December 2005 Archives

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center just published a study in American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (see Coaching Makes Little Difference for Women in Labor) detailing how "coaching" during the second stage of labor has little positive effect on labor, and could have a negative effect.

Many newspapers, like the Australian, are misunderstanding the study. It's not that assisting a woman during labor has no effect, it's quite the opposite. It's saying forcing a woman to follow what my wife calls "directed pushing" (hold your breath and push as hard as you can for 10 seconds) during the second stage of labor is not very effective. Instead, women should be allowed to follow their own instincts, doing what their body tells them to do rather than following a rigid set of guidelines. That's exactly what doulas, and other "birth coaches" have been trying to get doctors to accept.

Listen, if you are pregnant, hire a good doula, like my wife, (sorry, shameless plug), someone that can act as an advocate for you. They know how hospitals work, and they can help you have the birth experience you want, one that is better for everyone involved, including your baby.

Running into some serious issues with AMM. It seems like only one blog entry works at a time. I guess I need to update, huh?

I like to listen to audiobooks on my commute. Since the Nokia 770 has an MP3 player, I copied an audio book that's about 12 hours long onto the memory card. The book is split into 275 MP3s to make it easier to manage them.

I got on the train, fired up the audio player and started the first track. Nice.

Then I wanted to add the other 274 files to the playlist. Not so nice. You've got to do them one at a time. There's no multi-select. The other problem, which for most users would probably be a feature, is that the filename isn't shown in the filelist, instead the ID3 information is shown. Each of my 275 files were labeled exactly the same so I could not distinguish them at all. I managed, through counting, to add the first 20 or so, which was a long enough list to get me to work.

Once I got to work, I plugged the Nokia into my computer and took a look at the playlist. Thankfully it's in the M3U format, which is a nice simple text format.

So, I created a playlist of all my tracks. The format of M3U is simple. All you really need is this

[code]
#EXTM3U
file:///media/mmc1/audio/foo1.mp3
file:///media/mmc1/audio/foo2.mp3
file:///media/mmc1/audio/foo3.mp3
...
[/code]

Where media/mmc1 is the path to the memory card, audio is a directory on the memory card, and ... isn't literal, it means "more lines like the above".

Create the list of files however you want to (on windows, you can do dir /b *.mp3 > playlist.m3u, on linux, ls -1 *.mp3 > playlist.m3u). Then edit the file in a text editor. Add the first line, as shown above. Then change the paths from, for example, d:\audio\foo1.mp3, to the correct path, as shown above.

Untested, but potentially even easier, save the M3U file in the same directory as your MP3 files, and you shouldn't need the path information.

We've gotten a batch of Japanese translated files back, and I'm trying to turn them into good online help and PDFs.

I've really done a lot of specialization on my DITA transformation architecture, so, be aware that some of the things I write concerning translation may be handled gracefully by the current, vanilla, DITA open toolkit.

Lessons I've learned:

1. Make sure your font settings are paramaterized. Not all fonts support all languages. You want to be able to change it based on the language.
   
2. If your XML files don't have the language set (xml:lang="ja-jp"), and if you are using ant to kick off the processing, make sure you pass DEFAULTLANG to the xslt task in the build target.
   
3. Follow the example of the DITA OT team and make sure you put all label text (footer text, note labels, etc.) in a labels file. In DITA OT, those files are in xsl\common
   

1. I can't pass a string of Japanese text as an ant parameter from the properties file or from the command-line. The text gets changed from UTF-8 to ASCII. It's annoying because I set the title of the PDF via an ant properties file. If I set the parameter in the ant build.xml file I'm okay, but if I set it in the properties file or via the command-line, it's garbled. Any tips?
   

Today was my first day with Nokia 770 "in the wild". They are rated for 3 hours battery life, but I wanted to see how it would perform in my world.

Today wasn't a typical day (no WiFi or Bluetooth access), but I did watch 3 Battlestar Galactica episodes, full screen, full volume. The battery power is still around 75%.

One thing I did notice was it was a little quiet. Need to look into that.

I used Tunebite this weekend to convert a nearly 12 hour long audiotbook from a DRM'd file to an MP3. It worked like a charm. To further clean things up, I split the 12 hour file up into a little over 250 small MP3 files, since nothing sucks worse than trying to find your place in a 12 hour audio file.

