Funny, I haven't heard anything about it prior to today. Guess I'm just out of the loop then...
As a University of Virginia staff person, I can tell you that VT's impending purchase of 1100 G5's was announced on our Mac user's group email list back on 28 July. By Apple's regional Higher Education user's group rep, who kiddingly asked when they could expect UVa's purchase order for 1200...
For pop culture geeks, there's a new reference guidebook: James Dean Died Here, from Santa Monica Press. It provides site, directions, and often photos for, as the title suggests, the place where Dean entered the stereo cabinet; also the Seven Year Itch subway grating, the Hindenberg crash, Heidi Fleiss's brothel, the garage where Apple Computer was born, the Ghostbusters headquarter, and hundreds more.
It would also be nice if we could get someone with a boom box pumping out "the Free Software song."
Brilliant! Pipe in
Richard Stallman's rendition at 140 decibels! That ought to be far more effective in getting the SCO weasels to surrender than when the BATF blasted David Koresh and the Branch Davidians with nonstop recordings of Tibetan monks chanting.
I recently got a new bottom-of-the-line 12-inch iBook (800Mhz, upgraded to 640MB memory) to serve as a kind of compromise between a PDA, an e-book reader, and a portable desktop computer. It handles all of those tasks admirably. Palm's Macintosh version of the Palm reader produces wonderfully legible text.
All in all, these days my iBook is my preferred reading device for most kinds of text. The main exception would be PDFs that are page images of print books, where the text can't be reflowed, especially when the original is in multi-column layout. But before too long (or maybe they exist already?) it should be standard for notebook computers to have screens that can snap out and be reoriented from landscape to portrait mode; that will make reading "legacy" e-text more comfortable.
Bridgekeeper: What... is the best tool for editing XML?
Arthur: Do you mean datacentric XML or docucentric XML?
Bridgekeeper: Why, I don't know th...augghhh!
I'd agree with fm6 that one tool doesn't fit all. XML is evolving away from its SGML roots in heavy-duty document production into two "forks", one that continues to emphasize documents and uses a lot of mixed-content elements, the other that is trying hard to be a database and relying therefore on schemas that provide data typing. The earlier generation of XML editors that emerged from SGML editors, like XMetal and FrameMaker, are much more comfortable to use for functions where you essentially need an XML word processor.
Someone has already mentioned jEdit as a Java editor with useful XML/XSL plugins. I'd add, especially for Mac OS X users, the oXygen XML editor, also Java-based, which provides a very comfortable editing environment with tag autocompletion and built in well-formedness checking and validation (including for XHTML documents, making it a nice Web editor as well). It supports XPath queries, has a built-in DTD generator [from well-formed XML], has a tree structure editor, and more. It's proprietary but not expensive.
Full screen vim with PgUp/PgDn now work fine for me.
? ? ?
Doesn't work for me. PgUp/PgDn in Terminal.app still sends the keystroke to the Scrollback function. What exactly are you doing to achieve the desired result?
Sorry to be late with this, but anyone interested in evaluating terminal emulator programs should know about the classic "vttest" program, as updated by Thomas Dickey. It compiles under OS X without any tweaking.
Of the programs mentioned in this thread that I've looked at, there's not a one that passes all the relevant tests. And Terminal.app does better than most at some of them, like the character set test and Xterm window-modify features.
My favorite terminal emulation program, PC-compatible only alas, is VanDyke's SecureCRT, which does well on vttest and comes with a nice terminal font set. (Luckily I'm at a school with a site license; regular individual price is $99.)
I understand the support in a lot of the comments here for the plain-vanilla ASCII Project Gutenberg approach to ebooks. Paradoxically, however, a simple ASCII conversion from print to digital form provides less assurance of future survivability and usability of your book than rendering it with the structured XML markup specified by the Open eBook standard (where well-formed XHTML is the least common denominator).
Why? Well, an ASCII text version of a printed book is really more like an analog facsimile than is a version in XML that has been tagged for structural features. Leaving aside issues of non-English characters, illustrations, and unusual typography, ASCII does a relatively poor job of capturing all of the structural conventions that exist in printed books. Books have copyright pages, tables of contents, chapter titles, subtitles, bylines, epigraphs, block quotations, footnotes, running headers and footers, citation lists, etc. ASCII can provide rough format equivalents of some of these, very poor equivalents of others. With an appropriate XML tagset, however, it's a relatively simple matter to tag most of the structural features of a book and then use stylesheets for presentational rendering. That's the whole assumption of the Open eBook specification.
