# "Hi, I'm Jay and this is my hetero-life-partner, Silent Bob."
anonymous said Kevin Smith rulz. [added 28th Jul 2003]
Marc Hadley said Oops, forgot to put my name in. [added 28th Jul 2003]
Marc said Jay and Silent Bob Bookends. [added 28th Jul 2003]
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# The entire text of an email I just received runs
Subject: RE: yahoo messenger
Don't use it.
Andy
---------------------------------
Want to chat instantly with your online friends?
Get the FREE Yahoo!Messenger
Is it just me, or is this ticklingly funny?
Big James [e] said HahahaHAHhahHAHAHAhaha... heh.. ahem. Finally I have tracked down some form of communication and I'm also bored so I figured rather than email you direct I can spatter my verbal diahorrea all over the pristine formica of your blog. In case you are wondering it's the James with brain damage, the one who Pete always manages to convince to move heavy boxes for. Anyway more in the spirit of the blog I have a much more simple and economic way of the common parasite know as 'felis cranius' shout at your girlfriend who is after all only a fingers prod away to: 'sort out that bl*ody cat, it was your idea to get them in the first place... rant... why did I ever agree to this... etc.' Until she either removes your purring toupe or alternatively leaves you, either way you're on to a winner... hang on a minute...
[added 25th Jul 2003]
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# Our first cat was a little black and white scrap we called Pickle. She was a sweet little animal, and generally a pleasure to have about the place. Her only really annoying behaviour was coming into the bedroom at first light and stomping around on your head, looking for attention.
I was reminded of this when the Bean came through at 5:15 saying he wanted to "snuggle" with us (ie. talk and fidget).
Pickle gave up on the head stomping when I started sleeping with a water pistol by my bed. I'd give her a good squirting, and she soon learned the error of her ways.
Hmm ...
smellygit said Screw that - get a cattle prod.
[added 25th Jul 2003] Yea, but it's only got a limited range, raising the possibility of beng taunted from the foot of the bed with no recourse but to actually get up and chase him down the landing. [added 25th Jul 2003]
planetcutie said Simple - shove him out of the bed so a piece of his ear gets cut out by the bedside drawer unit. It's what my father did with me, and look at me now!
[added 25th Jul 2003] I think you'd have to admit that isn't exactly a recommendation, is it? [added 25th Jul 2003]
planetcutie said As I say in therapy - "Who am I to judge?" :^)
[added 25th Jul 2003]
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# New
FOAFy goodness! Well, it's better than working.
peteychap said Been meaning to look into this FOAF stuff but a bit stumped on the mbox_sha1sum malarkey. How do you convert the email addy to that code? In fact, how do you create a FOAF file anyway, if not by hand?
[added 24th Jul 2003] With the FOAF-a-matic of course!http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html
To tell the truth, I'm not really sure there is much you can do with FOAF that's actually *useful* right now today, although I'm happy to be corrected on that. On the other hand, FOAF is an RDF application so as well as all the 'I know him and him' stuff you can add any other damn thing you like. Even now, I suspect my chum Kal (http://www.techquila.com/) is dreaming up ways to combine Topic Maps, peer-to-peer discovery and FOAF spidering to crawl his way through vast piles of corporate data, combining them into a towering ontology describing almost everything there is to know.
More fun for us would be coming up with FOAF4Comics browser. You read something. You like it. It's FOAF suggests something else, and so on and so on. OK, that sounds like plain old hyperlinks, but it isn't. It's hyperlinks with a swag of metadata, and that's the difference maker. Hmm, there's the germ of a really stupid idea in there :)
More not-always-apparent-what's-happening stuff here http://www.foaf-project.org/, intro article here http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-foaf.html, more here http://rdfweb.org/ and here http://www.semanticplanet.com/ [added 24th Jul 2003]
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#Astounding Developments
Coming back from a brief jaunt down to sunny Reading, I had a rush of blood to the head and bought a new chain for my bike. (Long time readers may remember
this.) It's previous one vanished years ago while I was working out in Germany, and it was stashed in the shed.
Even more amazingly, I actually fitted it and went for a ride. All things considered, the bike's in pretty good nick. The rear wheel is slightly warped, but much less that I would have expected from 4 years or so of random abuse. The tyres don't seem to have perished at all - which is good because kevlar banded tyres cost a fortune. All the bits and bobs moved freely and nothing squeaked. It was ace! I should have done this years ago.
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#[mango] LGPL may be viral for Java? -
The FSF's Executive Director, Brad Kuhn adds "LGPL's S. 6 allows you to make new works that link with the LGPL'ed code, and license them any way you see fit. Only the LGPL'ed code itself must remain Free. Such 'client code' can even be proprietary; it need not be LGPL'ed."
