Geeking

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 frames with wireless are super expensive, and don’t even have FrameChannel. Separately, I’ve always liked the Chumby, but considered it’s puny screen kind of pointless. I mean, what’s the point of a Linux machine with a 3 inch screen? If it’s not a phone, I mean. So when I saw the review of the new Chumby 8, I found the solution to my problem! ...

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 it’s important to help your customers move forward, at least those of us who want to learn about native IPv6 connectivity before it becomes an emergency. Also, as a not-for-profit service of the city of Lausanne, it’s not like you can argue “there’s no business in it for us”. Part of your job is to enrich the city; that means leading instead of following on technology! Too bad you missed this chance. ...

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 on the upper right of the page of nella.org. Go give it a try! But don’t complain if you don’t see anything, it just means you are on IPv4, and that you live in the 20th century… you probably also have a bad haircut and a skinny leather tie like I was wearing at my 9th grade end of year school dance… ...

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 normal form? third normal form? who cares!). The practice part seemed ridiculously complicated and pointless. Why go to all that effort to write something down? Why not just write it? Yes, yes, I know, ACID and all that. I grudgingly learned it all, and I passed the class. But it never felt right to me. It felt like the students were putting on a performance to satisfy the teacher. It didn’t feel like Theory of Computing (i.e. Turing machines, regular expressions, the halting problem, etc), which just Felt Right. ...

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 the footnote ends up dangling at the top of the next page. I thought a bit about why this is happening, and I thought about what if you added a keep to the footnote, etc. What I ended up wanting to do is to nudge down something higher on the page so that it created a bit of whitespace in a place where the reader wouldn’t notice. That made the table not fit, which made the table break, which put the table footnote where I expected it to be, instead of hanging in space. ...

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 learned from Cricket, and from years as a consultant. Here’s the big lesson: Infrastructure projects don’t sell themselves. ...

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 reason, DocBook doesn’t have a way to turn off hyphenation in one region of the document. ...

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 to turn the export XML file into FO, and process into PDF. Well, it is easy, in principle. But in practice it’s not. ...

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 right FO tags, grep for them in the DocBook XSL and reverse engineer what stuff I need to put into my DocBook to get them set right. I figured it would be something obscure like, or something. In fact, DocBook already knows who the author is, in order to format the title page nicely, so no dice there. ...

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 what I wanted. Doh. What I wanted was a structured way to represent my data, and I want two things to happen to it. Today, I want to publish my data with DocBook. Tomorrow I want someone to be able to suck the brains out of my DocBook document (leaving it to wander the earth as a zombie) and to put them into a wiki so that my project can become a community-maintained database, instead of being a single DocBook-formatted document that lives in my Subversion repository. ...