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xmlns not bound to URI
SAX2DOM::Parser shouldn't throw
Working on this next ...
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One of the backgroundy bits in Swallows and Amazons has an infant relative of the children suffering from whooping cough. It implied that this is a pretty serious thing to have, and there's much relief as she improves. When I read this as a child, this made no sense. In fact, none of it made sense, but that made less sense than the rest. A cough that lasted for weeks and weeks? A cough that could kill you? How absurd. Whooping cough, scarlet fever, the croup - they all seemed to be childhood diseases that only now existed in children's novels.
However, as I discovered about four years ago through long sessions of hacking and howling, whooping cough was alive and well and living in my throat. For weeks and weeks and weeks. I probably caught it from a fellow passenger on one of my weekly trips to Germany and back. Bastard.
This week, I found out that croup is alive and well too, this time in Daniel's throat. Croup is an infection of the vocal chords. When you're not coughing your breathing sound like Darth Vader, and when you do cough you sound like a seal barking. For some reason all children's illnesses seem to be worse in the evening, so he had a couple of nights where he was waking up every couple of hours in the middle of breathing crisis, barking out these coughs, unable to draw breath, and generally having a Christ-I-think-I'm-dying experience. Poor little mate. All we could do was to settle him back down and wait for the next episode. He's pretty much recovered now, which I'm very relieved about.
Daniel's so rarely ill compared with the other kids we know, I don't really know what to do. Some kids seem to suffer from almost non-stop ailments of one kind or another, so their parents get pretty practiced at which medicine treats what symptom, settling kids in the middle of the night and so on. Daniel hardly ever has calpol, for instance, and hates it anyway, so midnight attempts to get some down him to relieve a fever just get him even more upset than he was to begin with. What am I doing? I can't complain about this. Anyway, he was ill and now he's better, and if your nipper starts making a noise like seal asking for fish try to keep them calm as you can.
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This latest release adds both SAX and DOM writers, allowing SAX events and DOM trees to be serialised to streams (file, console, etc).
To support the writers are several codecvt facets provided several common conversions - UTF8 to UTF16, ISO8559-1 to UTF16, etc.
The release includes several minor portability improvements, and the library is now much easier to build than in the past.
Finally there have been several minor and one major bug fix, along with assorted improvements to the Xerces support, all largely provided by Arabica's Antipodean Correspondant, Philip Walford.
Source tar.gz file, Source .zip file, Build Notes[Add a comment]
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Recently discovered the joys of a compact flash adaptor - makes sucking photos out of your camera 2e^5 times easier. Well, it does with my Minolta DImage anyway as the software that ships with it can best be described as adequate. In fact, after three years to get used to it, I'd describe the DImage itself as adequate. It'll take good pictures most of the time, but it really doesn't like low light conditions at all. It'll pick out the brightest bit, everything else goes dim and the colours go wonky. In the photo below, for instance, Harry looks bright red. He is a bit pink, but nothing like that.
Anyway, back to the point - just pulled the pictures Daniel and I took on our Day out with Thomas at the Severn Valley Railway back in September. Severn Valley Railway is a heritage railway (as these places are called) runs between Kidderminster and Bridgnorth and has who knows how many steam locomotives operating there. It's largely kitted out in a generic 1940s style which is why it turns up in TV drama location shots all the time. It's very pretty actually. For the Thomas day out, they kit out some of their engines with faces, and lay on little events at the stops along the line - rides in a brake van, readings by Christopher Awdry and what have you. Good fun.
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Having a second child seems to be nowhere near as difficult as having the first. When Daniel was new, going out with him seemed to be some kind of mammoth undertaking involving all kinds of bags and clothes and planning and coordinating. Not so this time. Nat's just taken Harry and the Bean to Tumble Jungle and she'll won't be back until after lunch. Easy! Daniel did ask if Harry would be staying behind, but in the end decided he could play in the babies' section. I explained he'd probably be a bit nervous to begin with and so would probably stay with his Mummy. That seemed to make sense.
