Peter Flynn

Last year I switched from the ailing and incompetent ex-state telco because their crufty copper wouldn't support broadband in my area. I took the 3× package from my local cable provider: phone, Internet, and TV for the same price as a slower Internet alone would have cost with the telco.

Thus far, so good: a risk, but it worked excellently (still does when connected), and I got close to the claimed 20Mbit/s on a good day, enabling me to give away some of it via my FON router. Then it started losing both phone and Internet for hours at a time, at random.

At this point I should digress to explain that the local cable provider was once known as Cork Multichannel, back in the days when the only TV stations on air were the two state-sponsored ones — worthy in their own way, but unimaginative and hidebound. Cable provided the BBC, ITV, and S4C, and while they bungled a few things, the service was adequate. Then they became Chorus (what Marketing lamebrain thinks up these names?) and then they sold out to NTL, whose nest-fouling antics are well-documented elsewhere. Now they are now part of something called UPC, whose marketing and publicity is even lamer, and about whom, frankly, m'dear, no-one gives a toss.

Each time I report the fault, I listen through their Ovaltiney of an announcer prating on about how they are now UPC, and then get a very pleasant helpdesk operator with a canned script and about as much technical knowledge as a very small gnat (not her fault: theirs).

Each time, they ask me to wait while they remote-check my modem (it's working fine except it has no signal: I tell them this, because the fault is up the street in their cable closet).

Each time they claim the signal is going into my modem but not coming out. Yes, really: they claim to be able to read the input signal level inside the modem (ie from the other side of the demod circuit), remotely, and see the input waveform not coming out again. Right. Maybe this is possible with the right remote diagnostics, but I'd rather have it interpreted by a signals engineer than a helpdesk operator, thanks.

And each time, about 30 minutes after my call, the signal miraculously re-establishes itself, and everything is fine again. Only a nasty suspicious mind like mine would dream of suspecting that a fault call triggers an action on a controller to do a remote reset of the substation switch, ‘just in case that fixes it’.

So finally they send a cable guy, who did run the modem diagnostics and said it was just fine, but that the signal in my street was not what it could be, and that they'd send someone to fix it in a few days.

Nothing so far, but it failed again this evening, and again I listened to the snake-oil from Mr Smarmy, and explained my woes to the nice operator. Who went through the same script, tested the modem, told me it was being looked into, and for security she couldn't tell me when the engineers would come to my area to fix their degrading kit.

TV is unaffected throughout; and now, of course, the phone and Internet came back 30 minutes later, in the middle of a very fine Spaghetti Arrabiata and a glass of Aldi's Chateau Soussans 2006 Margaux, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. There is life there, Jim, but not as we know it.

Monday 2010-07-12 20:35:26

'Twas a dark and stormy night when I wrote the last post here, and far too long ago. My excuse is that I've been writing my thesis, and while that really isn't a valid excuse for not keeping this page up to date, I'm afraid it'll have to do for the moment.

However, progress is being made: chapters 1 (Intro) and 3 (Surveys) are done and corrected, and 4 (Testing) is close to completion. That leaves the Lit Crit, which is ongoing (new stuff still being added), and then the actual tests.

In the meantime, there is still a thing called a ‘life’ out there, I believe. If you find mine lying around somewhere, please return it to the owner.

Monday 2010-07-12 19:45:15

Way too much stuff has passed over and under the desk. For years I have been extolling the virtues of my Nokia N800 PDA, which does pretty much everything my laptop used to do, but fits in my pocket. Nokia call it an Internet Tablet, but it's actually a pocket computer, which may explain some of Nokia's current difficulties: they are thinking like a phone company, not a computer company, and they've missed the boat so many times it's becoming boring.

