XML in the Wild
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Not so much as a post, as a callout...
Ebooks and eReader hardware does take up quite a bit of my attention in my spare time, though.
How is this related to XML? It's all in that single source multiple output publishing concept. More to come soon...
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The iPod Touch... It is good.
I bought my very first iPod. Ever.
Why, on this night, of all other nights? I've been thinking about this for a while.
Part of being an XML she-geek comes from being a genetic bookworm. I read 'em in mass quantity, and am not too picky about format (in comparison, for instance, to my father-in-law, who will only read hardcover books due to tactile preference).
I've been doing the eBook thing since the emergence of Peanut Reader for the Palm way back in the 90s. (How scary is that??? The 90s are now way back.) I've skipped around from device to computer to laptop to device to phone to blackberry, but I was finally faced with a situation that brought the whole "can it all be in one, or not?" into perspective during my last business trip.
You see, I had to drive 3.5 hours from home to HQ. I've only been there one other time, so I needed to use GPS. My husband took off with the dedicated GPS unit because he had to go to Jersey, so I was left with the GPS on my Blackberry (which does very nicely, BTW).
Only one problem: Telenav on the Blackberry KO's Audible's ability to patch into the stereo speakers of a car by routing everything that isn't native Blackberry through the speaker on the Blackberry itself. So it was a choice of get be without Audible, or get lost. Since it was a business trip, I pretty much had no choice on this one. Luckily, I found a radio station that was playing nothing but Aerosmith as I headed into Boston, so all was not lost (literally).
But back to the iTouch... I've been fawning over them since I stayed at my friend's house of Mac a few business trips back. He has his iTouch set up as a remote with Apple TV and iTunes connected to something like 160 GB of tunes that can now be accessed from anywhere in the house. Cool.
I'd been reading about eBook apps. on the "iThing" (to quote that guy who does the Bookshelf app.) for quite some time on teleread.org, mobileread.com, and dearauthor.com. I also have been looking for a way to access some eReader books I bought way back when I was still reading on my Palm Tungsten E2 before it gave up the battery ghost.
No eReader app for the Blackberry + sketchy Audible support for the Blackberry + can't use any of this stuff while I'm using Blackberry GPS = one helluva excuse to buy my very first iPod/Touch/Thing (I like Thing best, I think... very Addams Family).
So I bought it, and I loaded it up with audible and ereader as the puppies sang nearby in awed chorus.
And it was good.
Labels: Audible, Blackberry, eBooks, GPS, iTouch
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Consulting Boot Camp
I have been, and will be tied up in consulting boot camp through the remainder of August and the first couple weeks of September.
Why is this significant enough to warrant a blog entry?
Because I'm learning important stuff that I never had the opportunity to learn in a formal learning environment before. Well, most of it, anyway.
What I'm really enjoying is that there's a process and method to _everything_ on my new gig - which is the reason I signed on. They haven't thrown me into the waters to see if I'll sink or swim because they realize that people who don't know what they're doing do not make effective consultants.
But it's not the XML stuff or the technology that I'm really focusing on this time out... (That's more like a game of catch up or matching - this feature is that feature in some other product that I'm more familiar with than what's in front of me.) It's the soft skills, marketing, and product positioning that's making the difference.
I had a great set of mentors when I started out... And they deserve credit for contributing to where I am today. But I'm thinking about tomorrow, now. I've been watching people I know in their career situations, and I've learned what not to (be|wear|act like). But I've never really filled in the blanks about _what_ to be.
So I'm doing the soft skills soft shoe shuffle. I'm reading, and listening, and finding that it's really hard to apply this stuff on the spot in the real world. The soft skills experts are right. It takes dedicated and conscious practice to get your soft skills in order.
Which isn't necessarily easy for a loud mouth, opinionated, super heroine who wants to convert the world to XML before bedtime. "Think before you talk|speak|act" has become my mantra...
I guess all of this means that I actually have learned something from spending my time in the business section of the book store and library. Cool. Guess I'm succeeding at the "Continuous Learning" thing they're all going on about.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Change is in the air...
New XML adventures are in the wind.
As a friend recently stated, when one door closes, another opens.
He was right.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Stuff that is cool.
- This little beta project at IBM AlphaWorks: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/taskmodeler
- Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/
- The fact that oXygenXML has a plug-in for Eclipse: http://www.oxygenxml.com/eclipse_plugin.html
- XFY and Mathematica: http://www.xfy.com/new/math.html
- The DITA Architecture Specification: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CS01/archspec/archspec.html
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
I’m Baaaccckkk…
Sheesh. I leave you guys in the structured authoring/CMS/XML business alone for eight years and what do I come back to?
