posts brought to you by the category “sarah”
Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life. What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun way to find stuff.
Jirka Kosek : Understanding the node-set() Function
You might be wondering whether the node-set() function will be part of [XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0]. The answer is no, but don't worry. The authors of XSLT 2.0 made an important decision: result tree fragments are gone. There will be no need to use the node-set() function in XSLT 2.0 as you can operate directly on XML fragments stored in a variable, as on any other node-set. Regardless, you should put the node-set() function in your bag of tools as it will take several years before XSLT 2.0 will be deployed as widely as XSLT 1.0 is deployed today.
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Mark Bittman : Borscht is the highest and best use for a beet.
The newest issue of
The Art of Eating
found its way in to my mail box yesterday. It contains what is
essentially an article that could easily have been titled
. So with that in mind I will offer you my own
under-defined
and loosey-goosey recipe
for doing fun stuff with beets, your borscht be damned:
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Apparently, the latest beta of OpenOffice reads and writes DocBook.
Goal is to explore the possibility of using OpenOffice.org as a WYSIWYG editor of XML content. The principle is to edit structured documents using styles. These styles are then transformed to XML tags on export.
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Emily Eveleth loves jelly donuts:
It sounds to me like this says more about Ed's bias,
which I probably share more often than not,
than it does about the CBC's. He, like I, has probably grown an 'ear'
for Bushisms, real or imagined. CBC radio might have been advised to
include the auditory equivalent of the written "..." but I'm not really
sure I would agree with the argument that the full text of Bush's
comments expanded on what is often little more than Dubya saying
I know what the meaning of "is" is.
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www.comixjam.org
refers to
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Me : ASCOPE::Class::Null.pm 1.1
Bug fixes. Who could imagine that something
like this would require bug fixes?! see also :
changes
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Snow men and assault rifles. They go together like...like..uh.
There's also a
local
copy
because that link will probably get borked in a week's time.
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Some clever egg thought to stitch together the stills from the webcam on the corner of Ste. Catherine and Peel
and create an MPEG movie of yesterday's
rally. Just to give you some perspective on the numbers: If you prefer
the low-end turnout of 100,000 people that is still one in ten people
of the island's core center. If you are feeling enthusiastic and prefer
to think there were 150,000 people that's one in twenty people out of
the entire Montréal urban community. Meanwhile, it should be
duly noted that some equally clever egg at City Hall decided that the
bulk of the rally proceed down Ste. Catherine thus ensuring that a
gazillion Montréalais pass through the
Festival
Montréal en Lumiere
; it remains to be seen whether or not attendance numbers went up last
night. Best placard of the day :
Goldorak, ou es tu?
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Meanwhile Ben Hammersley, in a fit of poetic license,
uses phrases like
arithmetical jiggery-pokery
and
[that]
no amount of sherry will help you do it in your head
to describe the things we ask our computers to do. I, for one, applaud
his efforts.
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : numinous
numinous adj 1: evincing the presence of a deity; "a numinous wood"; "the most numinous moment in the Mass 2: of or relating to or characteristic of a numen wn
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : deleterious
Deleterious \Del`e*te"ri*ous\, a. [LL. deleterius noxious, Gr. dhlhth`rios, fr. dhlei^sqai to hurt, damage; prob. akin to L. delere to destroy.] Hurtful; noxious; destructive; pernicious; as, a deleterious plant or quality; a deleterious example. -- {Del`e*te"ri*ous*ly}, adv. -- {Del`e*te"ri*ous*ness}, n. web1913
deleterious adj : harmful to living things; "deleterious chemical additives" [syn: {hurtful}, {injurious}] wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : pucker factor
The degree to which one is in mortal terror while excecuting a dangerous task. Term credited to USAF A-10 pilots flying ground-attack missions during The Gulf War.
ex. So, I'm ridin' in Bobby's new 'Vette and he takes this corner at like 110 mph--serious pucker factor.
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : somniferous
Somniferous \Som*nif"er*ous\, a. [L. somnifer; somnus sleep + ferre to bring.] Causing or inducing sleep; soporific; dormitive; as, a somniferous potion. --Walton. web1913
somniferous adj : sleep inducing [syn: {soporific}, {soporiferous}, {somnific}, {hypnogogic}, {hypnagogic}] wn
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Eugene Eric Kim : Purple
is a small suite of quickly hacked tools inspired
by Doug Engelbart's attempt to bootstrap the addressing features of his
Augment system onto HTML pages. Its purpose is simple: produce HTML
documents that can be addressed at the paragraph level. It does this by
automatically creating name anchors with static and hierarchical
addresses at the beginning of each text node, and by displaying these
addresses as links at the end of each text node."