Suppose you're in a world where all printed copies of Huckleberry Finn have been lost. You have two CD-ROMS that somehow you've managed to decode so that you can read the files and interpret their character sets. One of them contains the Project Gutenberg etext of the novel, an ASCII transcription. The other contains an XML encoding tagged according to a DTD from the Text Encoding Initiative, the current best standard for encoding literary (and many other) texts. It has all of the textual content of the PG version, as well as some that's missing (like the table of contents and the copyright page from the transcribed edition, which the PG version unaccountably omits). XML tags mark all the line and page breaks of the original. In addition, there are tags to mark quoted speech, unusual typography, words in foreign languages, and other significant features of the original. The CD-ROM contains the DTD used along with documentation on the tagset.
In this imaginary scenario, even if all of the XML documentation were missing it would be pretty straightforward for 31st-century programmers to strip out the tags and recreate the ASCII transcription. But with the documentation, it's possible to reconstruct something much closer to the original than the plain-vanilla PG version allows. And suppose your 31st-century archaeologist found a trove of TEI-tagged books on CD: with all of the structural tagging and metadata about authorship, publication dates, etc., a 31st-century librarian will be able to plug all of the books into a cataloging system that allows sophisticated searching. If instead you had a trove of plain-ASCII books, the best you could do with the collection would be simple full-text searches.
Leaving aside the sci-fi scenario, the reality is that our documents, over the next few decades, will move from format to format and be used for purposes that we can only guess at right now. Of course plain ASCII, or even proprietary formats, will be better than no documents at all. But the work involved in converting them will be a lot higher than if they are tagged in a well-documented, structured markup language.
Incidentally, there's already at least one project underway to take Project Gutenberg texts and add minimal XHTML or XML markup to capture structure and make them more readable via stylesheets. The Open eBook specification is just a more sophisticated way of doing the same thing.
Who's "we", kimo sabe? I'm at a computer conference at the University of Georgia right now, a campus with state-of-the-art Ethernet connections everywhere and an 802.11b network that covers most areas. However, this doesn't include the conference hotel. I'm sitting in my room reading Slashdot via a modem connection that has given me 28.8 kbps maximum since I've been here. And I'm mighty happy for pages with compact design and compressed graphics. I'll grant that the 15-second download for the evilwm screenshot was tolerable...
It may be that few Mac-only users will miss a decent Opera version, but it's a loss to people who move around from Mac to Windows to Linux. I used (and paid for) Opera when I was predominantly working on a Windows desktop, and used the Linux version from time to time. Last year when I migrated to OS X for my work platform I tried to stick with Opera, but the Mac version was so deficient and buggy that I shifted to Mozilla on all platforms; I preferred Opera's navigational modes and shortcuts, but cross-platform consistency and reliability was much more important. Proper CSS rendering is another factor in Mozilla's favor.
Nowadays I use Mozilla at work for my heavy-duty functioning, while on the iBook I got for home use I'm tending to use Safari and Mozilla Firebird. On the family desktop PC that handles finances and Internet commerce it's Mozilla. (Opera on Windows was less likely to work with secure commercial websites than Mozilla anyway, in my experience.)
If Opera had kept current with its Mac development, chances are I'd have paid for a two-platform license. Now it's unlikely I'll go back to Opera on any platform. Don't know if that's at all a representative experience, but there it is.
I've been using Linux since '94 too, but always in conjunction with another desktop OS, since at work I've always needed to run certain proprietary software apps that don't run under Linux. My transition has been Linux plus OS/2 then Windows NT then Win 98 (thanks to a job change) and now OS X (thanks to a job change that let me get a whole new system). I still use a Debian Linux box as a server, and for running various apps that haven't been packaged for Fink & that I don't have time to adapt and compile.
The combination of OS X + Linux is a pretty unbeatable work environment. I'd guess there are a lot of Linux "adders," maybe more than "switchers."
Coincidentally, I just today received my 11 x 17 inch print of this Zippy cartoon from April 2001, signed by Griffy himself. Destined for my office wall, of course.
Back in the mid 1970s, Swarthmore College was one game away from breaking some NCAA record for consecutive losses in football. Their upcoming game was against one of the teams that would annually tromp them--Franklin & Marshall, if I remember. Or maybe Muhlenberg. (Hey, I didn't go to the games...) So one of the TV networks thought it would be good fun to do a feature on the nerd-school-where-nobody-gives-a-shit-about-footba ll, and they sent a crew to cover the game and interview students about it.
One of the interviews was with an archetypal Geek of Classics (GC dpu s++:++ a-- C-- !tv b++++ r--), a roundish undergrad who looked like a cheerful Polish maiden aunt. She allowed as how she didn't know anything about the upcoming game: "I don't pay much attention to football, I guess--I spend most of my time reading Herodotus."
