Season of mists and … of geeky types taking pictures of foliage with digital cameras and putting them on their blogs.

Here's a couple from Wandlebury.

Physically I mean.

The picture here shows Jean Paoli handling the draft as a managable pair of ring-bound folders. Yet when the Czech Standardisation Institute came to print the final text of OOXML, their volumes were somewhat bigger.

Ecma had estimated the final text would be "two to three times" the size of the draft - even so, I'd be interested to see how legible the text was in Ecma's print out ... ;)

- Alex.

To Paris for a flying visit, primarily to give a paper with Francis Cave on our work on OPLE (The ONIX-PL Editor). This seemed to go well enough, though the strong presentations on concurrent tracks (I'd have liked to have heard Jeni Tennison's talk on Creole) meant we had a select audience -- but maybe electronic permissions management with XML is a topic for diehards anyway ...

An important secondary goal of this trip is to mix pleasure with business. Hence I am here with Sarah to continue our periodic sampling of the grandes tables of Paris. Our destination tonight is l'Arpège (caution: French web site: music will play), famous for its one-time removal of all meat from its menu (in France!), and notorious for its provocative pricing (the €56 beetroot had better be good). One for diehards of a different kind, I guess.

- Alex.

This week I have been helping to coordinate the UK effort to scrutinise OOXML (aka Ecma-376, aka ISO/IEC DIS 29500). The aim of this effort is to generate a body of technical commentary that can inform the UK’s response (via BSI) to the ongoing ballot on the acceptability of OOXML as a full ISO standard.

The early stages of this fast tracking effort have been characterised by some rather heated, and not always terribly well-informed debate, whose participants too often seemed to build their positions around an assumption that whatever Microsoft does is (or, more frequently, is not) “a good thing”.

The UK’s technical response, however, is designed to be unclouded by any such irrational pre-disposition. Given the unprecedented size of the text (6,000 pages) and the tight time scale (effectively 2 months for the initial amassing of information) BSI has decided to form an expert panel of approx. 30 members, in order to do justice to the task. Panel members represent (to give a selection): BSI itself, small companies, large companies (including Microsoft and IBM), public sector organisations, other standards bodies, user groups, academia, and government. Collectively, the panel embodies a depth of expertise and experience which gives me heart that DIS 29500 can indeed be properly scrutinised.

To help keep things organised the panel has been given access to a public Wiki where comments and material can be centralised. Because of the potential interest in this activity, the Wiki is open for public viewing (although only panel members may create content). BSI itself remains an open channel for wider public comment …

If anybody in the UK wants to join the panel, can commit the time, and has the necessary technical expertise to help the effort, please contact me via this blog giving an outline of your interests and experience.

Over the years, I've acquired too many CDs to store sensibly. The time has come to digitise the lot onto a hard drive, with the aim of ending up with uncluttered shelves and small neat box containing my entire collection. However, to do this properly there are some challenges to be faced:

Classical Music Challenges

The digital world is not well set up for classical music. Two problems in particular need solving. One is the classification system of album/artist/song propagated by the pop music hegemony, which doesn't map onto classical content; another is the inability of many digital audio players to play tracks "gaplessly".

(As an aside, the huge impedance mismatch between classical content and a world set up for digital pop music is illustrated by Universal Classics' own audio shop. If you purchase an opera there, you need to buy and - with many clicks - acquire a licence for every single one of the "tracks" in that opera. Since operatic acts are usually split into dozens of tracks this is just intolerable.)

Ars Longa

At a rate of one disc a day it's going over 3 years to rip this collection onto CD. It's a salutary thought that it'll take the same amount of time to listen to it as well!

Audio Fidelity

MP3 is audibly compromised (at least at higher compression settings), adding strange twangling and burbling noises to transients (plucked string suffer in particular). Even if less-compressed MP3 sounds better, I'm uneasy about losing any information on these discs and so will prefer a lossless format. FLAC works well for me, and has the interesting feature of supporting the embedding of arbitrary metadata (of which, more later ...)

Backup

Having all this content one one hard drive makes it awfully vulnerable. How to back up? Will burning DVDs be safe, or will these suffer from deterioration in the same way that some of my CDs have? Will I need to box all the CDs and store them in the attic? Or will the 'net have evolved to the point where I'll be able to drag and drop files for a speedy transfer to some off-site location?