Making a poster about XSLT usage in xmlroff for XML Prague, the fun moment was replacing the uses of “xmlroff” with the xmlroff logo.
Continue reading “Sizing a graphic to the font size in XSL FO”
xmlroff 0.6.2, libfo-examples 0.6.0
xmlroff 0.6.2 and libfo-examples-0.6.0 are now available from
http://xmlroff.org/download/xmlroff-0.6.2.tar.gz and
http://xmlroff.org/download/libfo-examples-0.6.0.tar.gz
libfo-examples 0.6.0 adds xmlroff-gtktree as a work-in-progress
demonstration of using a GTK+ tree widget to view the FO tree with what
will eventually be a side panel showing the current FO’s properties.
xmlroff 0.6.2 really only has some changes in the header files necessary
to support libfo-examples 0.6.0.
The next xmlroff version will be 0.7.0, which will have some support for
static fo:static-content.
Converting QuickBooks to SAGE
It seems that accounting packages are better at importing data than they are at exporting data in a generally usable form. Which is unfortunate since I use QuickBooks and my accountant uses SAGE.
To make life easier for my accountant when doing my annual return, I wrote some Perl scripts to convert the little that QuickBooks exports as files plus, via Excel, the data from a non-standard transaction report into what SAGE imports. The account balances on the two packages now all match (though at one point yesterday, account balances in one were -2 times the balances in the other).
I am expecting that the accountant will find few enough things to correct that I won’t have to automate conversion in the other direction.
Juxy
Juxy (http://juxy.tigris.org/), by Pavel Sher, is a library for unit testing XSLT stylesheets from Java. After a long time spent threatening to do so, I finally contributed an XML format for Juxy tests.
I’ve been riding my hobby horse for a while about the usefulness, nay necessity, of using more than XSLT when testing XSLT (and I’ll be back in that saddle again at XML Prague). Juxy fits that bill, since it’s in Java, but it always seems to me that writing tests in Java is more than many XSLT practitioners would want to do. So I wrote a stylesheet to generate Java from XML descriptions of the tests. Continue reading “Juxy”
Netizen of the world
I must be a netizen of the world: I receive emails in Russian that I can’t read, offers of earthmoving equipment in Singapore, discounts for Tim Hortons in Canada, and security warnings for accounts that I never knew I had at nearly every major bank in the English-speaking world.
Maybe it’s this innate netizen-of-the-worldliness that prompts many kind people to offer to share their inheritances with me. Though I do worry about my health, since there must be a reason why I also receive offers for so many different pharmaceuticals.
Obscure Emacs variable of the week
`fancy-splash-image’ points to the image to show when Emacs starts up. I can think of only two groups who’d need this: the Emacs maintainers and the XEmacs maintainers who’d set it to their respective logos. So naturally I customized mine:
1.5 @ Prague
I will have the pleasure of speaking twice at XML Prague 2009, once on my own and once as a co-presenter:
- Testing XSLT — An update and expansion of my previous talk on testing XSLT presented in less time. How can that be? Simple, really: put more in the conference paper, direct attendees to the paper, and spend more of the presentation doing demonstrations.
- Imagining, building and using an XSLT virtual machine — The why and what of the open source Xcruciate XML-based server. Or the why, what, and Howe of Xcruciate, since I’m the second presenter with Mark Howe of Cyberporte, who provides the ideas behind Xcruciate and its related projects.
xs3p is not the secret sauce
I used to think that the open source xs3p schema documentation generator stylesheet from the now-defunct http://titanium.dstc.edu.au/ was the secret sauce behind the remarkably similar graphical XML schema representations of both <oXygen/> and XML Spy. I was wrong: a modified version of xs3p is bundled with <oXygen/> and is used when generating printed documentation, and xs3p may still be included in XML Spy (though it’s unlikely since its currently not listed on their third-party licenses page), but even in its titanium days, it didn’t do any graphical representations of a schema.
Does anybody know of an open source toolkit that can produce that sort of graphical representation?
Fujitsu P1630
The replacement for my venerable Fujitsu P1120 is a Fujitsu P1630 running Ubuntu 8.10.
The netbook form-factor was important to me long before the term “netbook” was a twinkle in a marketing person’s eye, Continue reading “Fujitsu P1630”
Denshi Jisho
I quite like the online Japanese dictionary at http://jisho.org/. I found it when I was checking the spelling of the name I gave my new laptop. In this age of netbooks with the same form factor, even though I need the extra horsepower and much as I like it, I call the laptop takai.