Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I was too busy to install Bryce this weekend, but now it’s up and running. So far, it’s been annoying. It’s not native MacOS X, so it’s running the Classic environment. I never run that cow - it’s for people who live in the Mac past. I doubt I’ll end up forking out the big bucks for an official copy. My mac is also an antique at 333MHz, so despite the ample memory Bryce is rendering rather slowly.

My ongoing experiments in 3D software (POV-ray after this) are intended to help me visualize alien planetary landscapes. Yes, I do it all for the fic. I’m hoping to illustrate some fanfic, too, before my 30-day trial expires. Watch this space for practice images.

Time passes…

I made this one following the Bryce tutorial - things were much easier once I booted into OS 9 directly.

Pretty site of the day: the Phoenix Help pages at Texturizer, though the particular page linked here uses a table rather than pure CSS

I played with Phoenix at work today. The last time I tried it, back in version 0.1, I wasn’t impressed. Now it’s up to version 0.5, and it’s very nice when you add the Preferences Toolbar and a theme. It almost makes Windows livable.

I also found the guy who did the old style-switching Mozilla page that partly inspired my own style-switching efforts.

There’s a new build of Chimera out: 0.6 (2002122004). I’ve been using it all day and it hasn’t crashed yet. It does do this freaky thing where the preference icons go blurry at times, but that’s not enough to drive me back to Mozilla 1.3a.

One thing my new Chimera does better than its heftier parent, Mozilla, is display raw XML with CSS. It did better with this example from the Apple developers site. Maybe my Mozilla problem (that the titles were not turned into links) was just a bug in the most recent alpha release; Mozilla claims to have extensive XML support.

You’re probably in skim mode by now. If you’ve never understood the appeal of XML, take a look at A List Apart’s painless introduction to Using XML. If you know enough about XML to fear the acronym proliferation to which it inevitably leads, check out XSL Considered Harmful, an old article alleging that XSL would set XML back two or three years. I think the author’s dire predictions came true with a vengeance.

My sick fascination with XML stems from my dreams of an ideal content management system. Right now, my fiction is divided between plain text files with ASC headers, hand-converted HTML versions with handmade indices, and LaTeX source for my original fiction. I keep notes and related information in plain text files, in HTML pages (my own, or downloaded from useful Voyager sites), or in the TWiki I run locally on my Mac. TWiki is a nice solution, but it’s perl-based and annoyingly slow at times. I’d rather have something I could edit in Emacs, view in a browser, and convert to other formats easily. I know XML is the way to go, but getting there requires more free time than I’ve had to spare lately.

I’m not looking for fancy ways of combining XML and XHTML, though that sounds cool. I’d like to start with a simple DTD and a basic CSS stylesheet to go with it, so I can view my own stories on my own lovely mac using my own standards-compliant browsers. Conversion to web and printable forms are future goals, as is FicML for all. I’m hoping this teixlite tutorial will get me set up locally.

DocBook is intended for technical documentation, so it’s missing quite a few features I’m looking for in a fanfic management system. Specifically, it doesn’t handle verse and drama, though they’re essential for songfic, filk and screenplays.

Fortunately, there’s the Text Encoding Initiative, the somewhat dusty academic standard for marking up classic texts. Here are a few links:

• The Text Encoding Initiative website
• The XML version of TEI
• The TEI pizza chef for cooking up your own TEI DTD
• A TEI Technology Report with links, and Academic TEI applications, both from xmlcoverpages.org
• The TEI tutorial at the HTML Writer’s Guild - teixlite is one of the DTD’s they use for Project Gutenberg

Every time a customer sneezes, my company has a new product to support. The documentation issue is swiftly becoming a nightmare, so today I started looking into content management systems. Blogs are technically CMS’s, but I was looking for SGML or at least XML. I used to know a bit about this stuff, and I recognized DocBook straight off. Here’s my DocBook link dump:

• General XML links for technical writing
• A short explanation of SGML
• docbook.org may look boring on the surface, but check out the cool wiki!
• DocBook at Sourceforge
• DocBook publishing tools (from the wiki)
• XAE is a out-of-the-box Emacs-based XML authoring enviroment (discovered in the wiki)
• Website for websites (examples linked in the wiki)

It was unseasonably warm tonight, yet they’re predicting a snowstorm for tomorrow. The Boston weather might just be rain.

Last night, I had my first serious Mac problem in my three and a quarter years with the Powerbook. It was entirely my fault for clicking on DNSTrans when they said it was supposed to be a command-line application. The Mac asked me what program I wanted to open the program with, and I chose the Terminal app. That coaxed the command-line help information out of DNSTrans, giving me enough clues that I could run it from the command line myself.

