Tales From The Geek Side

In the fall of 2005 a server that I operated was broken into. The perpetrators defaced every index.* file on the system including those in the archives of a mailing list that I’ve run since December of 2005. Recently it came to my attention that those files were overlooked in the cleanup process. I checked my backup CDs from 2005 and found that I did not have any backups that could be used to restore the defaced archives. So I did what anyone would do, I searched for ways to regenerate the archive. Mailman includes tools to regenerate archives but there are some issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sadly many people use tools like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org to maintain large structured documents. If you’ve ever used a tool like this to maintain a large document you’ve probably already grown to hate it. Things like latex and DocBook make handling structured documents much more bearable. I’ve come up with some simple code that allows me to integrate DocBook documents into my website.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight I tried to figure out how I might be able to write some nice Docbook documentation for this site. The goal is to have a way that I can integrate the docbook content into my wordpress site. I spent some time looking for something that already does this and my search turned up empty. My next step was to look into available stylesheets for Docbook. A quick search using apt revealed some stylesheets. I installed them and attempted to use them using the docbook2* scripts that I’m used to. This proved to be a failure. I then found xmlto via apt (you just have to love apt-cache search). This was the tool I was looking for. This allowed me to use the stylesheets that I installed.

// This produced output using the system default stylesheet
$ xmlto -o html xhtml mydocbook.xml
// And this used the stylesheet that I had installed
$ xmlto -o html  -x /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl html mydocbook.xml

I guess the next thing for me to do is to learn to write my own stylesheet so that the output integrates into wordpress.