Thinking out loud (read:untested), it seems
like you ought to be able to do the same thing with :
<xsl:template match = "somenode">
<xsl:variable name = "anchor">
<xsl:value-of select = "generate-id()" />
</xsl:variable>
<someanchor>
<xsl:attribute name = "name">
<xsl:value-of select = "$anchor" />
</xsl:attribute>
<someanchor>
<somenode>
<xsl:copy-of select = "." />
<somedivider>
<someanchor>
<xsl:attribute name = "href">
<xsl:value-of select = "$anchor" />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select = "$anchor" />
</someanchor>
</somedivider>
</somenode>
</xsl:template>
via
decafbad
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A little piece of happiness is knowing you're not completely alone in the world...
use constant PROXY => "http://www.decafbad.com/xrfp/memepool.cgi";
use constant METHOD => "memepool.filterData";
my $text = "this is the network of our disconnect";
my $kw = "aaronland,perl,goofy";
my $xmlrpc = XMLRPC::Lite->new()->proxy(PROXY);
my $res = $xmlrpc->call(METHOD,$text,undef,{keywords=>$kw});
print $res->result()->{data};
Thanks
Les
!
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Me : Net::Blogger.pm 0.6.1.2
This is Blogger.pm 0.6.2 with some changes
to the POD, a Makefile.pl file and a little corner on the CPAN.
Blogger.pm is dead, long live Net::Blogger.pm. Attentive readers will
note that it should really be named 0.6.2.1. File that one under
"gah!"...
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chromatic : "Maybe it was the Perl XML fans talking about SAX being important for more than XML,
but I realized that if I could write a backend
module to turn bytecode into XML, the tree matching and conversions would
be solved. The only tricky part that's left is generating XSLT or
XPathScript or whatever syntax to refactor an error pattern. ... So now I
have B::ToXML that can XMLize a code reference, and it works pretty
well."
I'm scared!
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Salman Rushdie : "Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes
against the sheer weirdness of the American
citizenry."
NPR (PRI, maybe) broadcast a very interesting
piece over the new year about America and England suddenly becoming each
others new best friend in the wake of Spetember 11. They went to the U.K.
and recorded interviews with the natives about America and Americans and
then replayed them for the folks back home, again recording their
reactions and commentary. If anyone knows what I'm talking about and can
point me
to a link, I'd appreciate it.
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Eric Murphy : Jabberzilla Whiteboard update
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : fop
FU_KING OLD PEOPLE
ex. THAT FOP CUT ME OFFF!see also : fop dict-ified
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David Brownell : Producing SAX2 Events
Radio Crankypant #0: Dave Winer, "The next release of Radio has a new content management system, it's file-system-based..."
Which means that the actual CMS could be
mounted remotely via
Samba
and a mod_perl Apache::Radio framework could be written if you wanted
to use Radio for the editing but not for serving. Interesting. It is
too bad that this setup will not (?) work via
WebDAV
, because then you could create a whole series of mod_perl handlers to
transform/propagate
changes to files as they are written to disk. This would allow you to
build a group weblog where user foo could use Radio, user bar Movable
Type (with some hacks; I've been meaning to figure out how hard it
would be to add a callback framework - gak! must...
write...footnote...code...) and user hello-world Zope. For that matter,
user luddite could use the filesystem and a word processor.
Interesting. Stick
that
in yer
John Robb pipe
and smoke it ;-) see also :
Filesys::SmbClient
and
LocalFS
(Zope)
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My mother : "I’m looking out my hotel window, looking east at the full moon
just rising between the roof and spires of a
Buddhist temple, a wat, and the stupa-like Independence Monument. The
moon is low and orange against the blue-grey sky. The red and blue lights
that illuminate the Monument in bands representing the flag of Cambodia
are becoming clearer as the daylight falls. ... I live in Phnom Penh
now."