So I get to stay in and try to phone the VAT office. A couple of weeks ago we received a letter from VAT office saying they'd like to have a chat with us, so they can decide if we need to be inspected or not. Nat tries to ring a couple of days later, but the person we need to speak to is only in the office Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The neglected to mention this in their letter. I was going to ring last week, but was starting a new bit of work and forgot.
Received a second, rather clipped, letter on Friday - I do not appear to have received any response .... Given that the vast majority of companies don't seem to be able to respond to something in anything under about 6 weeks, let alone a fortnight, it seem slightly unnecessary. Please contact me between 08.15 and 12.15 so I rang at eight minutes past eleven. A recorded message eventually informed me that the switchboard is open between nine and eleven, and two and four. This also was not mentioned in the letter. In the past I've always found the Inland Revenue and the Customs and Excise staff to be courteous and helpful. With this little episode I'm starting to get slightly narked.
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Daniel and the new nipper would be proof, if I hadn't laid off the coffee, beer and hot baths during "mating season". [added 15th Oct 2003]
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jez: s/Mr/Dr/
jez: s/Marc you email/Marc could email you/
jez: IM by regex
kal: s/not english at all/english
kal: s/e/E/g
jez: just send nonsense then edit right by incremental update
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I pretty much gave up music radio about ten years ago. Without wishing to sound too much like a prematurely aged old fart, this modern music, well you just can't whistle it, can you? The variety of music on the radio in this country is pretty poor anyway. New music stations only play chart or "chart worthy" music - ie that stocked by Woolworths. "Classics" stations play a very limited selection of old chart music, and it only takes few days to learn that and now something from The Eagles inevitably means Hotel California. If you want to listen to folk music, or rock, or gregorian chant, or Elizabethan pavanes (or a combination thereof) you can pretty much forget it, unless half an hour at 2:30 in the morning once a month tickles sufficiently.
The Internet to the rescue!
Yay! the internet rocks! Streaming from Paradise, California (the California that just elected Schwarzenegger as Governor, not the one down the road) is Radio Paradise. OK, so they don't play pavanes, but its playlist of "eclectic rock" is custom built for prematurely aged old farts like me. It is a little strange that they only have one DJ and he's on, thanks to the miracle of digital technology, 24 hours a day (Do Androids Dream, anyone?) but there's a minimum of talking, just a low key pointer to the website every 20 minutes or so, no blather, no hype, no nonsense, just a really good selection of tunes. Tunes, godammit! I like it so much I gave them USD15.
All I need to do now is hook up a PC in the kitchen so I can listen while I cook.
"It's bad, you know..." [added 23rd Jan 2007]
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Heh. No worries, the tea is better than most of what I get at home.
Well, the stuff I don't make myself anyway ;-)
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I should probably add that they are all adults. [added 9th Oct 2003]
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Counting and numbering? Easy, no? You start at one and go up from there. If I gave you five boxes and said number those, you'd write 1 on the first, 2 on the second and so on up to 5 on the fifth.
Unless, that is, we were talking about something in a programming context. Then I'd want you to write a big 0 on the first box, 1 on the second, up to 4 on the fifth. This probably sounds bonkers, but here the boxes are numbered by their offset from the start, rather than by their ordinal rank. It makes lots of other things easier to think of it that way, even if it first glance it seems strange.
Where numbering goes completely out of the window is software version numbering. Word 1, for instance, was followed by Word 2, then Word 6, Word 7 aka Word 95. MacOS 9 was followed by OSX. Those are well known but minor examples - right now scanning over Freshmeat yields 1.12, 0.31, 2.0rc1(2.4Devel), 0.4.0, 0.9.4, 0.2, 1.2.9rc1, 1.02, 0.5.7.7, 1.2, 0.43.16, 0.5.3, 3.1, 1.3.0-pre2, 1.0.2, 0.0.5, 2.6.0-test7(2.5), pb17r515.
