XML 2007 Last-Call Deadline

 Conference  No Responses »
Aug 302007
 

The XML 2007 talk sub­mis­sion dead­line is loom­ing; there’s only one this year (and it’s this Fri­day, August 31st!), so if you miss it, you miss out. I’m one of the review­ers. If you want a high grade if I’m assigned your paper to review, read these hints on writ­ing good abstracts first. 

Since the talk sub­mis­sions are blind-reviewed, the only thing I have to go on is the qual­ity of the abstract. Here’s the check-list I go through.

  • Is the abstract long enough? Abstracts that are too short don’t give enough inform­a­tion for me to judge the qual­ity prop­erly. Remem­ber, I don’t know who you are when I read the abstract.
  • Does the abstract say why the sub­ject is import­ant, as well as what the talk will cov­er? Both of these are neces­sary to let people know why they should both­er going to the talk.
  • Are tech­nic­al terms and acronyms used cor­rectly? If these are wrong, I will tend to assume you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about and grade appropriately.
  • Is the gram­mar and spelling cor­rect? I appre­ci­ate a well-craf­ted, gram­mat­ic­ally cor­rect abstract and will tend to assume someone who can write a good abstract can also write a good talk.
  • Who’s the expec­ted audi­ence? The abstract should make it clear who is expec­ted to bene­fit most from hear­ing the talk, wheth­er that’s novice or expert, tech­ie or manager.
  • Does this look like a product pitch? If so, it’s prob­ably not suitable.

Apache and Logrotate

 Technology  1 Response »
Aug 292007
 

I use apache to serve a few sites from the fire­wall box in the base­ment and for some reas­on it kept dying on a reg­u­lar basis. This star­ted fairly recently, some time after I set up sep­ar­ate access log files for each of the sites.

The error logs showed entries like 

[Sun Jun 10 06:28:03 2007] [warn] child process 16516 still 
did not exit, sending a SIGTERM

which seemed bizarre and wer­en’t being spawned by any­thing obvi­ous in the access logs. I even­tu­ally remembered that I had set up log rota­tion for each of the vir­tu­al hosts, and went search­ing through the error logs to see if it was related. Sure enough, the shut-down was hap­pen­ing at the same time, and so the log rota­tion was likely to be related to the cause. But what could be the real cause? Surely not just rotat­ing logs…

A bit of pok­ing around the web found that oth­er people have had this prob­lem. I went down a bunch of dead ends (vir­tu­al hosts? apache2ctl restart vs apache2ctl start?) and even­tu­ally just turned error report­ing up to the max­im­um. The next week, after the serv­er went dead again, I found the fol­low­ing email in my sysad­min inbox.

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to 
address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
error: error running shared postrotate script for 
/var/log/apache2/*.log
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return 
code 1

Hunt­ing around more on the web, I found a recom­mend­a­tion to expli­citly set the TMPDIR envir­on­ment vari­able before run­ning logrotate. Apache has now been up for a few weeks without fall­ing over, prob­lem solved! I’m still not sure why this only star­ted to hap­pen after set­ting up sep­ar­ate log files for the sep­ar­ate vir­tu­al hosts, or even if that was more than a prox­im­ate coincidence.

Knitting and XML

 Crafts, Technology  4 Responses »
Aug 272007
 

Eve’s XML and knit­ting ana­logy got me thinking.

You can think of a writ­ten knit­ting pat­tern as being the schema, with a set of instruc­tions, just like the schem­a’s con­tent mod­el. Then each knit­ted item you make that con­forms to that knit­ting pat­tern is like the doc­u­ment instance that con­forms to the schema. Schem­as can be restrict­ive or allow lots of instance struc­ture vari­ations, as can knit­ting pat­terns. And, to tie it into my pre­vi­ous post on knit­ting and copy­right, a schema can be copy­righted (and often is). The ana­logy does have a few prob­lems when you start try­ing to fig­ure out the rela­tion­ship of the set of tags in a doc­u­ment instance and the con­tent with­in those tags; if you think of the knit and purl stitches as being the ele­ments, then the yarn would be the con­tent. Except for, yarn can­’t really be ori­gin­al in the same way as the con­tent in an XML doc­u­ment can be. Some people may dis­agree when it comes to hand-painted yarns, of course.

Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

 Books  5 Responses »
Aug 162007
 

The book­club dis­cussed Oscar Wilde’s The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray. Read­ing this was a remind­er that one reas­on I go to book­club is to be encour­aged to read books I oth­er­wise would­n’t, and to get more out of them than I can on my own.

The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray (Wiki­pe­dia review) is the story of a beau­ti­ful young man who becomes evil and debauched after he views his por­trait and real­izes how much he wishes to stay look­ing young and beau­ti­ful. His wish is gran­ted; his out­er form stays young and vig­or­ous while the paint­ing shows the effects of his life­style; he keeps the paint­ing hid­den from the world as long as pos­sible. The book played a role in Oscar Wilde’s tri­al and prob­ably influ­enced his being convicted.

I had a hard time get­ting through the book and skimmed many of the more bor­ing pas­sages. While we were dis­cuss­ing the book, it became obvi­ous that part of the reas­on I did­n’t enjoy it as much as the oth­ers did was because I got a ver­sion without foot­notes or an explan­at­ory intro­duc­tion. Know­ing some­thing of the lit­er­ary allu­sions makes a big dif­fer­ence. Those bor­ing pas­sages, for example, were sup­posedly inten­ded to illus­trate the tedi­um of parts of Dori­an Gray’s life. Not that any­one at book­club read them in detail. 

The second edi­tion has a lot of changes from the first edi­tion; new char­ac­ters, pas­sages designed to tone down the homo­eroti­cism, and we had some fun try­ing to fig­ure out how the Vic­tori­an-era audi­ence would have seen the nov­el, com­pared to the way it would be under­stood today. This is where those foot­notes (which the oth­ers in book­club had in their edi­tions) came in handy. 

It’s prob­ably an import­ant book to have read, giv­en its his­tor­ic­al sig­ni­fic­ance; I doubt that I’ll read it again in the near future but if I did, I’d get anoth­er, annot­ated, version.

Virus Spam

 Technology  No Responses »
Aug 152007
 

Spams car­ry­ing vir­uses aren’t any­thing new but every now and again some­thing comes into my email box that is a bit dif­fer­ent. Like this one.

Dear user of textuality.com, mail system administrator of 
textuality.com would like to let you know the following.

We have detected that your account was used to send a 
huge amount of spam during this week.
Obviously, your computer was infected and now contains a 
trojan proxy server.

We recommend that you follow our instructions in the 
attachment in order to keep your computer safe.

Virtually yours,
textuality.com support team.

Since the email was­n’t from my ISP, and if there’s a “mail sys­tem admin­strat­or” that isn’t my ISP, it would be me, it’s obvi­ous that this is spam. Even without those clues, the email is sus­pi­cious. The wor­ry­ing thought is that it has per­haps just enough per­son­al­iz­a­tion to dupe some people into open­ing the attachment.

City Mayhem

 General, Vancouver  No Responses »
Aug 142007
 

Today was my turn to take the boy to his soc­cer camp; it also turned out to be the day after the police shot someone on a main street. The afore­said street was com­pletely closed down for a block which caused a cer­tain amount of traffic hav­oc. I got a close-up look at the deser­ted street while inch­ing past the yel­low “Police — do not cross” tape (it’s on the usu­al route to the camp). When I got to the camp, I found more chaos in the park­ing lot, since two-thirds of the lot was blocked off for shoot­ing some film (a com­mon occur­rence in Van­couver). I finally made it back home again, only to find the cat in the back yard play­ing with an almost-dead rat. With the cur­rent strike in Van­couver includ­ing the garbage pick-up ser­vices, the rat pop­u­la­tion has exploded, so I don’t actu­ally object to the cats catch­ing rats, but I don’t really want to have to watch. 

Sum­mer in the city, I guess.

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