propaganda
So I have this formatting engine. Engine is maybe a strong word. I had a set of stylesheets and a nice ruby script I had hacked together that could convert HTML to XSL::FO, or XML Style Language, Formatting Objects. FO is one of those technologies that, given CSS seems a bit overkill, but from a layout perspective is probably vital. The really nice thing is, some smart guys started the Apache FOP project which allows you to render a set of formatting objects to various outputs, for example PDF.
So how do you get an FO document? Well, you could write on by hand but that is what the crazy people do. I didn't want to be crazy so I looked around for an XSLT stylesheet that would transform HTML to FO. There are a couple in the wild that do this. Notably there are a set of document from Antenna House that covered almost everything. The problem was that they worked with their formatting engine, and not Apache FOP. So I spent some time a year ago reworking them so that they played well together.
I had all of these pieces sitting around and wanted to cobble them together, but I rarely use HTML anymore. I use markdown or textile. So I decided I needed to hack together something that was easy to install to convert those to HTML and then generate a PDF for emailing to people. A couple of hours hacking gave me Propaganda. There is support for shelling out to the Java command for the Jar and support for loading the JVM directly with the Ruby Java Bridge. It can detect what you have and go for it.
lego star wars at-st walker
So Jude and I play with Lego blocks a lot. He loves it. That's why I do it. Not because I am a giant kid, or geek, or nerd. Or maybe I am. In any event, he has been asking for Lego 'The Battle of Endor for a while now, and we have been resisting. Today he decided he wanted to build it with what he had. So we thought about it a little bit and started in and I think we will be able to do most of it. We worked on it for about an hour this morning. Herein are a couple of shots of our first draft at the AT-ST walker:
The middle guns need some work still, and we need to add the hatch for Chewbacca (and reconstruct the inside a bit to firm it up), but the legs seem to work great and he is already happy.