Funny story. The first use of my new digital camera was to send pictures back to my company headquarters documenting the horrible shape the equipment we were working on was in! There had been a complaint from the customer about the extra money required to bring things back into operational shape. No more complaints once I sent in the pictures! I knew back then that digital photography would be a powerful medium!

One of those early pictures flashed across my screen tonight and I went to enlarge it. It was taken at a resolution of 640 x 480. Back then you were an advanced user if you were at 800 x 600 on a laptop screen and a picture at 640 x 480 looked pretty good!

When viewed on a modern laptop at 1280 x 800 that same picture looks grainy and like a postage stamp! It is amazing how fast the world has changed from film photography to digital.

Kwaj Sunset 1998 @ 640 x 480 - 96 dpi

I wish I had my modern day digital camera 10 years ago. The color and depth of the pictures through several zooms now is amazing. I feel like I can crawl into the shots and look around. The shots I took ten years ago are a good test of my memory and imagination without zooming at all. To crawl into those shots and look around, I need to close my eyes and remember what it felt like to be there first hand.

Mount Wire 2008 @ 3072 x 2304 - 72 dpi

We are in the midst of an incredible revolution with digital High Definition photography and video. It takes the old photo album to a level where we can actually imagine we are there without leaving our living rooms.

I’m all for digital progress and photography yet believe there is something to be said for actually living outside the digital realm every once and awhile. I will cherish both the photos shown here because I was there in 1998 and 2008. For those that did not have these experiences, I still hope you enjoy the photos!

-C. Angione - 1998 & 2008

One of the most important principals of DITA specialization is the concept of inheritance. Inheritance allows you to use the structures and semantics previously defined by others as a starting point for your specializations. But how do you communicate this idea in a repeatedly simple clear concise manner during the design process? If a picture is worth a thousand words, a UML model is invaluable.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a graphical notation that is particularly good at expressing object-oriented designs. UML went through a standardization process and is now an Object Management Group (OMG) standard.

I like using UML because it allows me to communicate certain concepts more clearly than alternatives like natural language. Natural language is too imprecise and subject to interpretation by the reader. A DITA DTD or Schema is very precise but not something that should be created during the design process. So I use UML to communicate and keep track of the important details like inheritance.

A lot of people talk about the learning curve associated with UML. I’m not advocating that team members need to be exposed to all that UML can provide. Only the parts necessary to convey the important details of the moment.

Let’s say that we want to build a new type of DITA topic for creating slide presentations. The following diagram conveys a lot of information:

My conversation with the assembled audience of technical staff and business users would go something like this:

Each green ellipse represents an element already in existence. Each yellow ellipse represents a proposed element. The double angle brackets in the ellipse are used in UML to define sterotypes. A sterotype is the vocabulary extension mechanism built into UML. In our case we are using sterotypes to indicate which organization (DITA or SGMLXML) an element reports to. The dotted lines represent which elements are included in others and which elements extend a base type (inheritance).

Once the audience agrees that the model is correct, it can be included in the specifications and developers can create the new elements and the properly-formed class attributes required.

In our example the definition of the class attributes in the resulting DTD would look like this:

Besides communicating DITA specialization information, I also use UML for other aspects of my deployments such as use case design, system deployment and various activity diagrams. No single model is sufficient to build the system but by using the same modeling language for all the models, it is easy to impart all of the important analysis, design and implementation decisions that must be made by an organization before deployment.

-Charles Angione

My favorite Allen Drury book Advise & Consent (1962) was made into a movie that is now available on DVD. When I was in high school, I was part of Mock Congress debates. We followed Senate rules (parliamentary procedure) during those sessions. I wish I had read this book or watched the DVD before I was in some of those debates!

I don’t care if you are Liberal, Conservative, Democrat, or Republican. You can empathize with all points of view by the end of this movie.

I can’t think of a more perfect movie to watch in this political season.

C.

