jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • I love my Chumby

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    jra
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    I have been wanting a digital photo frame for a while, so I could see the same pictures I send to the other digital frames in my family. I post pictures of Elio to Picasaweb, and my family sees them via Toshiba digitical frames with built-in wireless and FrameChannel clients. Here in Switzerland, the digital…

  • No IPv6 from CityCable of Lausanne

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    My home ISP is CityCable of Lausanne. While I have nothing bad to say about their IPv4 offering (fair price, good service, no noticable speed problems) I’ve got nothing good to say about their IPv6 service… because they don’t support it yet. Shame on you CityCable. You should support IPv6: it’s not so hard, and…

  • Now with IPv6!

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    I have been learning about IPv6 for work, and getting it turned on for home and for my server at nella.org. It’s been interesting, and a bit depressing just how hard it is to get people to do something that’s so easy… Anyway, if your web browser is on IPv6, you’ll get a nifty ribbon…

  • The SQL backlash

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    jra
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    I remember sitting in my databases class years ago and thinking, “This can’t possibly be the right way to store data.” It was a strange class, because it mixed theory and practice in a way that was anathema to the way I think. The theory part bored me to tears, and seemed ludicrously useless (first…

  • <nudge>, <nudge>, <wink>, <wink>

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    jra
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    FOP can get confused and do stupid things. Giving it a nudge in the right direction fixes it. For example, when a table is going to fill the page right up from where it starts to the end of the region available for it, it does ok. But add a footnote onto that table, and…

  • Dealing with a clogged link

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    jra
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    A friend asked me a question that reminded me of some great resources I want to mention here (in case I ever need to find them again…) They are: How to Accelerate Your Internet Wireless Networking in the Developing World Wireless U In my response to my friend, I also touched on something interesting I…

  • Disabling hyphenation in DocBook

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    When you are using the chain “DocBook -> FO -> PDF”, it is the FO processor that decides on the hyphenation of your words. This is because it knows the lengths of the lines it is making. In FOP, hyphenation can only be turned on and off at the level of <fo:blocks>. For some dumb…

  • Printing a Blog

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    I got interested in applying my new XSLT wizardry to the task of printing an entire blog. Like making every post into a big PDF and sending it off to a print-on-demand service. Digital backups = bad. Paper backups = good. I thought it would be easy, just do “WordPress export”, then write the XSLT…

  • Apache FOP and document properties

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    jra
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    I am a little bit obsessive about checking out the document properties in PDF files I read. I can’t explain why, but there you have it. I was sad when I noticed the PDF file being emitted by my XML has no document properties. So I figured, no problem, I can just go find the…

  • The <xen> of <xslt>

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    jra
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    For a project I am doing right now, I descended into DocBook hell. Not completely unscathed, I made it through the learning curve (why don’t they call it what it is: The Unfathomable and Horrific Tunnel of Learning) and blinked slowly in the light of day. I realized DocBook is nice, but it’s not actually…