I had set up a Comcast login, so, good little computer user that I am, I tried what he said.
It didn't work of course.
So I called this time.
Distressed Me: I was online, trying to get my email to work, port 25 is blocked, I tried his suggested fix, and it didn't work.
Clueless Comcast Support Person #2: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express?
Aggravated Me: No, it has nothing to do with my client. You blocked my access to port 25, and I can't send...
Clueless Comcast Support Person #2: Since you don't need help configuring Outlook Express, bye and have a nice day!
Infuriated Me: If you say the words "Outlook Express" one more time, I am going to kill you. You are blocking my outgoing port for alleged security problems. Your fix didn't work. What can be done?
Clueless Comcast Support Person #2: (Long delay, mumble, mumble.) Our security department is going to look into it and it will be fixed in 24 hours.
This morning, I got online again, new guy.
Tired-but-Somehow-Hopeful-Me: I was checking to see if the problem with my email has been resolved? And please don't mention Outlook Expr...
Clueless Comcast Support Person #3: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express?
Ready-to-be-Livid-Me: Please look up my account details for the history on this problem.
Clueless Comcast Support Person #3: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express?
Livid-Me: Are you going to unblock port 25 or not?
Suddenly Clueful Comcast Support Person: We do not lift blocks on port 25.
Cool-as-a-Cucumber-Me: Do you have the number for Verizon?
POSTSCRIPT: I ended up talking with someone in Comcast security. Despite what the first two support people told me, they do not selectively lift blocks on port 25. He did not have information about whether my connection was used to spam (I am virtually certain it has not been), but implied instead that they are doing this across the board.
The fix is challenging. Comcast's online help--and the tech support people--are only prepared to help you reconfigure a comcast.net email to use an alternate port, port 587. They do not tell you how to configure other email addresses. What I ended up doing was configuring my other emails to use smtp.comcast.net for the outgoing email server (port 587). This works from here, and I am hoping it will also work when I am using this laptop elsewhere.
I find a few things about this episode absolutely amazing.
-- If Comcast is doing this to more than a few people, they are astonishingly arrogant to roll something like this out without informing people. I found a number of other blogs discussing this.
-- Comcast hates their customers, but they also hate their tech support staff. Imagine having calls coming in about something you don't have a clue how to answer?
-- Is it a blanket change in using this port, as the security guy said, or was something happening on my connection? Who knows, but Comcast should have their story straight.
If Comcast is doing this, as the other blogs suggest, to combat spam, well, good for them. I hate spam. But if they are taking my money, they should spend some of it to roll out such changes in a thoughtful, well supported way. Their tech support folks should be better informed, and their online doc and Help should address the thousands of users like me who use non-comcast.net emails.
UPDATE: Another blogger says Comcast's port change will be ineffectual against spammers.
ANOTHER UPDATE: My fix works at home, but not at my office, where I had to revert to the old port and the old SMTP server. So either I need to find a more general fix or toggle between the two sets of settings (I have four emails...). Fun, fun, fun!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:21 PM | Comments (4)
August 9, 2007
Matinee
American Life in Poetry: Column 124
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
Here is a lovely poem about survival by Patrick Phillips of New York. People sometimes ask me "What are poems for?" and "Matinee" is an example of the kind of writing that serves its readers, that shows us a way of carrying on.
Matinee
After the biopsy,
after the bone scan,
after the consult and the crying,
for a few hours no one could find them,
not even my sister,
because it turns out
they'd gone to the movies.
Something tragic was playing,
something epic,
and so they went to the comedy
with their popcorn
and their cokes,
the old wife whispering everything twice,
the old husband
cupping a palm to his ear,
as the late sun lit up an orchard
behind the strip mall,
and they sat in the dark holding hands.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Patrick Phillips, whose latest book is Chattahoochee, University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Reprinted from the "Greensboro Review," Fall 2006, No. 80, with permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:18 AM
August 8, 2007
Gilbane Boston: Enterprise Publishing Technology
For this fall's Gilbane Boston, we have some some sessions on enterprise publishing technology. The session include: DITA: One Size Fits All for Technical Publishing?; Technologies for Multi-Channel, High-Volume, High-Quality Publishing; and Metadata for Content Management and Publishing.
If you have thoughts about a talk in one of these sessions, please email me.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:22 PM
NY Times to Make TimesSelect Free
Barry Graubart weighs in on the decision at the New York Times to Make TimesSelect free.
The Times has decided to stop charging a fee for its TimesSelect product. TimesSelect, which includes the Times Columnists and OpEd pieces, is free to print subscribers and costs $95 per year for others. There are approximately 220,000 paid TimesSelect subscribers, representing roughly $21 million in annual revenue. It also provides a perceived benefit to print subscribers... While I don't know if the Times will recoup that revenue simply from serving ads on the OpEd pages, this is clearly the right thing to do. Putting a wall up around Times columnists simply resulted in reducing the influence of the Times editorial page. In addition to limiting access for direct browsers, it also dramatically reduced the "pass-along" potential of Times content. Once the walls are down, I'd expect their editorial columns to often be at the top of the "most emailed" lists and also receive numerous links from bloggers, Facebook pages and more.
All good thoughts from Barry, so do read his entire entry. I just want to know if the crossword puzzle will now be available free.