refers to
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Movable Thoughts #5-8
5) it appears that
CGI parameters aren't being untainted anywhere
, at all -- the reality is that this may not actually be an issue in an
MT context, but it is disconcerting all the same 6) the
$CGI::POST_MAX variable
is not set for file uploads which means that a cgiwrap-less Movable
Type can, potentially, be used as a DoS tool -- to be clear, this
problem exists for any and all CGI (wrap-less) scripts; it's just that
MT does it out of the box 7) MT is hard-coded to prevent you from
updating an already uploaded file 8) there isn't much in the way of
validation for email addresses and URIs in the comments form. Now, lest
you think I'm just being an
asshole
and picking on people who've generously donated their time and code to
the general public I assure you that I wouldn't have spent as much time
as I have on MT if I didn't
think
it was an otherwise excellent piece of work. But some of these bugs are
the kind of thing that no amount of feeping creaturitis or ease of use
should ever trump. You can dress it up in a pretty package and try to
make it "simple" for "average" users to setup but, and this is not
directed at the clever people who've written MT, it doesn't change the
simple fact that this computer stuff is
hard and
complicated and fraught with pitfalls
. Where possible I have sent the developers possible fixes, or
workarounds. Whether they care to listen to anything I have to say
after everything that's been said to date remains to be seen...
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Me : I'd like a sidebar with that thought, please.
Following up on yesterday's comments about
categories as rss as html as [mozilla] sidebars
, I've added the necessary widgets to make it so. At the bottom of each
of each
category/.*/recent
page, there is a link for adding the feed for that category as a
sidebar.
Insert booming voice-over talking about empowering users and
generally pandering to their innate selfishness as though it were a
virtue in the new digital, content-is-king, only pay for what you need
(read:the more you spend, the more you save) age, here.
I also made a
weblogs.com
sidebar widget
.
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is pablum
| source : wn | Pablum n 1: a form of cereal for
infants [syn: {Pablum}] 2: a diet that does not require chewing; advised
for those with intestinal disorders [syn: {soft diet}, {pap}, {spoon
food}] 3: worthless or oversimplified ideas [syn: {pap}]
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Steven L. Telleen : Intranet Organization - Strategies for managing change
"Talking to companies that have implemented
Intranets, the toughest issues are not the technology but the people
issues. What is missing entirely is a book that takes a thoughtful look
at how an organization might transition to all these wonderful benefits,
what it means in terms of organizational needs, role requirements and
reskilling people and how the organizational strategy relates to the
technology decisions. In other words, the critical stuff that links
strategy and technology."
refers to
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Gregory Nickonov : "It’s the same as buying a loaf of bread,
and when you find the middle isn’t baked,
you come back to show the baker and get put in jail."
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Gary Groth : "It was dangerous agitprop."
God, help us. Someone has given Gary Groth
a bigger soapbox... If you think the Internet defines hyperbolic
vitriol as an artform, you haven't seen anything until you've read this
guy. Frankly, most of the arguments in this debate strike me as
spurious. This is not about the paperness (or lack thereof) of the
paper -- and we're doomed if it is about animated gifs -- it is about
the same issue that has always plagued the comics industry :
distribution and, by extension, control. Okay, McCloud stops there long
enough to talk about micropayments, but then seems to devolve into
goofy arguments about how paper is dead and and and ...and painting has
been dead for about six thousand years now, too. This is art school
level posturing and just makes everyone involved look like children. It
is, rather, an issue of economics : it's cheaper produce
words-and-pictures online than it is in print. Further, there is the
chance of reaching a larger audience in the process. That is, swag
notwithstanding, the entirety of the Internet revolution. The degree to
which the art form you practice suffers in the transition is just the
price you pay. Trust me when I say you don't want to see comix artists
doing work about the "materiality" of the Internet. see also :
McCloud in
Stable Condition Following Review, Groth Still at Large
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Claes Jacobsson : JavaScript.pm
"gives you the power of embedded JavaScript in
your applications. You can write your subs, classes etc in perl and bind
them to the JavaScript engine. Variables are converted between the
language automaticlly and you don't have to worry about that. ... This is
not a JavaScript runtime written in perl, it's simply an interface to
libjs from the mozilla crew."
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is discomfit
| source : web1913 | Discomfit \Dis*com"fit\, v.
t. [imp. & p. p. {Discomfited}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Discomfiting}.]
[OF. desconfit, p. p. of desconfire, F. d['e]confire; fr. L. dis- +
conficere to make ready, prepare, bring about. See {Comfit}, {Fact}.] 1.