(Swarthmore went on, unbelievably, to win the game on a last-second goal-line play. Thirty-five years later, Herodotus would prevail when the college dissolved its intercollegiate football program.)
The Windows port of the Vim editor is a sine qua non. Except for not being able to use interesting pipe commands, the PC port will do anything in the world one might want to do with a text document, and it has just enough GUI functionality to be useful without being intrusive.
If memory serves, informal missives in the '70s, particularly from teenage girls, were often adorned with handwritten Happy Faces that performed roughly the equivalent paralinguistic function as typewritten smileys would later. The main innovation was the 90-degree rotation that allowed for a sideways ASCII representation.
Hopefully this won't become a reason for users to roast banthespam over a slow grill.
CNN's original story this morning was an AP piece that quoted Adam Thierer of the spam-friendly Cato Institute essentially saying "Bwa-ha-ha, the anti-spam forces reveal their true colors." But the quote has been pulled from the current version of the CNN story, which demoted the "spamming" to a "technical glitch."
People, you are demonstrating a pitiful lack of awareness about your own history. Father Busa has been coding since your grandparents were in diapers. If you've used the online Oxford English Dictionary or any other dictionary or concordance software, you owe what you're doing at least in part to Father Busa's interest in text processing 50 years ago. For that matter, if you use XML, since much of the work in SGML/XML and the theory of markup languages has been done by people coming out of humanities computing.
Time to recycle an old space-race joke that I first heard from an Algerian friend. Modify to fit your needs:
The chief scientist of Stupid Country gets an urgent summons one day to meet with the President.
The President is fuming. "Look at this news! India is getting ready to put a man on the Moon! Imagine the publicity they'll get. Surely we must have a way to get there first!"
"Not to worry, Your Excellency," says the Chief Scientist. "We are planning something much better! In fact, at this moment I have my most skilled rocket scientists working on a project to put a man on the Sun!"
"A man on the Sun?" says the President. "Praise be to Stupid Country Deity! That will be splendid! Only... only... isn't it terribly hot on the Sun?"
"Aha!" says the Chief Scientist. "And that is precisely why we are going to land there at night!"
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)
Forget the movies. The best, funniest treatment of a superhero face-off ever was the Internet Oracle's response a few years ago to a query about who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk.
Remember, Scotland invented the word "uncanny", and in older Scots it meant not only weird but dangerous. UFO just stands for Uncanny Ferlies, Och!
All I know is that I had a UFO experience during my one and only visit to Scotland. I was in Glasgow for a meeting, and rented a car for the one free day I had, to drive as far into the western Highlands as I could go. I was driving through Glen Coe, which is about as wild and romantic a place as it gets (on both aesthetic and historic grounds), when WHOOSH something flew past me at incredible speed, and not too high up; it seemed to be three pitch-black fighter planes. But I couldn't be sure I hadn't just imagined it. What would jet fighters be doing swooping through idyllic Glen Coe as if it were part of a Star Wars set?
As it happened, I shared a compartment on the train back to London with a guy in the RAF, and he told me that sure enough, the glens up there were used a lot for low-level military flight training. (Of course, he could have been an Alien plant trying to convince me that everything was Just Fine.)
But it doesn't take desert flats or Highland glens to produce odd sightings. The most uncanny experience I've ever had was riding a city bus in New Haven late in the afternoon, and casually noticing the sun going down out the window to the east, and then as it penetrated my consciousness what that meant experiencing a couple of seconds of disorientation and pure panic until the reason-seeking part of my brain figured out that I was simply seeing a reflection of the sunset to the west. But if I'd only had that split-second perception of the world reversed, I might for the rest of my days had sworn that I had slipped through a crack into an alternate universe for a moment.
Actually, FREE THE MOUSE is already the slogan of the plaintiffs in Eldred v. Ashcroft – you can get their button with the slogan and link to the site.
Slashdot Mirror
For pop culture geeks, there's a new reference guidebook: James Dean Died Here, from Santa Monica Press. It provides site, directions, and often photos for, as the title suggests, the place where Dean entered the stereo cabinet; also the Seven Year Itch subway grating, the Hindenberg crash, Heidi Fleiss's brothel, the garage where Apple Computer was born, the Ghostbusters headquarter, and hundreds more.
All in all, these days my iBook is my preferred reading device for most kinds of text. The main exception would be PDFs that are page images of print books, where the text can't be reflowed, especially when the original is in multi-column layout. But before too long (or maybe they exist already?) it should be standard for notebook computers to have screens that can snap out and be reoriented from landscape to portrait mode; that will make reading "legacy" e-text more comfortable.
