Primarily a bug-fix release.

SAX: SAXParseException copy constructor was corrected. DefaultHandler::fatalError now throws an exception, matching its documentation. Thanks to Ulrich Heinen of the University of Freiburg for picking that up. The MSXML2 wrapper now allows exceptions thrown from ErrorHandlers to propagate properly, rather than dropping them at the COM boundary. There are a few VS.NET specific fixes. The Writer SAX filter now also writes any internal DTD subset.

DOM: Some minor DTD handling problems were fixed

Source tar.gz download Source zip download
Build Notes

Another exceedingly quick'n'easy^TM teatime winner. It's a lovely way to eat broccoli - you really get to taste the broccoli, rather than the sauce or gravy or whatever that it usually gets mixed up with.

Nip down the shops and get

• two or three nice fresh heads of broccoli
• half a kilo or so of pasta
• a teaspoon or two of dried chilli flakes
• three or four or five big fat cloves of garlic

1. Find a pan big enough to hold all the pasta and the broccoli, fill it with water and stick it on to boil. The bigger the pan, the better really.
2. Cut or break the broccoli florets up into little bite sized pieces.
3. Get another large pan, and pour in a generous quantity of good oil. Heat the oil gently. Crush or chop up the garlic, then fling it into the oil along with the chilli flakes. Fry it round for a couple of minutes, then turn off the heat. Throw in a large pince of salt, and stir it around.
4. When the water comes up to boil, tip in the pasta. Bring it back to the boil and cook it for five minutes or so. See how long the packet recommends and knock about 5 minutes off that.
5. After five (or however long) minutes, tip the broccoli into the water too. Bring it back to the boil again. (Depending on how big your pan is and how much water you have, this'll take between no time and a couple of minutes.) Simmer for two or three minutes more, until the pasta is cooked. Drain it.
6. Turn the heat up high under the garlic and chilli. Tip the pasta and broccoli into the pan, and turn it around and around until everything is coated with the oil, chilli and garlic bits.
7. Eat!

With all that broccoli to work against, the pasta need to be pretty rugged. Right now, I normally use buckwheat pasta because Natalie isn't eating wheat. Wholewheat spaghetti is something I usually avoid, but it's excellent cooked with the broccoli. Hemp and spelt pasta is good too - it cooks so quickly you can put everything in at the same time.

Spent the weekend up near Skelmersdale with my Warps chums JD, Anton and AndyB. Warps is a crappy acronym for Wargames and Role-Playing Society but WARPS made for a better name than Hull University Wargames Society. It also meant Ian could design a cool logo for the T-shirts. I'm fairly sure I came up with the Warps name, so I'm gratified that it still exists and is, no doubt, ensuring that maladjusted scientists and engineers continue to get 2:2s. Hurrah!

We talked a lot of nonsense, played Carcassonne, drank some beer and, with JD's delightful goodwyf Francine at the wheel, embarked on an extended midnight tour of Ormskirk looking for a takeaway. Top fun.

In the weeks beforehand Anton had solicited suggestions for music we listened to at university. He turned up with a CD of 119 rock tracks, roving from Biohazard through Faith No More to Lawnmower Deth. At the cheesy end of things he also threw in some Poison, Dave Lee Roth and Warrant's marvellous Cherry Pie. Sitting round the game, drinking beer, Andy outlined his objections to Unilever's latest branding strategy. The rest of us tuned out slightly and gradually we all began to nod in time to Queensryche.

I don't honestly see us not continuing to do this two or three times a year until we're all dead and buried.

I can't claim to have an exhaustive test suite, but it eats all the arbitrarily complex XPaths I've thrown at it today.

What I find amazing is the speed with which I've been able to do this. I've spent less than two working days on it - two hours transcribing EBNF from the XPath rec, half a day footling around with abstract syntax trees and what not, and the rest of the time eliminating left-recursion. Now I have a grammar that I'm extremely confident is correct.

That development speed and confidence is entirely due to the mind-boggling power of the Spirit library. By allowing you to transcribe EBNF more or less directly into code, I can take the grammar in the recommendation and codify it. Literally codify it. The rec text is there in my code, so the code must be right. Here's snippet

// [1]
LocationPath = RelativeLocationPath | AbsoluteLocationPath; 
// [2]
AbsoluteLocationPath = AbbreviatedAbsoluteLocationPath
                     | ('/' >> !RelativeLocationPath);
// [3]
RelativeLocationPath = Step >> *((boost::spirit::str_p("//") | boost::spirit::ch_p('/')) >> Step);

// [4], [5]
Step = AxisSpecifier >> NodeTest >> *Predicate | AbbreviatedStep;
AxisSpecifier = AxisName >> "::" | AbbreviatedAxisSpecifier;

[1] LocationPath ::= RelativeLocationPath | AbsoluteLocationPath	
[2] AbsoluteLocationPath ::= '/' RelativeLocationPath?
		| AbbreviatedAbsoluteLocationPath	
[3] RelativeLocationPath ::=   	Step	
		| RelativeLocationPath '/' Step	
		| AbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath	
[4] Step ::= AxisSpecifier NodeTest Predicate*	| AbbreviatedStep	
[5] AxisSpecifier ::= AxisName '::' | AbbreviatedAxisSpecifier

