Sean Middleditch

Whatever happened to Seth Nickell, who worked for Redhat? His blog hasn’t been updated since May of 2005, and the last mailing list post I saw from him is from June of 2006.

His quietness is kinda saddening, especially given all the cool stuff he is/was working on.

I’ve been learning XSL-FO, or the eXtensible Stylesheet Language - Formatting Objects, specification, with the aid of Apache FOP. All in all, it’s pretty darn cool.

There are a few things I find a bit distasteful, although most of those are apparently being taken care of in XSL-FO 2.0. Probably my biggest complaint is that XSL is a programming language in XML, which is just horrendous to work with at times. I think that XSL would have been better designed as a JavaScript w/ E4X support. Oh well.

The project I’m working on is a handbook for Kanar3. Whether or not that actually ends up turning into a real game is unknown at this point, though I’m not counting it. It does at least have a chance, though.

XSL-FO is making the project run fairly smooth. I have a custom XML format used for the book, which lets me do all sorts of nifty things like define game skills in a nice format and have the XSLT script turn that into a well-formatted list and also generate cost charts, something which CSS just flat out could never do.

Speaking of which, originally I was just using XSLT to transform the document to HTML. Unfortunately, no browser yet supports all of the CSS3 print media extensions for things well finely-controlled page breaks, page number referencing, and so on. I could make a nice web page, but the print version looked bad, and Firefox doesn’t seem to be able to print to PDF either. Plus Firefox has a few bugs with rendering multi-column layouts when printing.

So, now I’m using XSL-FO and Apache FOP and using that to generate a PDF. It’s quite nice. I don’t know how people generate documentation using word processors and the like.

So I was sitting at a red light a few days ago, blasting some Korn, and suddenly my truck was about a foot closer to the car in front of me and I was rocking back and forth rather violently. Couldn’t hear a thing because the music was so loud, but it was fairly obvious what had just happened.

I got out of my truck and looked back and saw a white car with its front end completely smashed. The grill was in tiny pieces, the headlights were no longer attached, the hood was bent… the car was fucked. I become rather irritated at this point, since I quite like my truck, and I really didn’t want to deal with having its rear end smashed to pieces.

I walked back and looked down. And stared. I couldn’t believe how much damage there was to my Ranger. I couldn’t believe it because there wasn’t even a scratch. Not a dent. Nothing. Completely undamaged.

Built Ford Tough indeed.

Now, to be fair, the reason my truck was unharmed was because of the large trailer hitch I had, which is all the car had hit. The jerk scratched my trailer hitch.

I hereby coin a new term: Noob Lube

Noob Lube (n): anything which helps a new player “ease into” a game, e.g. game manuals and howtos.

My roommate has already started using the term in his WoW guild, and I’ve got my gaming group using it. Now I just need to get another 100,000,000 gamers using the term, and I’ll forever be a part of the gamer culture.

… quit judging me.