To clarify the Mango position - I licensed it under the LGPL because I want the library to remain free while allowing people to do whatever the hell they want with it. Basically, what I want to maintain is that Mango code stays in the Mango jar file, and isn't bundled into some other jar instead. So go ahead, use the code in whatever application you like, under whatever license you like.
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# I have no clue what
this is meant to be, but I'm pretty sure it isn't what
Tim Berners-Lee had in mind.
Marc said A true masterpiece of the modern ad makers art. [added 18th Jul 2003]
john [e] [w] said Great movie. Don't ask me, I still giggle when I see a van painted with Snap-On Tools.
[added 29th Jul 2003]
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#[Arabica] Doing some client work slinging XML and XSLT in Python, using
4Suite. 4Suite is a really comprehensive package covering SAX, DOM, XSLT, XPath, a whole pile of RDF stuff I've not looked at and XInclude. I've previously used XInclude as part of
the rather convoluted build process for
the Versim website. 4Suite goes further than anything else I've seen, by having XInclude support within the XSLT processor. How cool is that? It means you can do things like
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
<xi:include href="../htmlfragments/prolog.xhtml"/>
</head>
<body>
<xi:include href="../htmlfragmenst/page_header.xhtml"/>
<xsl:apply-templates />
<xi:include href="../htmlfragmenst/page_footer.xhtml"/>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
It's fantastic - I'm already wondering how I'm going to manage without it.
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# Been working for the boys in Cardiff for 10 months now. When I started, they said, in quite strong terms that it was a 12 week engagement, there was no budget beyond that, so don't even think about an extension. Well, that suited me at the time, because I didn't want to be away from home any longer than I really had to, and I thought (mistakenly as it turned out) that the contract market would be picking up again and so I'd get something nearer home.
Well, I did my 12 weeks and they offered me some more work. I said yes if they'd let me work from home. They did, and we've not looked back since. That "absolutely no budget" ran on and on. And on. And on. Finally though, it did look like we'd reached the end. There simply didn't seem to be any more work to do, and it seemed that the strange stretchy budget really had run out. We agreed a final couple of weeks, to run up to last Friday, and then we'd finally shake hands, slap each other manfully on the shoulder and stride off.
Imagine my surprise then (as they say), when instead of the handshaking and shoulder slapping, they presented the spec for another month's worth of new work.
Hurrah! Thanks to chum
Kal, I'm about to spend a couple of weeks on a job for a new client, then we're off on holiday for a week, then off again for the Cardiff boys. The wolf is once more averted.
Buckeye [e] said Fantastic! I take back (nearly) everything I've said about the Welsh
[added 14th Jul 2003] Or as they would have it "Champion!" [added 15th Jul 2003]
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# Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
Quite possibly the stupidest film I have ever seen. Amazingly loud. Thoroughly unbelievable. Tip-top fun. I loved it.
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#Sedentary Slimming ...
Been feeling a bit porky for a while now. I put on a load of weight at the backend of last year, while I was staying in Pontypridd with Ali. Sainsbury's kept doing two for one offers on steamed puddings, and we drank rather more beer than I would normally. Despite my near-vegan diet since then, it's just not shifting because I sit on my arse all day and don't move.
In a bit of an effort to do something about it, my similarly afflicted sedentary chums have pointed me to
FitDay. You tell it your weight, activities, what you eat and so on and it give you a load of charts and graphs showing you thing like how many calories you've eaten vs burned. Geeky!
My
BMI today is 27.9 (pudgy, borderline fatarse). Watch this space.
planetcutie said My BMI is 18.8 (healthy, if on the thin side). Oh yes, and I bought a new PC so I can actually see this page properly now.
[added 14th Jul 2003] I hope you didn't buy it *solely* so you could see this page ... [added 14th Jul 2003]
planetcutie said Well, that and for SimCity 4...
[added 14th Jul 2003]
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# Cricket on the radio is the most perfect way we have enjoying that acme of Englishness. Running a close second is the texual delight of The Guardian match reports. Here's a tickler from today's
England vs South Africa match down the road at Edgbaston.
30th over: South Africa 117-7 (van Jaarsveld 15, Adams 1)
Gough beats Adams's outside edge and then gives him a little advice about how best to get behind the line. Adams just smiles the sheepish smile of a spinner who knows he can't injure Gough with the ball when it's his turn. One off the over.
"Clapham Common has a distressingly high volume of city Hooray Henrys," says Ian Pugh. "Bad at weekends as well as they are all wearing deck shoes and chinos." The cads.
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# Other eye blackened overnight. With two beautiful purple patches down the sides of my nose and across my eyelids, I look like some dodgy gothkid who ran out of makeup at a crucial point.
