Or not…. Anyway, my point was – why does everyone else get to play with GMail and I don’t? Bah, Ghumbug.

You know, Verdana is the kind of font that really grows on you. My boss has been madly changing every CSS file he sees to use “Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif” for the past month or so and considering that the content of those files (only default templates) are copied into the users document, it’s been a rather annoying obsession. I’ve got to admit though, I’m kind of getting to like it as you might note from the recent change to “Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif” around here.

Apparently, fears of an HIV epidemic are putting the breaks on porn production in the US for the next 2 months. Does this mean the spam will stop for 2 months too? On a side note, I’m almost afraid of what the “The Google Says” box over there on the right is going to contain for this entry….

For some reason my email notifications for comments have stopped working or at least are intermittent. While I wasn’t watching, a whole heap of spam comments snuck onto this blog. I’ve now installed MT-Blacklist to see if that can fix the problem (it certainly seems to have cleaned out the existing comments nicely). If not, I’ll be disabling comment entirely. It’s such a shame greedy, selfish people have to go and make life difficult for everyone. Let me make it very clear: I will most definitely not be buying my penis enlargement products from any of the company’s who spammed my blog. Hmm, I’m not sure that’s really going to make much difference to them….

The RAM is a coming, oh yeah…. Ordered another 512Mb of RAM for my shiny new powerbook (it currently has 256Mb). Strangely overnight delivery was $2 cheaper than standard delivery. So I should get a happy little package sometime tomorrow. Then I’ll really see what this little baby can do.

aka: Why people think Americans have no concept of the world outside the USA. Sometimes on this big intarweb thingy, we come into contact with people from different countries and they might have different ways of expressing things or even (shock horror), spelling things. Witness this slashdot posting (which has no particularly worthwhile content but a non-american spelling of “gaol”). Note the flamewar that ensues. The first response (regarding the nineteenth century wanting it’s spelling back) is naive yet funny. My response was pointed and uncalled for but providing a at least somewhat humorous correction. Then it all went downhill. How is it that Americans manage to so consistently portray this image of absolute ignorance towards anyone outside their own country (and no I don’t just mean on slashdot…)? It’s like all the support queries that come in at work after people discover we’re in Australia – they all start with “Good day mate!”. How is it that these people can’t learn to spell “Good day” in Australian properly (G’Day)? And don’t even get me started on American actors trying to do Australian accents…. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got to go wrestle a crocodile or two… Crikey!

Since my new laptop has bluetooth builtin, I’ve been using my MS bluetooth mouse a lot more. The extra buttons on the side are set up as the Expos� triggers and'7;m now completely addicted to using them. I honestly never thought anything would be able to replace my good old faithful, “Hide Application” method. Where I once used to have a completely clean screen, devoid of all windows but the ones I was specifically working on – I never have absolute chaos with every window I might ever need open. I can happily flick through them with just a twitch of the thumb and a flick of the wrist. Fabulous!

(I’m starting a $NAME has lost it series if you were wondering. Blame Leo.) Anyway, Stallman’s lost it.

But the major source of this problem today is Java, because people who write free software often feel Java is sexy Oh Java, you sexy thing you. Admittedly the sexiness of Java is starting to make life a little difficult. I can’t get any work done because I just sit there looking at it. When I walk down the street hand in hand with Java, people wolf whistle. I go to a bar and every guy in the place tries to steal Java away from me. Maybe I should get in touch with “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and get them to give me the full makeover so I can be as sexy as Java is.