I sat in a break at the Balisage conference last year, on a Skype conference call with the other organisers of the XML Summerschool, using the N800. Someone thought it was a phone until I showed them that it did all the PIM stuff, browsed the web, did my email and newsgroups, tweeted, IM'd, edited Word and Excel documents, ran Emacs and Saxon and LATEX (did my PDF slides using Beamer), let me ssh back home to fix a broken server, and still had space for my music and some videos for the plane home.

The only thing it wasn't, was a phone (although Skype made up for that) and I kept bellyaching about how I didn't want it to be a phone as well because you look such a fool trying to talk on the phone and read a spreadsheet on the same device. However, my cellphone eventually died, so I went looking for a new one, and followed a colleague's advice and went for the HTC Hero. I couldn't afford an iPhone, and didn't want a Blackberry, and — thank goddess — didn't even consider the Nokia N900 because every indication on the Maemo mailing list was that it was a turkey.

OK, so now I'm contradicting myself. No, the Hero doesn't run Emacs or Saxon or LATEX. No, it won't let me edit Word or Excel. In theory it will let me ssh, but I'm quite willing not to spend my own time fixing other people's broken servers remotely. What it does, though, is enough to persuade me to part with the N800: it's lighter, slightly faster, and it's a phone. The Android Market has plenty to keep me occupied, and if I'm away locally on business, I can still bring the old laptop on the train.

I haven't been away long-distance since changing over, so I'll need to consider what to do if I have to hop the pond, although with the economic situation as it is, that looks unlikely to recur for a long time.

Right now the N800 is ‘resting’: used but immaculate, fully loaded with all the above-mentioned software, depersonalised (no trace of me), and you get the nice black hand-stitched leather slipcase and the amazing Stowaway fold-out pocket keyboard. Offers by email, tweet, or text, please.

Monday 2010-07-12 19:50:03

I have Ubuntu on almost all machines except a couple of big RHEL servers and the domestic Macs. The oldest desktop is a Dell something-or-other with a 1024×768 screen but it's been happily running 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) — so why would I want to upgrade?

Partly I was getting tired of needing to use a new facility or test a new package, only to be told that it required more recent libraries than I could install without major internal surgery. Plus the upgrade tool was rather explicit that 8.10 and later were unable to support my nVidia Geforce4 graphics card because the existing driver had been obsoleted by changes in the Xorg code; but that my installer would automatically switch to the older (FLOSSy) nv driver which would at least get me running. Everything was backed up, so I took the plunge.

They either lied, or something went wrong that they were unaware of. The upgrade went right ahead and installed the new driver which it knew was incompatible, so the newly-installed system simply hung at the login screen. Several hours of poking at the drivers convinced me that they just hadn't bothered to check. Several more hours of emailing the CLUG convinced me that it wasn't worth repairing the damage. I was resigned to reverting to 8.04 until someone mentioned 9.10 — I'd been looking at it, but had assumed that if 8.10 had dropped support for my graphics card, there wasn't an icicle's chance in hell that 9.10 would have put it back.

Wrong. I wiped Intrepid Ibex and installed Karmic Koala and it came up first time, full graphics mode, and even Compiz is working (so eat your heart out, Snow Leopard). Lots of good stuff, a few stupidities (not Ubuntu's fault): no KPDF, no KDVI (KDE has integrated the first into KDEgraphics and apparently dropped the second on the floor; but they have removed the ‘Current’ [page] option from the Print menu, which is plain daft); and some prat has removed the list of current buffers from the Emacs ‘Buffers’ menu — what am I supposed to do, guys? remember all my files in my head? C'mon, put it back.

But there goes the doorbell; kids wanting another blast of the pressure hose, I guess…Happy New Year to you all.

Saturday 2009-10-31 20-02-00

We've been typesetting a book for a colleague of mine, a Festschrift for a colleague of his. As usual with these works, each chapter was contributed by a different author, and my colleague had the task of putting them together.