Informative stuff. If you've got a practiced eye, then some of these do convey some small amount of information. 1.3.0-pre2 means that this release isn't the real 1.3.0, it's what they think it'll be but they'd like a bit more of shakedown testing, because someone found a bug in -pre1. Same with 2.6.0-test7(2.5). That's a Linux kernel version number. Linux kernels in active development have odd minor version numbers, while versions considered suitable for widespread use have even minor version numbers. So 2.6.0-test7(2.5) isn't quite 2.6 yet. But the rest of them? Don't really mean a thing. Once we take off the -pre2 off 1.3.0-pre2 we lose even that tiny bit of information.
Generally you read version numbers as major.minor.bug fix level possibly.erm. They start low, around 0 or 1, and get bigger in some way at each release. Bumping a major version usually resets the minor version, but other than that there's usually no particular relationship between those numbers - the next in sequence 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 is more likely to be 1.10 or 1.9.127a than 2.0.
What determines a release is highly subjective. What constitutes a bump in major or minor numbers is similarly subjective. Yesterday, chum Kal released version 0.8.3 of his TM4J package, up from 0.8.2. In his release notes he says the primary focus is two new features. To my mind, this new release therefore represents a significant advance so should be 0.9, but obviously Kal's brain is wired wrong and he disagrees.
In the end all a version number says is this version is newer than that version.
And that's why I don't number my software releases, I date them.
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Back in the old days, before ubiquitous networking and desktop email, we used to transfer files between computers the way God intended. By printing them out, and then typing them in again. Once we'd all got fed up of that, everyone used floppynet. Copy the file onto a floppy disk, walk across the office, copy it off again, and spend the time you saved not retyping playing DOOM instead.
These days, all the offices I visit have network ports to spare. Many of them are also pretty paranoid about network usage though. Fear of virusses, fear of surfing-not-working, fear of industrial espionage all mean a lot of places won't let you plug in. Only this week, for instance, I wasn't able to use the network in the office where I was working, despite being using a computer they had given me, running a brand new, clean installation. So, we come back to floppynetting to shuffle things around, because despite being paranoid no-one ever locks down physical access to a machine. It's not measly little floppies we tote around now though - all the hip kids are using USB dongles. And they rock! Physically tiny and virtually massive, you really could smuggle out all of a company's sensitive data in one easy to conceal package.
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Norm,I know its presumptive of me to apologise on behalf of the entire nation, but I just assumed we all would be ashamed once we get over our collective love of Nescafe.
On behalf of the nation let me apologise for the coffee. Most of the coffee served and drunk in this country is absolutely rotton, and there's really no excuse. No doubt some of your more churlish correspondants will bang on about Americans' inability to make tea, but if the truth be told most of the tea here is rotton too. Sorry.
If your little sojourn brings you through Birmingham, feel free to drop in and I'll try and serve something a little more palatable.
Best,
Jez
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$ cvs commit transcode.cpp
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
cvs [commit aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages if any)
Gagh! Curses on SourceForge (but only mild ones, because they're nice people really).
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There are so many ways to read this little report.
- Imagine you work for Xerox - your company pretty much invented the modern computing user interface, laser printers and photocopiers. You get one. A jumped Japanese imitator gets 49! Where's the justice?!?!??!
- There's a lot of research that suggests children can be quite strongly influenced by their names. Calling a kid Unique seems to be guaranteed to turn them into an utter headcase.
- Timberland? Jaguar? Xerox? What the fuck are you thinking? Timberlands are your pride and joy? Think back, you prat. Give thanks that your parents didn't name you in the same way. Or is your name Allegro fucking Hush Puppy? Quink Capri? MacFisheries Parker-Pen?
- No, it's pronounced Jag-woar.
That and 'Microsoft' :p [added 2nd Oct 2003]
Nah [added 3rd Oct 2003]
"No not the camera, actually I'm named after the first dog in space." [added 3rd Oct 2003]
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