Like this - http://www.jezuk.co.uk/pictures/blackeyeCam.jpg [added 8th Jul 2003]
I don't want to crap about this too much, but my eyelids are getting heavier and heavier. Presumably, I bruised myself when I cracked my head, and now all the leftover blood rubbish is all sloshing about inside my head, and draining down to settle round my eyes. It's uncomfortable, but it's got ot be better than a haematoma. [added 8th Jul 2003]
AngryJohn said That's a beauty ! If blood is sloshing around unbidden then perhaps a quick three hour queue in casualty is called for ?
[added 8th Jul 2003]
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# Re:Beagle, ESA and .uk (Score:5, Interesting)
Who said Slashdot users are a bunch no-brain skript-kiddie l4mM3Rs?
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#The Coffee No Hot Liquids Grounds
Tonsillitis. Ouchy.
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# Took the Bean down to visit my Mum for the weekend. We went on the train, which I considered quite daring, but he a little champ and it all went splendidly. We seemed to fit an inordinately large number of things in between lunchtime Saturday and mid-afternoon Sunday, including two trips to
Barry Island, a stroll round Cardiff Bay, a session at a kiddies playground, and splash around in a swimming pool. I somehow contrived to smack my head on the pool wall, and now sport a slightly uncomfortable black eye.
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#Should Archer be paroled?
Jeffrey Archer's being paroled from prison in a couple of weeks. This is pretty normal stuff, of course, as most prisoners are paroled well before their full term in clink is up. Once paroled, you spend a period of time when you have to report to your parole officer on a regular basis, and there are certain restrictions on your movements. After that, you finish your sentence on license. You can be recalled to prison at any time, should you reoffend.
Not everyone gets paroled though. People who are considered a danger to the public don't get let out early - they just have to bottle it up. You are also unlikely to be paroled if you don't express regret for what you did or, for instance, continue to claim your innocence.
Michael Shirley's conviction for murder was overturned this week, after he'd been in prison for 16 years. If he'd just kept schtum he'd have been released several years ago.
So, if Archer is being paroled, we can assume
he regrets that he lied in court, is sorry that he attempted to obtain money by deception and sully the reputation of others? In which case, why are
his wife and children attempting to gather evidence for another appeal?
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# Received an email requesting permission to include Arabica on the cover disk of the forthcoming fifth edition of
The XML Handbook by Goldfarb and Prescod. No doubt it will be even bigger and weightier than previous editions and just as bloody awful.
Despite my low regard for the book, I said yes. Not liking the book isn't reason enough to say no, and it seems to appeal to lots of other people. There's nothing to be gained by not being on the disk, either. On the other hand, there's probably not much to be gained either because XML processing in C++ isn't that common, and there's so much else on there you'd have to be pretty dedicated to find it. Arabica's precursor SAXinC++ was included with
the third (and presumably fourth) edition, and I'm not aware of anyone who used it as a result. Whatever, it's going in.
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#[Arabica] Received an email requesting permission to include Arabica on the cover disk of the forthcoming fifth edition of
The XML Handbook by Goldfarb and Prescod. No doubt it will be even bigger and weightier than previous editions and just as bloody awful.
Despite my low regard for the book, I said yes. Not liking the book isn't reason enough to say no, and it seems to appeal to lots of other people. There's nothing to be gained by not being on the disk, either. On the other hand, there's probably not much to be gained because XML processing in C++ isn't that common, and there's so much else on there you'd have to be pretty dedicated to find it. Arabica's precursor SAXinC++ was included with
the third (and presumably fourth) edition, and I'm not aware of anyone who used it as a result. Whatever, it's going in.
Three years ago, this was the spur for me to cut a new release, and I'm going to try and get one out for this. Here's what I hope to do, at least,
* combining libSAX, libArabicaUtils and libArabicaXML into a single lib
* making the std::wstring utility typedefs optional - on platforms with broken wide char support they're a positive hinderance
* finish the SAX and DOM writer samples so they support wide streams and output transcoding
Suggestions, patches, whatever, are welcome as always.
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# More styling fiddliness today. Hopefully, this page should look a bit more pleasant in Internet Explorer now. There's also a sans-serif/serif font choosy thinger in the User Settings for you logged in types. Anti-aliasing + serif == good, I'm told. If you want something really eye-bleeding choose monospace.
Specific complaints or suggestions below, please.
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# He might not have been
a minicab driver and I didn't actually kick him. He did beep his horn at seven o'clock on Sunday morning because he was too damn lazy to walk the five yards to someone's front door. Consequently, I leapt from bed and went out and gave him a very severe talking too.
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