Freecell Solver

I ran into a few problems with DocBook/XML. The db2pdf, db2html, etc. utilities (that use jade as a backend) barfed on me. I spent a lot of time trying to resolve it and eventually was able to find a flag (-c /etc/sgml/catalog) that resolves it with the help of a certain camille who is a Mandrake Linux developer. Now they all work flawlessly, and Camille said he'll find a workaround for them for the next Mandrake release. Note that rendering DocBook/XML using XSL stylesheets worked all the time.

I thus went into a frenzy of converting the architecture document to DocBook, while fixing some of the errors in the original text document in the process, and adding some DocBook kitch-factors such as hyperlinks, tags, and stuff like that. It is pretty much finalized now. Check the results here.

While looking at an intermediate PDF I discovered that the Acrobat bookmarks were quite flat. I posted a question about it to the DocBook-Apps mailing list (a very useful resource), and received an answer in private that the new DSSSL stylesheets contained a broken file, and that a fix was available on SourceForge. After I replaced the file, the PDF came out extra-fine. I love DocBook!

Naturally, the main downside to DocBook is that it is very verbose. Very very verbose. I eventually apted to use some gvim tricks to make my life easier.

Other Hacktivity

I've been heavily working on my homepage, and now it's in a sensible state and functions across both t2 and vipe with the original URLs. If and when I lose my t2 account and will have to set up a homepage on a different host somewhere (possibly with my own domain - like shlomif.il.eu.org) then I'll probably cause Google and friends a shock and move everything to one domain. Right now, I care too much about broken URLs, and don't mind the extra WebMetaLanguage effort.

I've been giving a lot of thinking about what I want to do with Quad-Pres, but there has been no actual coding. I think some programmers (and engineers in general) make the mistake of coding too much and thinking too little, so I don't think it so bad. Better to start programming when you have a goal that is well-defined and scrutinized to death than to hack something, and then rewrite it time and time again. A stitch in time saves nine. A good design can save you a lot of keying/running/testing/debugging time.