In fact as a test of the new browser, I’m writing this post in Chrome. Chrome has some cool features starting with a very minimalistic UI. I’m already in love with the browsers minimalism. The WebKit rendering engine is smokin fast. So far it has done a good job of correctly rendering all the typical pages I visit. The address bar also acts as the search dialog which is a really simple but smart idea. It saves real estate up at the top of the browser. Same idea for their application toolbar. It only appears when you start a new blank tab, then goes away. Smart.

What I don’t like.

So why won’t I make this my primary browser for day to day activities? Three major reasons:

The Future?

I like competition and Chrome has the potential to push the browser industry forward at a more rapid pace than any of the established players would be comfortable with. So for now, Chrome has found a place on my RocketDock toolbar as a browser to keep an eye on.

The first was a Wired article about the Sheraton Hotel chain rolling out the Microsoft Surface table. While this might not be a true Blue Screen of Death it sure looks like it!

The second Blue Screen sighting was reported by Gizmodo about the torch lighting at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Good thing this computer wasn’t controlling anything critical!

I started with Google Docs. Storing my checkbook register (an excel spreadsheet), some Power Point presentations and some PDF white papers I always find myself looking for. I want access to these documents quickly and easily from any and all computers I might happen to have available to me even if only for a few minutes.

My move further into the cloud happened when I had to decide if I was going to put additional Network storage on my home network or lease secure disk space somewhere in the cloud. We’re at 2 terabytes and climbing at home already. Some of the disks have been spinning for a few years so I wouldn’t trust critical or archive data to them. Truly archiving data means having it mirrored on at least two different disks if not on a DVD as well.

I decided to roll with the Amazon S3 service instead of buying more disk that I have to maintain. Amazon S3 is a simple web service that can be used to securely retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon does not provide a front end to the S3 web service. It is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

For a front end to the S3 service I decided to use Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk supports Linux, Max, and Windows (including Vista) platforms as well as USB sticks. It makes the Amazon S3 service appear as a network drive on your machine where you can drag and drop or copy files.

One of my major complaints with approaches like this in the past has been that passing lots of info or large files over the network takes time and can be process intensive depending on your OS (this is really the kindest way I could put this without saying Windows slows to a crawl). Jungle disk has solved this. It caches the files local on your machine and slowly feeds the bits to the S3 service as CPU and bandwidth are available (configurable). To the end user it makes the copy to the Network drive look instantaneous. The software also comes with a backup routine where you can backup selected folders. The software is 20 bucks with life time upgrades.

You pay for the Amazon S3 service monthly. The rates are reasonable. Storage is $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used. You also pay a small data transfer fee for incoming and outgoing data transfer. Amazon provides a fee calculator to figure out your approximate costs. If you think about what hard disk space costs to install and mirror (for a true archive) as well as administer, the fees keep looking better and better! I’m willing to pay for good service and zero headaches!

So what’s left on my Network Storage at home? VMware images. Lots and lots of VMware images. Large files that are I/O and bandwidth intensive are not the type of thing I’m looking to store out in the cloud…..at least not yet. Next thing on my list to explore is Amazon EC2. The topic of a future post I’m sure.

-Charles

Victors Way — what a noble address! I first came to the four-story building 11 years ago as a potential customer. It was the middle of the December, and I was meeting with a sales rep and some lead engineers to show them a proposal featuring Arbortext. I remember Ivan, my sales rep, later telling me that everyone was eager to meet someone willing to come to Ann Arbor in December!

I came back to Victors Way the following year for the Annual Users Group Conference (AUGI) held in Ann Arbor. What a fun and memorable event! Arbortext made sure that just about anyone a customer might want to speak with was at the conference. I remember watching the trepidation on the faces of some engineers as they walked across the street, their eyes full of dread and looks that said, “Oh no! I have to talk to a customer!”

But that kind of openness and innovation is what gave Arbortext the reputation it maintains today — fiercely dedicated to standards and open at all levels of the organization, from the CEO to the engineer that built a feature.

Eventually, I joined Arbortext as a consultant, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. In addition to an amazing career, I’ve gained a wonderful extended family. When I came in for my job interview, it took my interviewers 20 minutes to get me to the conference room because we kept running into people I knew along the way!