We consulted about it beforehand. He uses OpenOffice (perhaps NeoOffice, I can't remember) on a Mac, but he had taken in all the chapters and edited them and arranged them, and was pretty much ready to go, when the publishers reminded him that their policy was for endnotes, not footnotes. Not a problem: only Chapter One used them, and we were using XSLT to create LATEX code for the formatting, so no changes were needed except to switch in the endnotes package.

However, which checking Chapter One, my colleague observed that all bar one of the footnotes-now-endnotes just said ‘My italics’. The author was quoting extensively from other sources, and highlighting relevant words and phrases. My colleague agreed with his publisher that such repetitive notes really weren't needed, so he left the only ‘real’ one and deleted all the rest. But as he deleted the final endnote of Chapter One, all the rest of the book (twelve chapters) vanished.

Ever a man of cool mind, he hit Undo and brought them back. No harm done. But that final endnote of Chapter One was back as well. Assuming that he had slipped a finger, he again deleted it…and again all the remaining chapters disappeared. At this point he brought them back with Undo, and saved the file for me to look at.

Well, well, well. The first time I had had to dig into ODF XML in earnest. It's nowhere near as bad as OOXML (so no surprises there, then), but footnotes and endnotes are inside more multiple containers than a Russian doll, and that was where the problem lay.

ODF allows multiple paragraphs in a single footnote/endnote — perfectly reasonably; all general-purpose markup systems do that, from DocBook to LATEX. But in ODF, as in OOXML, everything is a paragraph. Neither system has any concept of depth, regardless of the repeated and redundant nested sections in Word documents and the Byzantine sewer of ODF's footnotes.¹ That means ODF (and perhaps OOXML; I haven't tried it) allows anything at all in a single footnote, even twelve whole chapters because everything is a paragraph, and the only evidence of the text being in chapters is the style name, which is not checked because it's not a controlled vocabulary.

And that's what my colleague had unwittingly done. Having edited the first chapter, his cursor had been at the end of the last footnote, and had remained there while he pasted in twelve more chapters, which promptly and silently went into the footnote container and stayed there.

The reason is clear: OpenOffice believes that the cursor has no business being in element content at any point after the last text node, so there is actually no way (that I have found) to insert a new paragraph sibling to your current ancestor paragraph when your cursor is at the end of a footnote.

This slavish adherence to the WYSIWYG model is fine for shopping lists and business letters, which are short, transient, and not subject to any reprocessing. It's not suited to a serious editor, and if OpenOffice wants to be taken seriously by the publishing community it is going to have to change this, and preferably introduce a style margin like Word (or some other wide-angle style view) so that editors can see what they are doing. The last time I asked them, they said you could see the style by hovering the mouse over a paragraph (clearly not someone who had ever had to edit large documents), which is not meaningful when you need to see perhaps a dozen paragraph-level styled elements on a single screen.

It also makes a fine example of another technique I am researching for easing the burden on writers, and that's the distinction between ‘Insert’ and ‘New’. The first is for database programmers, markup experts, and ontology gureaux. It's meaningless for writers because with only a WYSIWYG view, there is nothing to insert into (and the interface won't allow the cursor to be in element content). ‘New’ is what writers use (new chapter, new paragraph, just like you were dictating), and when you want a new one, the editor should check its current location, scoot forward to the next place at the current level where one is permitted, and add it there, creating additional markup if needed to retain validity. If there is no place at the current level, go up a level and check there; lather, rinse, repeat.

The facility for an editor to click on ‘New Chapter’ and have the editor Do The Right Thing, instead of the wrong thing, would be a major step forward.

1. One exception: ODF wraps lists in proper list markup. Well done, ODF.

Saturday 2009-03-07 21:41:00

Every so often, ISPs have a major purge of hardware and software, and ‘upgrade’ their clients to the new service. You don't get a choice, and you're lucky if you get any warning, because alerting the clients that there is about to be a chnage might lead to some disaffection.

I've been with this bunch for over a decade, and they've given excellent service, with a responsive helpdesk and virtually no outage or downtime. The service was simple, and as most of my sites are generated rather than hand-coded, this suited me just fine.