To scatter in fight; to put to rout; to defeat. And his proud foes
discomfit in victorious field. --Spenser. 2. To break up and frustrate
the plans of; to balk? to throw into perplexity and dejection; to
disconcert. Well, go with me and be not so discomfited. --Shak. Syn: To
defeat; overthrow; overpower; vanquish; conquer; baffle; frustrate;
confound; discourage. | source : web1913 | Discomfit \Dis*com"fit\, a.
Discomfited; overthrown. [Obs.] | source : web1913 | Discomfit
\Dis*com"fit\, n. Rout; overthrow; discomfiture. Such as discomfort as
shall quite despoil him. --Milton. | source : wn | discomfit n : a defeat
in battle [syn: {rout}, {discomfiture}] v : cause to lose one's composure
[syn: {upset}, {discompose}, {untune}, {disconcert}]
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Apache::XBEL.pm
"is an Apache mod_perl handler that uses XSLT to
transform XML Bookmarks Exchange Language (XBEL) files into exciting and
foofy dynamic HTML documents. Documents are rendered as collapsible
outlines and individual nodes may be viewed and bookmarked as unique
pages, so you don't have to click through a gazillion nested leaves to
find what you're looking for."
I made this! You can play with a live demo,
that uses XBEL as a sorta/kinda aggregator for RSS feeds,
over here
, but there isn't much point unless you've got a 5.0+ browser.
refers to
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is comely
| source : web1913 | Comely \Come"ly\
(k[u^]m"l[y^]), a. [Compar. {Comelier}; superl. {Comeliest}.] [OE.
comeliche, AS. cyml[=i]c; cyme suitable (fr. cuman to come, become) +
l[=i]c like.] 1. Pleasing or agreeable to the sight; well-proportioned;
good-looking; handsome. He that is comely when old and decrepit, surely
was very beautiful when he was young. --South. Not once perceive their
foul disfigurement But boast themselves more comely than before.
--Milton. 2. Suitable or becoming; proper; agreeable. This is a happier
and more comely time Than when these fellows ran about the streets,
Crying confusion. --Shak. It is good to sing praises unto our God; for it
is pleasant; and praise is comely. --Ps. cxlvii. 1. | source : web1913 |
Comely \Come"ly\, adv. In a becoming manner. --Ascham. | source : wn |
comely adj 1: according with custom or propriety; "her becoming modesty";
"comely behavior"; "it is not comme il faut for a gentleman to be
constantly asking for money"; "a decent burial"; "seemly behavior" [syn:
{becoming}, {comme il faut}, {decent}, {decorous}, {seemly}] 2: very
pleasing to the eye; "my bonny lass"; "there's a bonny bay beyond"; "a
comely face"; "young fair maidens" [syn: {bonny}, {bonnie}, {fair}]
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Pico Iyer : Imagining Canada
This is the lecture from which the essay about
a world
of honorary Canadians
that I pointed to a couple weeks ago was excerpted. 21h00 EST (real
audio)
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Alain Dubuc : "The result is a Canadian identity that is extremely vulnerable,
because the soul of the people comes to depend
not on the citizens, or values, but instead on government programs, civil
servants and budgets. A budget crisis -- or even relatively innocuous
acts such as closing a railway link or shutting down a regional radio
station -- become nation-destroying gestures. ... Another much more
disquieting perverse effect is the development in Canada of an
ideological orthodoxy. In Quebec, there are pressures that discourage
intellectuals from straying from sovereigntist dogma without running the
risk of exclusion and mistrust. I know something about this. The same
process is at work in the rest of Canada, through the Canadian social
model. It is difficult to be a true Canadian without espousing the
centre-left values that underlie our welfare state."
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Marie-Joelle Gros : Le «Gitoyen» contre le Web commercial
"Pour eux, la constitution d'un GIE «associatif»
est une étape supplémentaire dans l'édification d'un Web indépendant des
pressions économiques. «
On n'a rien contre le business, mais on défend une
autre idée: celle d'une appropriation du réseau par le public
, explique Laurent Chemla.
La liberté d'expression appartient à tous. Elle n'a
rien à voir avec une logique marchande.
»"
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I drove past the the Tinman Diner this morning,
and saw that there had recently been a fire,
gutting the place. I'd only been there once, when I was about 8 or 9 on
my way back from Camp Meadowlark. I don't remember the circumstances,
exactly. I think I had gotten on the wrong bus leaving camp and,
following a completely forgettable but surely exciting denoument, found
myself another bus with Karen, the counsellor from England. It was hot
and the bus was packed and I was parched and eventually we were dumped on
the side of the highway in front of the Tinman Diner. When my family
arrived, we went inside for lunch and I ordered iced tea and chocolate
milk in separate glasses.