Someone has already mentioned jEdit as a Java editor with useful XML/XSL plugins. I'd add, especially for Mac OS X users, the oXygen XML editor, also Java-based, which provides a very comfortable editing environment with tag autocompletion and built in well-formedness checking and validation (including for XHTML documents, making it a nice Web editor as well). It supports XPath queries, has a built-in DTD generator [from well-formed XML], has a tree structure editor, and more. It's proprietary but not expensive.
Doesn't work for me. PgUp/PgDn in Terminal.app still sends the keystroke to the Scrollback function. What exactly are you doing to achieve the desired result?
Of the programs mentioned in this thread that I've looked at, there's not a one that passes all the relevant tests. And Terminal.app does better than most at some of them, like the character set test and Xterm window-modify features.
My favorite terminal emulation program, PC-compatible only alas, is VanDyke's SecureCRT, which does well on vttest and comes with a nice terminal font set. (Luckily I'm at a school with a site license; regular individual price is $99.)
Why? Well, an ASCII text version of a printed book is really more like an analog facsimile than is a version in XML that has been tagged for structural features. Leaving aside issues of non-English characters, illustrations, and unusual typography, ASCII does a relatively poor job of capturing all of the structural conventions that exist in printed books. Books have copyright pages, tables of contents, chapter titles, subtitles, bylines, epigraphs, block quotations, footnotes, running headers and footers, citation lists, etc. ASCII can provide rough format equivalents of some of these, very poor equivalents of others. With an appropriate XML tagset, however, it's a relatively simple matter to tag most of the structural features of a book and then use stylesheets for presentational rendering. That's the whole assumption of the Open eBook specification.
Suppose you're in a world where all printed copies of Huckleberry Finn have been lost. You have two CD-ROMS that somehow you've managed to decode so that you can read the files and interpret their character sets. One of them contains the Project Gutenberg etext of the novel, an ASCII transcription. The other contains an XML encoding tagged according to a DTD from the Text Encoding Initiative, the current best standard for encoding literary (and many other) texts. It has all of the textual content of the PG version, as well as some that's missing (like the table of contents and the copyright page from the transcribed edition, which the PG version unaccountably omits). XML tags mark all the line and page breaks of the original. In addition, there are tags to mark quoted speech, unusual typography, words in foreign languages, and other significant features of the original. The CD-ROM contains the DTD used along with documentation on the tagset.
In this imaginary scenario, even if all of the XML documentation were missing it would be pretty straightforward for 31st-century programmers to strip out the tags and recreate the ASCII transcription. But with the documentation, it's possible to reconstruct something much closer to the original than the plain-vanilla PG version allows. And suppose your 31st-century archaeologist found a trove of TEI-tagged books on CD: with all of the structural tagging and metadata about authorship, publication dates, etc., a 31st-century librarian will be able to plug all of the books into a cataloging system that allows sophisticated searching. If instead you had a trove of plain-ASCII books, the best you could do with the collection would be simple full-text searches.
Leaving aside the sci-fi scenario, the reality is that our documents, over the next few decades, will move from format to format and be used for purposes that we can only guess at right now. Of course plain ASCII, or even proprietary formats, will be better than no documents at all. But the work involved in converting them will be a lot higher than if they are tagged in a well-documented, structured markup language.
Incidentally, there's already at least one project underway to take Project Gutenberg texts and add minimal XHTML or XML markup to capture structure and make them more readable via stylesheets. The Open eBook specification is just a more sophisticated way of doing the same thing.
Who's "we", kimo sabe? I'm at a computer conference at the University of Georgia right now, a campus with state-of-the-art Ethernet connections everywhere and an 802.11b network that covers most areas. However, this doesn't include the conference hotel. I'm sitting in my room reading Slashdot via a modem connection that has given me 28.8 kbps maximum since I've been here. And I'm mighty happy for pages with compact design and compressed graphics. I'll grant that the 15-second download for the evilwm screenshot was tolerable...
It may be that few Mac-only users will miss a decent Opera version, but it's a loss to people who move around from Mac to Windows to Linux. I used (and paid for) Opera when I was predominantly working on a Windows desktop, and used the Linux version from time to time. Last year when I migrated to OS X for my work platform I tried to stick with Opera, but the Mac version was so deficient and buggy that I shifted to Mozilla on all platforms; I preferred Opera's navigational modes and shortcuts, but cross-platform consistency and reliability was much more important. Proper CSS rendering is another factor in Mozilla's favor.