Two weeks ago I got email that warned me about some small changes in their mail systems during an upcoming upgrade. No problem: I downloaded my mail folders and switched from IMAP to POP for a week (easy when your IMAP, POP, and webmail service all use standard mailbox files: goddess help those whose mail is buried in proprietary databases). After a week I uploaded the mailboxes and reverted to IMAP.

Suddenly this week everything stopped working: mail wouldn't log in, not by any protocol, and all my sites were inaccessible — but oddly, I could still log into their new site-owner page, and FTP still worked. I logged a support ticket and downloaded a few key files. No word of any changes, though.

Then the FTP access changed: I could still log in, but the entire directory structure was different, although all my files were still there, but in a different subdirectory. No response to the ticket. Phone calls met the usual disembodied voice saying that all their agents were busy helping other clients, and refusing to put me on hold, but offering to take voicemail. No response.

Fortunately, their web site gave local phone numbers (they're in California: I'm in Ireland, so an American 1-800 number is no use to me). A phone call early in the morning Pacific time got a harassed support person who explained they'd been having ‘a little difficulty’ in the move to a new hardware and software system, and claiming that they didn't have my alternate off-system email address (which they did have a week before because they emailed me on it). All was eventually resolved and the email and subdomains re-established (except I lost a dozen or so planned-but-nused subdomain names). Generally speaking, pretty good service, although it would have been better if they'd told me beforehand.

It was worrying that the move clearly squashed all record of my subdomains, all my contact details, and reset all my email passwords. But what was reassuring is that they had the good sense to put a non-1-800 number on their web site, and they didn't change my owner password. Everything is backed-up off-site anyway, so I wasn't worried about data loss, and because everything uses open file formats, a new environment is no big deal. To those of you who went looking for the XML FAQ, the Acronym Server, or the online book Formatting Information, thank you for your patience.

Friday 2009-03-06 21:26:00

One of the recurrent problems in living on an island off the coast of a bigger island off the coast of a continent is that you have to use boats and planes to get anywhere other than your own doorstep. Planes are not a problem: our local airlines do a reasonable job, and RyanAir terrifies the life out of bigger airlines worldwide.

But if you want to bring the car, you either have to drive for hours to get to a port for a ferry to Wales, or wait a week to get the ferry to France. Either way you pay through the nose for the privilege, because the shower who ended up running what was left of the direct ferry to Swansea lost their tub a couple of years ago and never found a new one. What a pity the proposal to the (then) EU by our former Foreign Minister Peter Barry for a bridge or tunnel to the UK never took off!

However, at last there is new hope: a local campaign to bring back the direct ferry service is making excellent headway. If you're interested in coming via the UK to visit, or the other way round, sign their petition and fill in their questionnaire, and maybe we'll soon be back in touch with the next chunk of land.

Monday 2009-01-26 20-35-04

The recent XML meeting was in DC in December, and I was pleased to see more evidence of the developments I mentioned above, although the whole meeting has shrunk (as predicted) as XML becomes embedded into the wainscoting of IT development and ceases to be new. The next breakpoint is the Balisage meeting in Montréal in August (the week after Worldcon), and I hope to have available some results and conclusions from the work I have been doing on the usability of editing software for structured text.

The TEX Users Group meeting last July was well-attended, and went without any major hitches except one: the odd inability of the host institution to provide visitor wireless access. Curiously, this was not only of no interest to UCC, but they seemed to be unable to understand its importance to visitors. It does mean that organisations looking for a host site would do well to check wifi arrangements and do a physical test that it exists and works before committing to the site. Fortunately this year's meeting in Notre Dame is better-prepared in this respect.

There's a load of new stuff to go through in the next few weeks: an updated Maemo, some neat Yuletide presents, lots of books, and plenty of file-format weirdness.

Monday 2009-01-05 18-22-46