For a while, everything seemed ok. Then I closed some apps and came home, and when I tried to open iTunes and listen to Filk Radio, the Terminal app opened instead. I tried some other programs, and all the icons opened Terminal. I could still open apps by roundabout methods, such as clicking on an html file to open the browser, and then clicking on a mailto link in the browser to open Mail. A few programs still ran from their icons, possibly because they didn’t have the .app extension.

So I searched Google for the solution to my application woes. I found one guy on Google Groups who’d had the same problem (with TextEdit instead of Terminal), but no one had answered his post. I found out about the three files you can delete on OS X to do what rebuilding your desktop database will do for pre-X macs. The files were LSApplications, LSClaimedTypes, and LSSchemes, which are all in the ~/Library/Preferences directory. (The ~ means under your Home directory.) I deleted them, but my problem didn’t go away. It did mutate slightly - instead of everything opening Terminal, my icons all opened Sherlock.

That’s when I started worrying, but it was late so I went to bed. At work today I searched some more - finding the proper search term for my apps are all trying to open themselves with Terminal.app was hard. I’m not sure how I finally found these troubleshooting tips, which mentioned the three files above and also the real culprit, com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. I deleted that one, and my Mac is all better now.

While I was puttering around Mac sites looking for help, I found an application I used to run under OS 8.6: DragThing. Many’s the hour I wasted configuring DragThing with snazzy colors and exhaustive app icons back then. Now, the OS X Dock does some of the same things. I downloaded DragThing, but there were too many buttons I couldn’t click without registering first, and I have no patience for picking the perfect Bondi colors and backgrounds anymore. I decided the Dock was good enough for me, but not before I read up on how to disable the Dock in order to use DragThing’s process dock instead.

So here it is, Death to the Dock (from Google Groups):

• Open a terminal window (that’s Terminal.app, in Utilities).

• Type: sudo mv /system/library/CoreServices/Dock.app
  /system/library/CoreServices/oldDock.app
  The password it wants is probably your own password for the Mac.

• Logout and log back in.

I’ve been trying to goof off, really I have. I had to try from work, though, and that made it harder. I did manage to download a new version of Analog, the world’s most popular web log analyzer. (That’s web server logs, not blogs.) Along the way I picked up DNSTrans to speed up the DNS lookups, and then I did them all over the DSL at work. Working on Sunday isn’t all bad.

I also downloaded JAXP, the Java XML Processing tools and Xeena, a Java-based DTD editor, so that I can play with my FicML DTD for fanfic. First, however, I must run the web logs. It’s been four months.

Word count: 22,439

I was going to answer the religion Friday Five, but Chimera 0.6 crashed again in the middle of my MT entry. So I’m back to Chimera 0.5, which, although lacking 0.1, is much more stable. I could check the bug tracking over at mozilla.org to see whether the issue has been fixed in the code, then build from source myself, but I get enough gcc at work, thanks. I bought a mac so I could have a low-maintenance computer at home to offset all those high-maintenance Windows and Solaris boxes at work. My job has changed since I got my Powerbook G3 way back when, but the high-maintenance Windows and Solaris boxes remain the same. Honestly, how many times can one Sun Fire need to be fscked? Next thing you know, I’ll be buying it jewelry.

I don’t think I’m going to make my NaNoWriMo goal tonight because I have an article due tomorrow. I haven’t started that either, though I do know what I’m going to say. I’ll have to NaNo more over the weekend to compensate. No rest for the bloggy, I tell you.

No new words yet - I just got home from a Buffy marathon. All I can say is Depresso-ep! And that line should have been 33.33% of the Legion of Doom were flayed alive the last time they were in Sunnydale. Maybe that was an intentional mistake.

So, the geeking - there’s a new release of Chimera, the Cocoa Mozilla browser for MacOs X. I downloaded it this weekend, and it’s been crashing up a storm. I’m hoping it’s broken itself in now. The last version rarely crashed for me, so if this one keeps it up I’m going to have to downgrade.

For NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided on a new daily word count of 2,000 to counterbalance the upcoming holiday and my bad habit of getting behind. I may slack off tonight and just round myself up to 20,000.

Word count: 1729

I’m still behind on my novel, but I have an excuse. Yesterday as I was happily novelizing I also downloaded some updates for my Mac - because it asked so nicely and did it all by itself. Apparently the updates broke Emacs (Fatal error (4). Illegal instruction., if you’re curious). All I could find about the problem was this similar situation from somebody using the Hurd. He said recompiling solved the problem, so I rebuilt Emacs and that solved the problem.

My mac is past three years old now, and it doesn’t build Emacs for Mac OS X as fast as a shiny new TiBook would, so it took me a while to recompile, which is my excuse for my word count still being so low. I did notice this nice Mac Emacs FAQ while I was waiting, though.