Keith’s Blog

As of today, 30 O’Reilly titles are available as Ebook bundles and many will be in the Kindle Store later today:
As promised last month, O’Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price — at or below the book’s [...]

Ah, the day my tent showed up in TechCrunch:

This is why people get annoyed about the silly gem install dependency mess (esp WRT hoe):
$ gem install heckle
Need to update 31 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org # fair enough, you’re allowed
………………………….
complete
Install required dependency ruby2ruby? [Yn] Y # Yeah, I know you need these
Install required dependency ParseTree? [Yn] Y [...]

I’ve been using RescueTime since the fall, after hearing about it from some YCombinator-related person. It’s an absolutely spectacular application, and has really changed the way I understand my work and computer use. They also just released a cool widget:

var _RescueTimeURL=”http://www.rescuetime.com/widget/top_tags_widget?user_id=3215&api_key=86629e4a71bc4db6600064db02722ef1ad2dc0c3&year=2007&month=5&day=14&view_type=forever&date_key=5a036d5573a6c3551e7f626a273c6d3874dff306&widget_header_title=My%20Top%2010%20Activities%20&widget_header_color=&widget_header_text_color=&widget_footer_color=&main_bar_color=&shiny=0&width=370px&height=275px”;

Time Management Software provided by RescueTime

EDIT: I can’t get Wordpress to not screw up [...]

Keith Fahlgren at his TOC Tutorial, XML for Publishers

Originally uploaded by duncandavidson

I just got back from New York and the second annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference. It’s become a very impressive conference in just two years and had impressive attendance and [...]

As of the beginning of 2007, ISBN10 is dead. Now we’re in a world that allows “979″ prefixes, though the following code doesn’t expect them yet…
Here’s some stuff to turn your 10-digit ISBNs into 13-digit ISBNs, naively assuming “978″, following an the API post doing the same from LibraryThing. There’s another one at isbn.org for [...]

A nice tidbit from Joe’s talk at Oscon 2007:
Exposition: I can lie if you can learn

Norm Walsh writes:
Stylesheets can have literally hundreds of parameters. The DocBook XSL Stylesheets have more than six hundred.
All I can say at this point is: wow. Grepping the core of our own customization shows 121 <xsl:param>s (about 20 of which we introduced) and 52 <xsl:attribute-set>s (20, again). Thinking about it now (as I haven’t before), [...]

James Snell has been working some interesting things as the work on the Atom Publishing Protocol spec winds down. Most recently, he posted some thoughts on how to effectively communicate partial updates to APP servers using HTTP PATCH.
[UPDATE: James points out the obvious drawback to this approach in his response.]
One of the things that [...]

[UPDATE: Added a link to the categorized CSV file below]
Here’s some of the nitty-gritty behind DocBook Elements in the Wild. We’re trying to get a count of all of the element names in a set of 49 DocBook 4.4 <book>s.
First, go ask the O’Reilly product database for all the books that were sent to the [...]