More acronyms. More standards.
That's OK... I also come back with 8 years of perspective.
Eight years of corporate enterprise customer perspective from two different industries, no less.
While I was gone y'all discovered:
- DITA
- Open Toolkits that go with Standards are cool.
- The fundamental business problems of working with business documentation, technical documents, product documentation, and any other subject with a "document" or "ation" in it have not changed.
- Packaging (more about this later).
While I was gone, I discovered:
- There is a big wide world outside of a structured authoring software company. There is an even bigger, wider world in the land of Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs and Submissions documentation.
- Do not think that you are immune to the downsizing monster just because you are working on a global enterprise project.
- Working as a technical resource in a publishing company is not as fun as working for a software company.
- Beware of anyone who wants to change your title from "Architect" to "Analyst."
- Microsoft's flavor of XML. Tastes like… XML, with a distinct datacentric flavor.
- There is no one way more effective to stop any useful work in its tracks than to become part of a constantly re-inventing and re-organizing amoeba formerly known as a functional department.
In short, I looked up, saw the mess, read the markup on the whiteboard, and decided it was time for a change. There is just no way to convert the world to XML before bedtime in a stagnating political environment within a large corporate enterprise.
Luckily… An opportunity fell in my lap just as I had one foot out the door!
So I'm no longer with the publishing company which shall not be named, and have joined a software company with dedicated XML structured authoring desktop and server solutions that are way cool.
The good news is I get to continue working out my master plan for converting the World to XML Before Bedtime from the Woods In New York, with my little dog by my side, my big dog lying behind me, and my Siamese sitting on the back of my chair. (The biggest dog is still looking out the window, waiting for the perfect herding opportunity…)
Here's the plan… Learn DITA. Feel the DITA. Be the DITA. Follow the DITA standard as adopted in various industries, paying specific attention to what is going on in Pharma.
Why Pharma? Because I, at one point a long time ago, made one of the first attempts to evangelize XML technology in the Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs community. The huge documentation and content management problems I reviewed back in 2000-2003 are still there. Just waiting and crying out "write me, reuse me, and manage me with XML!!!"
The wheels are turning. The tools are out there. The standards are moving toward precisely articulating ongoing document and content management problems.
Yeah. I can work with this.
Stay tuned.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Ooh, Ah, Oh. I got to play with a Windows Vista machine
Take one smoking Lenovo/IBM T60, add Vista, hand it to Jean, and listen to her scream as she tries to figure out "where did they put the damn coffee cups when they reorganized my kitchen!?!?"
That bad? Well, not really. In fact, the experience was quite well, not eventful.
I was asked to evaluate one of my employer's custom MS Word 2003 XML-based templates in MS Word 2007 on a Vista machine. So I borrowed a Vista machine from our IT department and was up and running.
The best I can say about the new Aero interface: ooh. Pretty. And shiny, too. Other than that, there were no cataclysmic realizations that I just could not live without Vista, or that it was the neatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe it's because I became a part-time Mac User within the last year, and got one of the first Intel MacBooks running OS X… Now THAT's a cool toy.
But, back to Vista… Nothing bad happened, but nothing astounding happened, and my husband was all too relieved that putting the Vista machine up on our wireless net didn't make anything explode, or cause other computers to fight like cats and dogs. Which, in itself is interesting, because we have all nature of operating systems running on our net – from my Mac, to my husband's really ancient Windows 98 SE machines, to various forms of Windows XP, and even a Linux box or two (my husband is partial to PC Linux and Knoppix).
Moral of story – operating systems are less important to me as long as I have a good XML IDE. My current favorite is oXygenXML, because it works on both my PC and my Mac, but I just heard that XML Spy now has nifty interface features to support Open XML, if one is inclined to pay for such nifty features, which you really don't have to if you know where to look.
I also need to make Word do the XML things that it needs to do – regardless of version. This means I am limited to the Windows environment so long as I want to play with Open XML within the Word 2007 interface. (Yes, I know the Mac converters just came out. I have not had a chance to install them yet, and it still does nothing for letting me work in the actual Word 2007 UI). So, it turns out that whether my Windows environment is XP or Vista is not really relevant to the type of work I do.
My conclusion? My next personal PC purchase will be an Intel Mac that can run Windows XP in Parallels (because why fork out the cash for Vista if XP suits my needs just fine?). There. Problem solved.
Will someone now do the honors of pressing the "That was easy!" button?