Now if I could just automate all this stuff ....

The Nokia 770 (called by Nokia an "internet tablet") is my newest gadget, given to me by my sweet wife as a Christmas present. Gorgeous screen, WiFi, runs linux. What more could you ask for?

So far I've mostly just been fooling around with it. Browsing web sites with the included Opera browser, playing some games that I installed from Maemo.org, and watching Battlestar Galactica. The long term plan is to get back into Linux, though, by helping to port or create apps for the Maemo platform.

Details coming as I explore this thing some more.

Today I picked up a piece of software called Tunebite . Tunebite is a very simple program, but comes close to solving my problem with NetLibrary's DRM'd audio books (see my previous post for more information). Tunebite acts just like an old-fashioned dual-deck cassette deck with high speed dubbing. It plays the audio in iTunes or Windows Media player, but it plays them at 4x speed. At the same time, it records the track to disk, either in OGG, MP3, or WMA.

It's a brilliant, and legal, way to listen to DRM'd audio on equipment that doesn't support that DRM version.

One big drawback - the high speed recording has to start at the beginning of the track. That's a problem for long tracks, like the 16 hour audio book I'm working on now. Even at high speed, that's 4 hours of computer time, not to mention one huge mp3 file.

The US House voted to wall up Mexico border on December 16th of this year.

These are the same idiots that say free trade is the most important thing, and keep increasing the number of visas for technology workers.

Look, fences don't work any better than copy protection for software or the war on drugs. It makes it harder, but all that means is someone will make more money off of it. When they triple fenced the wall near San Diego, illegal immigration moved to Arizona. When they make it too hard to physically cross the border, people will figure out a way to gain entrance legally (student visas, work permits, etc.) and then will disappear. That is already the number one way illegal immigrants get into the country. The fence won't change that, but it will waste a lot of money.

The BBC article on the Pennsylvania judge's ruling on intelligent design, Victors hail US evolution ruling, is a good summation of the situation. The judge ruled that intelligent design should not be taught in classrooms. It's a pretty obvious ruling, but I was starting to get worried.

I've got a dynamic IP at home. Getting a static IP is more expensive, and I'm not running a server, so there is not reason for my to have a static IP.

However, NetLibrary doesn't agree with me. Today I tried to listen to the next bit of an audio book I have checked out from Net Library. No go. The book, according to the error message, was checked out to a different computer.

If this happens to you, here's the work-around. Log into NetLibrary and renew your checkout. No downloading required, just a pain in the butt.

How long until they disable this, too?

There's a great editorial in the Star Tribune (from my home state of Minnesota) - Editorial: Bush's speech got tone right, not facts. Here's the quote I love from it -

In tone, President Bush's Sunday night television address was wonderful; it showed humility, a willingness to admit mistakes, and a desire to talk straight. But in substance, the speech was full of truculence, spin and obfuscation.

I won't go quite so far as they do (I still don't think Bush has ever admitted to making a mistake - he admits others have made mistakes, but he never has), but the main points of the article are very good.

Bush said Hussein blocked the UN weapon's inspectors. As the article points out, he didn't. He failed at that.

Bush said Iraq sponsored terrorism. The only thing Iraq ever sponsored that was close to terrorism was paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The Saudi royal family does that, too. Why don't we invade there?

There's more, but I encourage you to read the article.

My local public library has subscribed to NetLibrary, an online audiobook provider. It's really nice except NetLibrary uses Windows Media files with DRM. That means I can't play them on my MP3 player without converting them to another format. This is like forcing me to read a book only at one location in my house. It's nonsense, and I won't do abide by it. That means the DRM itself is making me break my license agreement.

Here's what I want content providers to understand - I want the content in an open digital format so that I can listen to it the way I want to, not the limited way you allow me to listen to it in. In return, I promise I won't give it to other people, or take such open content from others if it is offered to me.

Until then, I will be forced to ignore any licensing agreement that limits my ability to use the media I own.

The BBC (among others) reports that Eugene McCarthy is dead. Although most people will remember McCarthy for his presidential campaign in 1968, he was much more than just an anti-Vietnam agitator.

McCarthy led the US to a new type of liberalism. Without him, the civil rights movement would have stalled. It's a day to look back and remember everything that modern liberalism has brought to the US.