I know that that there better things to call a blog post than to use part of an error message that I got from Saxonica’s Saxon while I was converting XML files into PHP equivalents for the visitor information section of my main website. I use the open source Saxon-B rather than the commercial Saxon-SA and it fulfils all of my needs and version 8 and later (it has now reached 9.0.0.2) handle the XSLT 2.0 features that I need to make the transformations really clever. Also, because Saxon is available as a jar file, it is cross platform so long as you have Java on board. There are, however, some slight differences in behaviour. I now run thte thing in Linux and any Windows-style file locations are not recognised. I had the file path in a DTD declaration starting with "J:\" and that was thought to be a protocol like file, http, https, ftp and so on because of the colon. There’s no j protocol so Java gets confused and, voilà!, you get the rather obscure error that titles this post. Otherwise, the migration of the Perl script that creates XSLT files and fires off the required XML to PHP transformations was a fairly straightforward exercise once file locations and shebang line were set right.

I recently got myself a 500GB Western Digital My Book, an external hard drive in other words. Bizarrely, the thing is formatted using the FAT32 file system. I appreciate that backward compatibility for Windows 9x might seem desirable but using NTFS would be more understandable, particularly given that the last of the 9x line, Windows ME, is now eight years old (there cannot be anybody who still uses that, can there?). The result is that I got core dump messages from cp commands issued from the terminal on my Ubuntu system to copy files of size in excess of 4GB last night. It surprised me at first but it now seems to be a FAT32 limitation. The idea of formatting the drive as NTFS did occur to me but GParted would not do that, at least not with my current configuration. The ext3 file system is an option but I have a spare PC with Windows 2000 so that will be a step too far for now, unless I take the plunge and bring that into the Linux universe too.

Other than the 4GB irritation, the new drive works well and was picked up and supported by Ubuntu without any hassle beyond getting it out of the box, finding a place for it on my desk and plugging in a few cables. While needing judiciousness about file sizes, it played an important role while I converted a 320 GB internal WD drive from NTFS to ext3 and may yet be vital if my Windows 2000 box gets a migration to Linux. In interim, 500 GB is a lot of space and having an external drive that size is a bonus these days. That is especially the case when you consider that the 1 terabyte threshold is on the verge of getting crossed. It certainly makes DVD’s, flash drives and other multi-gigabyte media less impressive than they otherwise might appear.

Moving from one operating system to another like I have means that a certain amount of migration is in order. I have already talked about migrating my email but there are lesser acts too. One of these is carrying across bookmarks into the new world. This should be an easy thing to achieve and, for the most part, it is. However, the Import… entry on the File menu of the main browser only brings in bookmarks from other applications. To get more flexibility, you need to open up the Bookmarks Manager window from the Bookmarks menu (Organise Bookmarks… is the entry that you need). The File menu of the Bookmarks Manager has entries named Import… and Export…; their functions should be very apparent. The former will read from a file, very useful if you do not want to disrupt what you already have. Another migration option is the potentially disruptive act of copying in an alternative bookmarks.html file into your Firefox profile folder and overwriting the one that’s already there.