Online documentation

As one of those people who complained about the HTML output of DocBook recently, it’s good to see Shaun kickstarting some progress on this.

I think my main concern with those mockups is the line length… in English, ten words is about the most you can fit on a line before reading speed slows down. This isn’t so much of an issue for stuff that turns up in help browsers, as the narrow width of the window naturally restricts this anyway, but it’s a problem for things like the HIG that are normally read in a web browser. I’ve tried to deal with this in the draft HIG’s stylesheet recently by indenting the body text from both sides of the page, which also makes it easier to pick out headers. (Example)

My main gripe with the HTML version of large DocBook documents, though, is the lack of a navigation sidebar. Things like the HIG are a pain in the bahookie to jump around, when every other major online styleguide (Mac, WIndows, Java) makes it simple.

Happy Christmas!

Went up to Enniskillen in Norn Irn this weekend, for Julie’s belated works Christmas dinner. Nice hotel, great views across Lough Erne (the pic is from our bedroom window), but the event was a bit of let-down… it was all booked months ago, so they could at least have saved us some Christmas crackers, made sure the carvery included a turkey, or hung up a few decorations. Unfortunately, all we got was some local crooner and a drum machine murdering the usual Elvis and Beatles repertoire. Still, the six hour round trip drive was pleasantly traffic-free, and it’s always fun crossing the national border on one of the minor roads– you can only tell you’ve changed countries when the painted stripe at the side of the road abruptly turns from yellow (Irish side) to white (UK side). Changed times indeed.

On the plus side, got back just in time for the live Motherwell game on Setanta, in which Jim Hamilton crashed in as good a goal as I’ve ever seen a Motherwell player score (we still lost though), and to find that Eircom’s DSL upgrade has gone to plan (now up to 3Mb/384kB… upload speed still a bit crappy, but better than the 128kB we had before).

Poker power

Julie and I had an excellent lunch at Boccacio’s on Dame Street today, which was made all the more entertaining by the otherwise ordinary-looking bloke on the next table receiving a call back from Paddy Power. Apparently he’d phoned to complain about some adverts for their online poker service that he’d seen in a public toilet, and made it perfectly clear that he was appalled and outraged by double entendres such as “Get your hands on a big pair tonight” and “The man next to you is watching your hand”. He was equally appalled that they had not been cleared by the ASAI because it was not “compulsive” (sic) to have them reviewed prior to being posted, and that they would remain in place to “disgust” other people over the festive period.

You do have to wonder if some people have too much time on their hands…

Nollaig Shona

My Christmas break started on Wednesday, and I won’t be back in the office until January 9th (except next Wednesday to see if I won anything in the annual corporate-gifts-we’re-not-allowed-to-accept raffle). I don’t anticipate that GNOME usability will suffer in any way while I spend the next month parked on a beanbag eating chocolate and trying to finish as many of my old PS2 games as possible so I can pick up some new ones in the January sales, but my waistline inevitably will. Happy whatever-it-is-you-feel-like-celebrating!

sbackup

Was looking for a painless utility to do regular incremental backups of a bunch of stuff on my Ubuntu box today, and ran across sbackup, which was sponsored by Google’s summer of code. The UI could do with a little polish, but it was dead easy to set up, and so far it looks like it’s just the job. (Might even have a go at getting it to work on OSX, as I’ve yet to find a free OSX utility that does what I want quite so easily.)