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What the hell is a "Quality of Life" crime?
Michael Best : "The act of participation
seems to entrap us at once into becoming captive
markets of information economies."
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MacNN : "Other [ MacOS X ] features highlighted
include a new Aqua Pro Mode option, which changes
all the Aqua elements to Graphite, to help reduce the graphic distraction
that some graphic artists expressed displeasure over in Aqua."
refers to
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Cool Uses for Perl : 250 badges in 10 minutes!
Randal Schwartz : Simple XML Processing and Queries
"So, the strategy is to start with an HTML form
asking the user to input SQL search patterns. When the form is submitted,
our script uses the LWP module to fetch the XML document, and the
XML::Parser module to parse its data. The DBI module will insert the data
into a DBD::RAM database using the SQL queries that were entered in the
original form."
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Apparently, the burning question
on the minds of Americans is
why does Canada have so many female pop singers
?
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Jamie Jaworski : Modern Menus
"I've received many email messages from readers
asking me to cover JavaScript menus. ...with the release of Navigator 6.0
PR1, I decided that it would be worthwhile to develop a menu component
that would work for three incompatible DHTML-capable browsers: Navigator
6.0, Navigator 4.0, and Internet Explorer 4.0 and 5.0."
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Paul Krugman
"By contrast, if several companies were given the
right to sell Windows, their competition would probably drive the price
of the operating system almost to nothing; this would amount to an
expropriation of intellectual property rights. Maybe you think that
Microsoft deserves that fate; but it is not a precedent to set lightly."
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I'm not much for instant messaging
but
a
robust client for the AOL Instant Messenging service using the Emacs text
editor as it's UI
sounds pretty sweet. see also :
Emacs-specific crossword puzzles
.
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The NORAD Tracks Santa Claus Website
It's nice to see the peace dividend hard at work.
(shockwave)
refers to
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Danny Goodman : Getting Ready for the W3C DOM
Audrey Schulman on attending weddings naked
"Downstairs there were a variety of surprises.
The first surprise was that the sacred pie had been mostly eaten by us
guests. I guess it had been the Entenmann's raspberry danish. The bride
and groom decided to use the one remaining slice."
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The Leisure Luge
"I smiled when I got the email from my BBC
contact. He asked if I could do the second part of the live interview
from my skateboard-propelled recliner via cell phone as I rolled through
the streets of Richmond. The suggestion was as absurd and spontaneous as
the Leisure Luge itself. I loved that. " Sweet!
refers to
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Michael Kimmelman
It is as if they were saying: this is what architecture, carried to a creative extreme, can do for an art that is strong enough and sympathetic enough to deal with it, and vice versa.
Speaking of art, there was a time a few
years ago when tea-bag art was all the rage. I wonder whether anyone
has started making art out of laundry detergent scoops yet.
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Ben Cohen
on priorities and government spending. real audio
(starts 25:27)
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Michael Yaki: Setting Federal Policy One Town at a Time
"Has the stalemate that characterizes today's
devolution-crazed Republican Congress resulted mainly in just passing the
buck to the local level? Are companies, frustrated with inaction on
Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to let them slug it out in an arena far
easier and cheaper to control?"
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While I attended art school
there was a retrospective celebrating the role
the
College
played in the heyday of 70's
conceptual
art
. One of the pieces consisted of a single hole in the wall, the result of
someone firing a pellet gun. Whatever, I didn't like it either. What
fascinated me was that not only had someone bought the "original" (did
they buy the whole wall or just like a square foot?), but they had also
"authorized" the "reproduction" of the nonobject-cum-artobject!
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Lysiane Gagnon : Does anyone care about Radio-Canada?
"Radio-Canada is the French equivalent of the CBC
-- and much more. During its first decades, it was the major lifeblood of
French-speaking culture in Canada. No other institution did as much to
promote home-grown culture and to raise the standards of spoken French."
See also : Richard Martineau's
Traitement de
Canal
.
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wtf?
-
dude, where's my car
This document uses CSS kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it shouldn't be an issue.
On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a browser with incomplete CSS and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to mind.
It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some later date.
On the other hand, if something is down-right unreadable please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.
-
yes, we have no bananas
This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through the cracks.
See also : W3C::LogValidator.pm
-
it's the software, stupid