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July 29, 2004
OSCON 2004: Dan Gillmor on We the Media
I wanted to go to Dan Gollmor's talk yesterday, but I there were 3 or 4 good talks going on then. I was glad to see Jeremy Zawadny's notes. This is the topic of Dan's new book, We the Media.
11:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
OSCON 2004: Ben Galbraith on Publishing a Medical Textbook with Apache FOP and XSL-FO
Here's the challenge:
- Entirely new kind of textbook.
- Structured content, not prose
- Extensive pictures
- Books generated on demand
- Reuse content in other forms
The first attempt was the Microsoft tool approach using Word with special templates as an authoring tool, Word VBA to convert Word to HTML-ish format, access used to store content, and then VB and Framemaker macros would generate content. A whole generation of books was developed with this technology, but it was a mess and the content was not reusable.
The second attempt used a Java Swing-based editing tool (modified JTree with Word-like editing features and an XML binding layer). XSLT converted the XML into LaTeX and then MiKTeX rendered the LaTeX into PDF. The authors liked the authoring tool. The rendering system was too inflexible. LaTex is showing its age and the layout was unstable. Also the data binding was too inflexible requiring that it be recompiled with every change.
The third attempts was the replace the LaTeX stylesheet with XML-FO. This was more stable and flexible than the LaTeX solution.
The editing tool presents structured data as forms to be filled out rather than relying on authors (doctors) to write prose. Creating the editor was a big job, but worth the effort.
XML-FO v1.0 has some limitation (no support for multi-column region per page, etc.) but XML-FO 1.1 will eclipse TeX/LaTeX functionality. Apache FOP is an open source XML-FO processor. Its not fully compliant and may never be. The project was recently rebooted to start recoding from scratch. RenderX XEP is a commercial XML-FO processor.
One additional problem they ran into was the amount of computation that rendering a full medical text with all its images requires. Ben used JNGI to create a grid of computers to do the rendering a few pages at a time.
11:43 AM | Recommend This | Print This
OSCON 2004: Freeman and George Dyson
This morning's key note was Freeman and George Dyson. Esther was supposed to be here as well, but she's stuck in Dallas. No wonder, I heard on CNN this morning that Dallas got 12 inches of rain in 3 hours. Yikes! The format was Tim O'Reilly moderating and asking questions of Freeman and George. Here are a few things that struck me as interesting:
With regards to possibly dangerous technical advances (specifically the topic was bioengineering), Freeman says there are three questions to ask:
- Is it possible to put a stop to is?
- Is is desirable to put a stop to it?
- If you want to control it, what's the appropriate mechanism for doing that?
George makes talks about being a "maker." He says we went through a period where children didn't take apart things. They were too complicated and we've lost something in that. This is a great observation. My son just went to a "invention camp" at his school and took a bunch of stuff to take apart. I think it significantly changed his outlook on how things work and made him much more interested in how things work.
Freeman talks about the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry being that it doesn't work on a small scale. Open source software is about doing large scale things in a decentralized way. The small scale nature of any individual contribution is its strength.
Scientists are discoverers or explainers. Discoverers are makers and tool builders. There's an analogy about birds who look down from the sky and frogs who look up from the pond.