#[linkfarm] The developer's dilemma
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#[linkfarm] Industrial/Gothic music index
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# The Bean is two years old today. Where does it all go?
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#[linkfarm] South Birmingham Linux User Group
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# Comedian Spike Milligan dies
Milligan's work, especially his war memoirs, had a huge influence on me when I was growing up. It was all just so ridiculous, and it was good to know that you could be a grown up having to deal with serious situations and still do stupid things.
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#[Arabica] What the hell. Cut a new release anyway. This has porting changes for gcc 3.0.4 in Un*x enviroments, changes to work with Standard C++ libraries (rather than pre-Standard :)), and initial support for Xerces.
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#[Arabica] At last. Successfully compiled and linked libSAX and the pyx example application under Linux, using gcc 3.0.4 and the libstdc++ that comes with it. Tested http resolution and that works too. Fantastic. Will try to get the Xerces stuff finished and a release cut by the end of the week.
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#[Arabica] Think I've finally got gcc 3.0.4 installed correctly. Trying again to build everything again.
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#[Arabica] Done some portability work on socket_stream and InputSourceResolver so that it will build on Linux. My standard C++ library of choice has been STLPort. However, I've been unable to build it so that locales work correctly - this means that applications using SAX in C++ segfault or assert. Damn.
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# Every Monday I load up DotCom Builder, looking for the article Kal, Marc and I contributed to. I get a little frisson of excitement as the page loads. Will it be there? Won't it be there? Will it be there? Won't it be there?

Ah, one day, one day ...
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#I am an expert on Curling.
And so are all my friends. As is everyone else who was in The White Horse last night.

One minute were engaging in pub conversation. A moment later, as the landlord flicked the big telly over to BBC2, we are the nation's experts on curling. We came into the match with 'our girls' leading 3 - 1. The conversation died completely as the Swiss came back to 3 - 2.

Last orders. No one moved.

3 - 3

Time. Still no one moved.

We have the last stone in the final end. The advantage is with us.

The Swiss start strongly.

We battle back, the Swiss still seem well placed.

Five stones in, and unbelieveably, the lights come on and the big telly scrolls up into its little box.

We run from the pub and surge up the High Street to Ian's place. Then we remember it's curling, and so we can safely stroll and still be in time for the finish.

And what a fantastic finish. We went utterly bonkers, pronounced sagely on Rhona Martin's nerves of steel, watched it again and then reeled off home in a state of high excitement.

Bloody marvellous.

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# Work, glorious work. I have some. Hurrah!
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#[Arabica] Completed the LexicalHandler in the Xerces wrapper. Xerces doesn't do DeclHandlers, it turns out, so the only thing that's left is the EntityResolver and kicking off the parse.
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#[Arabica] The DTDHandler is hooked up in the Xerces wrapper. Lexical and Decl and EntityResolver to go.
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# Microsoft stops new work to fix bugs - Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."
Nat read about this in the paper at the weekend. According to The Guardian they have 7000 people spending February fixing bugs. At first she laughed because it seemed silly, then she started saying "7000 people for 4 weeks at 40 hours a week ..." We worked it out at 560 work-years. Then the disbelief set in. "You could start again from nothing if you were going to spend that much time." Later she said "think how much work 7000 of you could do in that time." Finally she said "If they have to spend that long fixing bugs no wonder their software is so rubbish."

stephen prestage said 40 hour week @ Microsoft ? That's not what they'd have you believe. Either they are doing more hours, and are too fried to make anything count. Or they aren't doing those hours, but need to. [added 20th Feb 2002]

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#[Arabica] Hooked up the ContentHandler in the Xerces wrapper. That's the biggest single interface, so things are well on the way now.
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#[Arabica] It's been a little while since I've had a chance to do anything, but today I started on adding a wrapper for Xerces 1.6. Xerces has a load of cool features including Schema support and it's about time I caught up with it.