A young friend of mine who’s just starting out in the world of programming and has ambitions of becoming a software engineer asked me for work experience today. I couldn’t think of anyway that could give him the support he needs (note: if you know of a company in Brisbane or surrounding areas that could provide some work experience for a year 11 student that’s starting out in programming please let me know – I think a September timeframe fits in with his school well). Instead I suggested he sink his teeth into any and every programming problem he could find. Naturally he asked me to suggest some and I figured while I’m at it I may as well publish them. So over the next few weeks or months I’ll be writing up some sample programming exercises along with some of my thoughts on how to go about solving them and posting them to the web. The first one’s available now. I’m sure there’s plenty of examples and tutorials around on the web but I wanted to take the contrived examples and make them a little more real world. As such, all the exercises will start with a semi-formal set of system requirements (similar to what most contractors are given) and a discussion of design techniques and other software engineering considerations is included. The examples are language agnostic and are intended to focus on giving problem solving and programming experience rather than learning a specific language. I’d love to hear of any other good resources people can point out as well as any comments on the examples – things to add, things to improve, things to cut out etc.

Rich Bowen commented on a local church holding a festival in a local park as outreach. His comments hit home pretty hard with me because just recently I helped organise a festival for my local church.

In other words, the primary purpose of advertising is to lie to the customer in order to get them to find your product attractive. Evangelism is advertising. Advertising is all about getting a message out about something, it doesn’t have to be a product and it doesn’t have to be a lie. For instance, political advertisements don’t have a product, they advertise a philosphy and encourage you to take action about it. Major product recalls often happen through advertisements, they’re not selling you something, and they’re entirely factual. Just because world is so full of false and misleading advertising doesn’t mean that every advertisement is just out to lie to you and get you to buy something.

Following my complaints yesterday I think I’ve finally managed to get XSLT working correctly in perl. The secret: ignore the obvious choice (XML::XSLT) and use XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT in combination. Then use fink heavily as well. Try to avoid using CPAN or installing perl modules by hand until you don’t have a choice. Step 1: Install expat, libxml, libxslt and sablotron using fink. Install anything else that looks vaguely XML related while you’re there too. Step 2: Using fink, install every XML or XSLT related perl package you can find. Step 3: Using CPAN run: install XML::LibXML. Step 4: Using CPAN run: install XML::LibXSLT Then use code similar to: `my $parser = XML::LibXML->new(); my $xslt = XML::LibXSLT->new(); my $stylesheet = $xslt->parse_stylesheet_file($xsl);

I’ve been wanting to develop a “dashboard” style system to information from a bunch of different systems at work. Since we use an awful lot of XML around the place at work the easiest way to do that is most likely to use XSLT to transform the various XML feeds into HTML to be displayed and piece it all together into one page. Systems that don’t speak XML could have a gateway developed for them easily enough. Anyway, I figured I’d write a few simple perl scripts to piece the various XSTLs together and make it all work, hopefully develop something fairly pluggable so that it’s easy to add new feeds as required. So I went looking for XSLT processors for perl and wasn’t particularly impressed with anything I found. The XSLT I had been using and that worked with both XAlan and MSXML but barfed with XML::XSLT. The other XSLT libraries I found either failed to compile on OS X or failed to run once installed. Now admittedly that’s mostly going to be my lack of knowledge of C and perl but I was surprised there wasn’t a simple, standard XSLT processor. So then I tried PHP and while it has XSLT commands that looked promising, they weren’t compiled in to my copy of PHP. It appears to be off by default in PHP because it depends on a bunch of native libraries that may not be present on most systems. So in the end, I think I’ll write the system in Java simply because it’s actually good at handling XSLT. Why isn’t XSLT straight forward in other languages? It seems that they’re trying to leverage off existing C libraries to save having to write a complete XML parser and XSLT processor natively in the language. Unfortunately, that seems to introduce a number of headaches when actually trying to use the libraries. I guess Java makes communicating with C libraries more difficult than with languages like perl or PHP and that in combination with it’s dedication to cross-platform support seems to have given it an big advantage in situations like this by not encouraging the reuse of existing code in another language. It certainly makes it a heck of a lot easier for users of the language. So what am I missing? Is there a simple way to get a fully compliant XSLT processor in an effective scripting language? Is there another scripting language that’s good for piecing together simple systems that does have straight-forward XSLT support? Python? Ruby? Help!