UN Parade 2008

Paligsining 2008 -- Finals

IDML is InDesign Limitless

One new feature of InDesign CS4 is its ability to import/export IDML, InDesign Markup Language. Basically Adobe tells that IDML is INX, just human readable and documented.

Having this allows developers to automate workflows and speed-up production time and thus limiting costs... Imagine, creating InDesign from XML content without going through the limited XML support of the InDesign IDE... you can even make InDesign documents from a web application that sends XML content... RSS feeds perhaps...

More of the features of IDML in this blog entry from Tim Cole of Adobe...

http://blogs.adobe.com/indesignchannel/2008/10/the_most_important_new_feature.html

Browser Wars -- A New Player

Google has now entered the browser wars with Google Chrome... And from what I read from features... I think we might got a winner here...

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

What I Do?

I generally do XML stuff like DTD/Schema analysis and design and XSLT transformation. I also create workflow that involves XML and InDesign... automation of the layout. Creation of scripts in InDesign the speeds up the layout and composition work.

I'm currently immersing myself in plugin creation for InDesign... again to help automate the layout process.

Tools are essential in the daily activities of my employer as speed and quality is important to our clients.

It's Jeferson -- With A Single 'F'

Last Friday 02-15-2008, I went to the DFA to do my personal appearance for my passport application. They said it was needed especially because I'm applying for the new machine readable passport that the DFA was issuing. My employer commissioned a travel agency to process my passport, that way it will faster and less trouble some for me (Means I will not skip work just to apply for my passport).

I was to meet the travel agency's liaison officer so that he can assist me for the personal appearance. I was there around 8:30 am, a large crowd was already there, all applying for a passport. In fairness, the liaison officer was very accommodating and I was inside this room where you have to check the details of your application, by 9:30.

However upon checking the encoded information in my application, I saw that my name was spelled incorrectly. Wasn't surprised by this in any account, my name is usually spelled incorrectly especially if you're not going to check it against the form because it is commonly spelled with a double 'F'. So I went up to the DFA personnel an ask them to correct the info, they took my form and told me to wait.

An hour and a half later, my form is not yet returned from the correction. How can it take so long if the correction will only involve deleting a single character from my name. I confronted the DFA personnel and ask how could it take that long, around 50 people that was behind me in the line already passed me and yet no correction?

To cut the story short, my application took that long to correct was because it was encoded again from the start and was placed at the end of the queue. I don't know what was the purpose of doing this, but correcting a single character that was already encoded should not take that long. All my day wasted just because an encoder cannot key-in an information that has at least 3 correct versions (I provided 3 valid IDs, a birth certificate, a marriage contract and the application form all of which shows the correct spelling of my name... Jeferson with a single 'f') in the application.