burnt* - designing, coding, writing...

...adventures in Python and science fiction

[daalexwrites]

Lucht. on Flickr.

Ik hou meer en meer van fotografie. In dat opzicht lijk ik wellicht op mijn ouders. Nogal verwoede fotografen, die twee. Voorlopig vooral iPhonografie, maar daar kan je ook al veel mee aanvangen.

[daalexwrites]

Societal pressures are on more and more work, more and more content, more and more connection, more and more communication. Where is the pressure for more and more thinking?

Nathan Bransford, http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2012/06/jonathan-franzen-and-fear-of-noise.html

[ransomcenter]

Read the full article on The Daily Beast website, “Last Letters From World War I Literary Heroes.”

English poet Wilfred Owen’s last letter to his mother. Dated Oct. 31, 1918, Owen was killed on November 4, one week before the Armistice.

The Ransom Center holds a Wilfred Owen Collection of World War I Poetry, which includes some family correspondence as well.

[daalexwrites]

This letter is a must read. Sad, and jarring because you know that he died just days after writing this, but a very profound testament to a great poet.

[daalexwrites]

[DITA] Oxygen Author 13.2

Just a small note to highlight a good reason to upgrade to the latest Oxygen Author (13.2), recently released: they now support "Find/Replace in Files" over FTP and WebDAV.

If you're working on DITA projects in a corporate environment, chances are that your source files will be on a server somewhere - in my case, in an Alfresco CMS. As Alfresco offers a neat FTP and WebDAV interface, we can edit DITA content directly in the CMS from Oxygen... and now we can even do global find/replaces on all files in a DITA Map - directly on Alfresco.

It already allowed me to find a nasty broken <xref> in a 600-topic reference guide. Hurray for Oxygen 13.2!

[daalexwrites]

via Wired, via Vulture.com. I'll never forget the fearful fascination I felt when my parents read to me from Where the Wild Things Are.

[daalexwrites]

[Web] MVC 4 and so forth

A while ago I posted about my potential dive into the wonderful world of .Net development for the web, using C# and the MVC framework for ASP.net.

Since then I've been pretty quiet... the reason, at least in part, being that I was busy learning how to write C# code, how to deal with Visual Studio, and how the whole MVC thing worked. All in all, it is pretty similar to the Django framework for Python, so I had at least some idea of how to work with Views, Controllers and Models.

By now, my first website built on MVC is live - yay! There is not too much content there yet, but at least my whole framework is functional and has not failed me yet. I used Entity framework to generate models (database-first development) for my controllers to deal with. The site itself is pretty standard HTML5 with a couple of neat partial views. And of course it is completely localized into 6 languages... Cool!

Next up: building a Single Page Application for the admin side of my web application... Upshot, Knockout, and other mysterious Javascript libraries, here I come...

[daalexwrites]

[General] Back in action

Been on vacation for a while, in East Sussex, around Rye. Loveliness all around, including weather-wise, however unlikely that may sound.

Back to business now. Wireframes to be made, C# to be studied.

And all the while, reading Patrick Rothfuss' excellent Kingkiller Chronicle!

[daalexwrites]

[Web] Taking the jump to C# and MVC?

At the Day Job, I'm kind of coming to the point where I am coding things that are so vital to the company, and crucial to production, that it is becoming irresponsible to continue doing so in my beloved Python.

The thing is, while Python is pretty powerful, elegant and easy to learn and read, I'm more or less the only person in the company who knows anything about it. All of IT department's developments are .Net-based, and our software R&D department is all Java and C++.

So I guess I will either need to dive into C# and MVC for web apps, or give up the coding and find someone else to do it for me... but given the fact that I started coding because we were short on resources from the beginning, I'm now installing the Microsoft Web Platform... Let's hope the learning curve is not too steep!

[daalexwrites]

The unwritten law of all armies, Captain. The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders.

The Black Company, Glen Cook

[daalexwrites]

[Web] Choices, choices...

For a (hopefully) upcoming web project, I'm refreshing my knowledge on the latest web CMS frameworks. I used Drupal in the past, and before that, Wordpress (but only for blogs). Recently I've become a bit of a hardcore Pythonista, so my fingers are itching to go with Django.

Drupal, of course, has changed a lot in the past few years. Still, even in the completely revamped interface of Drupal 7, I still feel it is kind of heavy for the occasional user - and as my client is likely to want to do their own updates, but only once every few weeks or so, this is a concern.

Wordpress has the easiest admin interface that I know of. It has only gotten more polished since the days when I first used it, and with Wordpress 3 and its custom post types, combined with one of the many free HTML5-based theme frameworks, it looks like most serious sites could actually be built with Wordpress. Creating new posts is a breeze in Wordpress, so this would be big bonus for the client.

