Category: General

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”

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.

Banks like to trumpet the speed of their online banking services. Ha! Electronic transfers takes 3-4 working days, unless you pay extra to stop the bank from holding onto your money. Continue reading “International bank transfers and the speed of light”

The W3C Japanese Layout Task Force (JLTF) has a working draft of “Requirements of Japanese Text Layout” available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-jlreq-20081015/.

It is an impressive body of work that the JLTF has been working on for a while. This is the current iteration of the document for which I went to a meeting in Tokyo last September, and I went to the W3C Technical Plenary in Mandelieu this week specifically for the JLTF meeting reviewing the working draft.

The task force is looking for feedback (to www-i18n-comments@w3.org) by 15 November 2008.

It took two upgrade cycles — from 7.04 to 7.10 then from 7.10 to 7.04 — to upgrade the P1120 to Xubuntu 8.04. Neither went smoothly Continue reading “Xubuntu 8.04 on Fujitsu P1120”

Translation: I came, I saw, I posted about it on a collaborative site.

Cf. Wiki, Vidi, Veni (Place or event reviewed on a collaborative site, I saw, I came)

Nuance, makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking, are running a “Do you speak Dragon?” competition.

They did a similar contest last year to collect favourable accounts of using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It must have made the Nuance marketing people feel all warm and soft inside to read the accounts, but you still had to already be at the Nuance web site before you could see what people had said in the hope of winning a prize. I did enter last year: it was one sentence, it was genuine, I didn’t gush, and I got the dragon fingerpuppet that every entrant received and that was all that I was after.

Actually, having just read some of the entries for this year, some of the accounts would make just about anybody feel warm and soft inside. Not the sort of accounts of aspiring novelists who have completed even more novels that will never be published in less time than previously, but the accounts from people with dyslexia, MS, or deafness for whom the dictation software really is making a difference.

Someone in Nuance marketing presumably has read about viral marketing. The difference this year is the extra category, and biggest prizes, for accounts posted on personal blogs, as reviews on sites such as Amazon, on Facebook, etc., or on YouTube. So the nice things that people are saying in the hope of winning a prize are now (or so the Nuance marketing team must be hoping) being spread around the web without any indications that at least some of them were put there because of a competition. Perhaps it’s a shade better than Nuance paying influential bloggers or a viral marketing company to spread the warm and soft feelings about the software (and it’s probably a lot cheaper), but I really would prefer if the positive reviews that I read on the web are put there because the software (or whatever) is genuinely good, not because of the dangling carrot of winning a video game.

This is a blog entry about Dragon Naturally Speaking. If I entered, do you think I could win?

I received a politely worded letter from Eircom telling me how happy they are to spam me with “special offers, price reductions and new products and services”. In fact, they’re so happy to do it that they’re going to do it even if I stop using Eircom.

Since I want to contribute to Eircom’s bottom line on my terms, not their’s, I’m sending back the opt-out form to the curiously named “Customer Suppressions Department”.

What, then, do they call the people who do the spamming? The “Customer Oppressions Department”?

I was going to do this on the day of the anniversary of my leaving Sun but, you know, I was too busy at the time.

In the past year I have:

• Helped companies and organisations in the USA, England, and France with their XSLT, XSL, and XML, including:
  • Making transforming to HTML go faster for an online retailer
  • Reviewing XSLT stylesheets and suggesting improvements for a major library
  • Writing XSLT for XML-XML transformations for a journal publisher
  • Specifying and implementing XSLT transformations for an archive service
  • Augmenting a XSLT-based automated schema documentation system that produces both HTML and PDF
  • Providing expert help to get a Perl XML::LibXSLT project off the ground
• Presented on XSLT profiling and unit testing at XTech 2007 in Paris in May
• Been selected to present training sessions on transitioning to XSLT 2.0 and on testing XSLT at XML 2007 in Boston in December
• Rejoined the W3C XSL FO subgroup as an invited expert
• Made four xmlroff releases, with another happening any day now
• Learned more about VAT and PRSI than I ever wanted to know (okay, maybe that’s not such a high point)
• Participated in the Workshop of the W3C Japanese Layout Taskforce in Tokyo in September
• Helped kids by completing two projects with the International Telementor Program

This is also the point at which I retire the “RIF” blog category as it has become irrelevant.