Nowadays I use Mozilla at work for my heavy-duty functioning, while on the iBook I got for home use I'm tending to use Safari and Mozilla Firebird. On the family desktop PC that handles finances and Internet commerce it's Mozilla. (Opera on Windows was less likely to work with secure commercial websites than Mozilla anyway, in my experience.)
If Opera had kept current with its Mac development, chances are I'd have paid for a two-platform license. Now it's unlikely I'll go back to Opera on any platform. Don't know if that's at all a representative experience, but there it is.
I've been using Linux since '94 too, but always in conjunction with another desktop OS, since at work I've always needed to run certain proprietary software apps that don't run under Linux. My transition has been Linux plus OS/2 then Windows NT then Win 98 (thanks to a job change) and now OS X (thanks to a job change that let me get a whole new system). I still use a Debian Linux box as a server, and for running various apps that haven't been packaged for Fink & that I don't have time to adapt and compile.
The combination of OS X + Linux is a pretty unbeatable work environment. I'd guess there are a lot of Linux "adders," maybe more than "switchers."
Coincidentally, I just today received my 11 x 17 inch print of this Zippy cartoon from April 2001, signed by Griffy himself. Destined for my office wall, of course.
Er, make that "twenty-five years later".
One of the interviews was with an archetypal Geek of Classics (GC dpu s++:++ a-- C-- !tv b++++ r--), a roundish undergrad who looked like a cheerful Polish maiden aunt. She allowed as how she didn't know anything about the upcoming game: "I don't pay much attention to football, I guess--I spend most of my time reading Herodotus."
(Swarthmore went on, unbelievably, to win the game on a last-second goal-line play. Thirty-five years later, Herodotus would prevail when the college dissolved its intercollegiate football program.)
The last digit was missing from the URL. The correct link is http://infocentre.frontend.com/servlet/Infocentre? access=no&page=article&rows=5&id=286
The Windows port of the Vim editor is a sine qua non. Except for not being able to use interesting pipe commands, the PC port will do anything in the world one might want to do with a text document, and it has just enough GUI functionality to be useful without being intrusive.
If memory serves, informal missives in the '70s, particularly from teenage girls, were often adorned with handwritten Happy Faces that performed roughly the equivalent paralinguistic function as typewritten smileys would later. The main innovation was the 90-degree rotation that allowed for a sideways ASCII representation.
... though "Father Busa" is not really Father Busa, but Stephen Ramsay. Even so, I think we owe at least a propitiary nod.
Repeat in chorus with me: We are not worthy...
The chief scientist of Stupid Country gets an urgent summons one day to meet with the President.
The President is fuming. "Look at this news! India is getting ready to put a man on the Moon! Imagine the publicity they'll get. Surely we must have a way to get there first!"
"Not to worry, Your Excellency," says the Chief Scientist. "We are planning something much better! In fact, at this moment I have my most skilled rocket scientists working on a project to put a man on the Sun!"
"A man on the Sun?" says the President. "Praise be to Stupid Country Deity! That will be splendid! Only ... only ... isn't it terribly hot on the Sun?"
"Aha!" says the Chief Scientist. "And that is precisely why we are going to land there at night!"
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)
"Hulk will impale Superman on sentence fragment!"
They don't make Net humor like that any more.
All I know is that I had a UFO experience during my one and only visit to Scotland. I was in Glasgow for a meeting, and rented a car for the one free day I had, to drive as far into the western Highlands as I could go. I was driving through Glen Coe, which is about as wild and romantic a place as it gets (on both aesthetic and historic grounds), when WHOOSH something flew past me at incredible speed, and not too high up; it seemed to be three pitch-black fighter planes. But I couldn't be sure I hadn't just imagined it. What would jet fighters be doing swooping through idyllic Glen Coe as if it were part of a Star Wars set?
As it happened, I shared a compartment on the train back to London with a guy in the RAF, and he told me that sure enough, the glens up there were used a lot for low-level military flight training. (Of course, he could have been an Alien plant trying to convince me that everything was Just Fine.)
But it doesn't take desert flats or Highland glens to produce odd sightings. The most uncanny experience I've ever had was riding a city bus in New Haven late in the afternoon, and casually noticing the sun going down out the window to the east, and then as it penetrated my consciousness what that meant experiencing a couple of seconds of disorientation and pure panic until the reason-seeking part of my brain figured out that I was simply seeing a reflection of the sunset to the west. But if I'd only had that split-second perception of the world reversed, I might for the rest of my days had sworn that I had slipped through a crack into an alternate universe for a moment.