Ever since I became part of the Arbortext team, returning to Ann Arbor (no matter what the season) has always felt like coming home. I see friends that I stay in touch with but don’t get to visit with in person very often. I make sure to stop by every office, no matter what floor, and chat with people that I’m genuinely happy to see.

One of my earliest major assignments at Arbortext involved creating one of the first linkbases in existence. At that time, the XLink standard was brand new. During those early days, I often found myself standing outside in the middle of the night next to one of the walkway lamps that light the entranceway. I’d look up at the ARBORTEXT sign on the building while I smoked like a chimney and prayed that the application would actually work! Eventually it did work, but only after some pain and suffering.

The four floors of 1000 Victors Way represent more than a decade of my life. Although the facilities in the new building are far superior for the Ann Arbor crew of today, I will always look back at the Victors Way building with fondness, and I will stop by when I’m in town. The Ann Arbor crew and Arbortext customers should be proud of what was accomplished within those walls, and I hope they are as excited as I am about what will come out of the new facility.

I can’t wait to reflect on what happens during the next decade.

-Charles Angione

For the uninitiated, the SVCHOST (stands for “Service Host”) processes host services for the Microsoft OS.  The services are DLL programs that do something useful. People more commonly refer to them as “drivers”, the things we install  to make some peripheral work well and play nice with others.  Multiple instances of SVCHOST may be running at any one time and multiple services may be grouped together in one SVCHOST process which makes finding the one stinking service that is not being a good citizen a pain.

Couple of techniques I picked up while suffering through this last night:

Identify svchost.exe processes using tasklist command (hard way)

1. First, go ahead and click on Start and then Run and type in CMD and click OK

2. Type the following in to the command window and press Enter

tasklist /svc /fi “imagename eq svchost.exe

You should get an output that looks something like this:

You’ll notice in this example  that PID 508 has a bunch of processes running in it. Now for the tricky task of figuring out which one is not playing nice.  Right-click on My Computer, choose Manage. Now choose Computer Management and then choose Services and Applications. Finally choose Services.

Now try and match the cryptic Windows service name with the easily readable names in the services tab. Stop the services individually until you CPU meter calms down.

Use Process Explorer (easy way)

There is a much better way to do this. Use Process Explorer. Process Explorer is a tool Microsoft acquired from SysInternals a few years ago.

What’s cool about Process Explorer is that it allows you to dig into any Process and Stop /Start process without having to match up Services with Display Names. One by one you turn off the Services and see which one calms down the CPU meter. Once you’ve discovered your problem child, the final step is to go into the Services manager and change the service to start manually if you don’t need it or a fix is not readily available. First aid for computers. Stop the CPU bleeding first.

My problem child was the HID Input Service which I don’t need in my day to day life but which I will try and make behave sometime in the future.

Info for this post came from a bunch of Google search research. I just decided to aggregate it all into one place. May you never need to use the knowledge contained here.

C. Angione

What brought on this rant…..I’m sending an e-card to someone. WHY THE HELL DOES A SOCIAL NETWORK SITE THINK I WANT THE CONTENTS OF A CARD THAT I EXPLICITLY ADDRESSED TO A SINGLE FREAKIN PERSON BE BROADCAST TO THE ENTIRE FRAPPIN WORLD? It gets better…… This is a new behavior since the site in question decided it was a social networking site instead of being a contact aggregation site.

A trademark includes any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination used, or intended to be used, in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others, and to indicate the source of the goods.  In short, a trademark is a brand name.

The federal registration symbol, the R enclosed within a circle, may be used once the mark is actually registered in the USPTO. Even though an application is pending, the registration symbol may not be used before the mark has actually become registered.

When you want to figure out if something has actually become registered try using the
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS). (Don’t government search engines get cute names?)

Other sites of interest while doing my research:

• Adobe Systems Incorporated Permissions and Trademark Guidelines

• General Microsoft Trademark Guidelines