I've also sucessfully tested against MSXML version 4, which also has Schema support.
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# Kathleen Fent Read This Story - Kathleen, I wanted to do this in this most potentially embarassing way possible, and I figured doing it here and now, in front of a quarter of a million strangers was as good a way as any. I love you more then I can describe within the limits of this tiny little story. We've been together for many years now, and I've known for most of that time that I wanted to spend my life with you. Enough rambling. Will you marry me?
If I'd tried this I'd still be waiting to find out - Nat doesn't read my websites.
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# When You Are Ready To Have A Serious Conversation About Green Lantern, You Have My Email Address - I mean, if you are hot for Jade or something, you could simply say so, and no one would think the less of you for it.
The first American comic I bought was Green Lantern Corps number 204. I stuck with Green Lantern through thick and thin (and to be honest it was already pretty thin when I started reading it) for some years. During that time, the regular book was cancelled, a couple of excellent limited series cam out, there was a special or two, and a run in Action Comics Weekly, DC's bold experiment in comics that didn't come out monthly. After all that, the series was relaunched. It was rubbish. I valiantly stuck with it, but one fateful day, I picked up the new issue, number 8 or 9, read 4 or 5 pages, threw it down in disgust. Haven't read another Green Lantern comic since.

planetcutie said Well, *I* liked the relaunched series of Green Lantern. In fact, the first DC comic I bought was #19. I eventually completed my run of 1-23 from various shops. I did put a standing order in for 24, but after reading it in the shop I refused to buy it, because it was no good. And all before my 18th birthday, too.

I stick to GL back issues now. [added 15th Feb 2002]

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# I've been an admirer of Philip Greenspun's for quite some time now. He wrote what is still the best book on web publishing, has built large and enduring websites which demonstrate he knew what he was talking about, isn't shy about sharing what he knows, and has a big white dog.

He founded a company, ArsDigita, which for a while was about the only company I would have considered going back into permanent work for, and built it into a pretty successful outfit. At the start of 2000, Greenspun did a deal to get some venture capital, then had a subsequent falling out and left the company. Those same VCs, with all their accumlated business nous, have now run ArsDigita into the ground and closed it up. Amazing.

• Philip's initial reaction
• Comments at FuckedCompany
• Eve Andersson's (ArsDigita co-founder) rise and fall of ArsDigita
• Another ex-employee says goodbye

smellygit said I hadn't read this b4 I posted on my site - honest! [added 10th Feb 2002]

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# First Who's Who, now this. What am I doing wrong?

smellygit said And they seem to think you are American :)) [added 7th Feb 2002]

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# How do Klingons compute? - A Warrior's Programming Language
Disappointly it's not an imperative, declarative language.
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#

From: Glenn Dakin
To: Jez Higgins
Subject: RE: Borderline Interview
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 14:18:01 -0000 

HI Jez

...

I read the interview off the screen, and am delighted with it, lots of
references to my favourite people... also the artworks were well-chosen -
the Temptation and Vicar strip work well in there. Congratulations on
weaving some sense out of our wandering conversation in the KIngs Head
basement bar...

...

Yay!

angry_john said u rock! [added 8th Feb 2002]

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# Like most programmers I've spent virtually my entire life under one Non-Disclosure Agreement or other. You simply can't get paid for programming and not encounter them, generally sooner rather than later.While usually written in a bizarre and tortured language almost exactly unlike English, they all amount to the same thing - don't tell anyone anything about what you do here ever. Some companies try and get you to sign away the rights to all the software you write, whether at work or not, and some get a bit funny if you try and write articles for publication, so you've got to watch out for those. In my experience, most software companies have very little that actually needs to be confidential, but signing NDAs makes them feel better. That's fine as far as it goes I suppose, but if I stuck strictly to the letter of all the NDAs I've ever been bound by most of my cv would be blank, and I'd have to refuse to answer most interview questions.

I signed a new NDA this morning. It was one of the funnier ones, but as the agreement itself was marked as confidential I can't tell you what the funny bit was.

Screw U Angry John!

[added 6th Feb 2002]

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# z = z²+c
The infinite beauty of the Mandelbrot set. As ASCII-art

axelice [e] said Excellent!!! the chaos is real [added 30th May 2011]

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# Every night when I get home,
The monkey's on the table,
Take a stick and knock it off,
Pop goes the weazel!
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# CutieQuake - Shoot everything that moves. Don't get shot.
Distraction ... must resist ... willpower fading ...
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# The new Borderline is available, with what seems like an astonishing large portion given over to my chat with Glenn Dakin. It didn't seem that long when I wrote it.
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