With Django, I feel the sky is the limit. Because I know Python to a degree that far outstrips my fledgling PHP skills, I'm confident I could build any required customizations in Django. The only problem, of course, is that I have never used it and I'm on quite a tight timeline... Mostly deploying to their hosted server is something that might prove to be a bit much for me.

Ah, l'embarras du choix... Wordpress has my favor right at this moment, but I'm sure I'll change my mind once or twice more in the coming days, while I work on my proposal.

[favnews-deactivated20120608]

[daalexwrites]

via fechnerk:

Is This the New Apple Logo?

(via Gizmodo)

[daalexwrites]

[Python] One of those days

Not all is well in my Python world. In fact, it is all screwed up. I updated my Aptana Studio IDE to 3.0.9 using the automatic updater, just as I have done many times before.

However, unlike in the previous updates, this one has rendered my Pydev plug-in unusable. Activating the Pydev perspective or using any Pydev-related functionality hangs Aptana Studio - CPU at 99% until the end of time (well, at least until I shoot down the aptanastudio.exe process).

One of those days, I guess...

[daalexwrites]

[Review] The Descendants

Go see it.

That's really all there is to say. George Clooney performs better than I have ever seen him play, but somehow he does not dominate this slow, heart-wrenching picture - the other actors all make their part matter, small though it may be for some, like Beau Bridges or Robert Forster.

Making a movie like this must be a terribly difficult balancing act between slow but enchanting versus spun-out and boring, between emotional and tearjerker, between funny and silly. In fact, nothing much happens in this tale that shows a completely different side of Hawaii, but nevertheless, I was at the tip of my seat throughout the whole movie.

All in all, a must-see, and I sure hope The Descendants brings home at least a few of its five Oscar nominations.

[daalexwrites]

[Windows] Tip of the day: find the nasty app hiding behind svchost.exe (and eating up your CPU or RAM)!

As a Mac user at the Day Job, this has not been a big issue for me lately, but I recall all too well the days when my Windows-based computer would grind to a halt because some process or other was stuck at 99% CPU, for no apparent reason. Only thing I could do then was to kill the process in the Task Manager and hope for the best.

However, what if that process happens to be svchost.exe? That could be anything, right - so is it safe to just shoot it down like that? What will be the effect if I end that process?

Well, I recently discovered a feature in my Windows 7 virtual machine (yes, I still run a Windows on my Mac, because the office environment sometimes still favours Windows machines) that solves this mystery!

To find out who is hiding behind the generic svchost.exe process:

Open Windows Task Manager.

Go to the Processes tab.

Make sure the Show processes from all users option is enabled (otherwise you might not even see the culprit, if it is a System process...)

Sort the processes by CPU or Memory usage to quickly hunt down the offending process (just click the column header).

Right-click on your svchost.exe process, and here is the magic: choose Go to Service(s).

The Services tab in the Task Manager opens, and the service(s) operated by the problematic svchost.exe process are highlighted.

For me, the culprit turned out to be Windows Defender (check the Description column to find out more about the service causing the problem), and I solved the problem by turning it off altogether, since my VM already had a company-provided virus scanner installed.

[daalexwrites]

[DITA] DIY DITA Fixups with Python and XSL

At the Day Job, we faced (yet) another challenge recently. We had been happily using FrameMaker 8 with DITA-FMx for our DITA documentation writing. Files are stored Componize (think Alfresco on DITA steroids), and published using Componize's version of the DITA Open Toolkit.

We became more and more disappointed with the lack of progress in FrameMaker's DITA capabilities, and finally we moved to Oxygen XML Author instead. So far so good, but of course we had been using a bit of a hack to get good-looking images in both print and webhelp output: a custom XSL in the DITA-FMx structured application duplicated all images we used in the DITA files, made both images conditional and marked one of "for web" and one (scaled down) "for PDF".

Now, in Oxygen we no longer need this trick. Oxygen (and FOP in Componize) simply respects the DPI value (resolution) saved in the image files themselves. So we were stuck with thousands of DITA topics containing double images, causing cluttered DITA files and additional ditaval filtering needs.

The solution? Some fairly simple Python scripting and an XSL stylesheet! In essence, I wrote a Python script that:

scans a specific folder and runs all the DITA files it finds through the double-image-removing XSL stylesheet.

processes all the screenshots it finds using the PIL module, embedding the DPI value most appropriate for the image width into the files, and in the processing, converting all the old GIF images into PNGs.

Not too difficult, very fast, and it makes our life going forward a lot easier. Sometimes it pays off to be your own DITA consultant!

[daalexwrites]

[Web] Adobe in the Cloud

Interesting evolution, this. At the Day Job we've been pondering how to approach cloud-based solutions for prepress companies and printers. Looks like Adobe thinks they have found the right approach. I wonder...

Read more about on Wired's new Cloudline blog.

Of course, their business model is radically different then ours, but still.

[daalexwrites]

Scottish guy Vs Siri. (by yvestheunissen)

Predictable but so very, very well done!