D:\work\JezUK\Arabica\xpathic>Debug\xpathic.exe
Hello
        'text' parses OK
        'comment' parses OK
        'text()' parses OK
        'processing-instruction('poo')' parses OK
        'processing-instruction("poo")' parses OK
        'processing-instruction()' parses OK
        'self::name' parses OK
        '@fruit' parses OK
        'one/two' parses OK
        'one/@fruit' parses OK
        'one/@fruit[1]' parses OK
        'one/descendant-or-self::woot[1]' parses OK
        'one/two/three' parses OK
        'one/two/three[1]' parses OK
        'one/two[1]/three' parses OK
        '/one/two' parses OK
        '/one[1]/two[2]/comment()' parses OK
        '/one[1]/two[2][1]' parses OK
        '//one' parses OK
        '//one/two' parses OK
        '//one/two//@id' parses OK
        'one/two/three[@attr]' parses OK
        'one/two/three[@attr][1]' parses OK
        'one/two/three[four/@attr]' parses OK
        'one/two/three[@attr='nob']' fails Parsing
        'one/two/three[position() = first()]' fails Parsing
        'one/two/three[(@attr) or (@id)]' fails Parsing

A friend of mine lives in Wolverhampton. Almost everyone in her street sends their children to the local, middle-ranking primary. After that, there is no automatic transfer to a similar school. The closest school is a girls-only grammar. The two nearest secondaries restrict their intakes to Catholics and Anglicans respectively. The local comprehensive has a catchment area that never reaches their street. My friend's best hope is that her children will be accepted at the specialist city technology college, which selects bands of children from an entrance test. The only choices for her children and those of everyone in the streets around her, if they want to avoid being placed in the area's failing schools, are these: tutor, find God, hope, appeal, move, or pay. They aren't choosing schools - it's schools that are choosing them.
[The Guardian, 14 Feb 2004]

What is a residential broadband IP address?

Residential customers of broadband services are assigned an IP address from a specific range maintained by the provider. These IP addresses may be either dynamic or static depending up the individual provider. Residential IP addresses should use the provider's SMTP servers and should not be connecting directly to another ISP's SMTP servers. Please see our Info Center for more information on IP addresses.

[Postmaster.Info : AOL Mailer FAQ]

Bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards.

For the first time noticed the dedication in Java in a Nutshell, 4th Edition.

This book is dedicated to all who teach peace and resist violence.

Admirable sentiment. No doubt the many, many people to whom that applies sleep a little bit sounder in their beds knowing their noble actions inspired a 5cm thick Java fucking reference manual.

I'm a little bit late picking this up but am saddened to read that Flossie, the prettiest sheep in world, has moved on to a pasture where the grass is always lush and there are many, many McVitie's biscuits.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to play GridRunner++ for a few minutes.

A guy ran through the crossing in front of me this evening. He wasn't going especially fast, and then pulled up outside Sainsbury's. I hoofed it down the road and caught up with him.

Me: Red lights not apply to you, mate?
Him:
Me: Red lights not apply to you, mate?
Him: What?
Me: You just ran through the pedestrian crossing when the lights where red.
Him: I did?
Me:

His surprise seemed genuine. He appeared to have not noticed the crossing, nor the fact the someone on the opposite side from me was on it at the time he drove through. If I hadn't picked up on his unchanged engine note, I would have started crossing too. Would he have noticed me, if I had not noticed him?

I'd expected a more aggressive reaction from him on being challenged, not a mild show of "oh silly me" surprise. I'd always assumed that the people running the crossing, jumping the lights or whatever, where largely motivated by selfishness and aggression. It didn't seem possible that people could fail to see a pair of traffic lights, but apparently they can. Perhaps the nation really is asleep at the wheel.

Since 2001 I have been working sporadically on a new parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short. TagSoup is designed for people who have to process this stuff using some semblance of a rational application design. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML.

From: Jez
To: Pete
Subject: Bettie Page Bio-pic Trailer

http://www.bettiepagedarkangel.com/

It's what broadband was invented for.

Jez

From: Pete
To: Jez
Subject: re: Bettie Page Bio-pic Trailer

There is a god ...

The original book of ancient-astronaut craziness in a cheesy mid-70s Corgi edition? For only one of your English Pounds? Extra amusement points for being on sale at the Birmingham Buddhist Centre? How could I resist?

Actually, if you see von Daniken on the TV or hear him on the radio, he doesn't sound like a wide-eyed crazyman at all. He seems at least as sensible as James Lovelock when he explains Gaia or as methodical as Fred Hoyle describing how he came to round to the idea of panspermia. In the current frenzied political atmosphere, he certainly makes more sense then the explanation for going to war in Iraq. Footle around legendarytimes.com for more fringe-pseudo-science fun.