# Clients - can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
smellygit said Can't shoot 'em either
[added 30th Jun 2004]
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#[Arabica] Added a few little tweaks to the XPath grammar this evening. Just have to walk the abstract syntax tree the parser creates and build a nice little XPath object to do the work. Course, I have to write the code that would use ...
Also fixed XMLBaseSupport so it works properly in the face of the URLs which don't end with a / character. There are some implicit std::string dependencies in there too, but I'm not overly fussed about that right now. Using the XMLBaseSupport class is simplicity itself - create an instance, call it in your startElement and endElement handlers, and use its makeAbsolute member function when you want to a URI referenced relative to the current xml:base. Here's the business part of a little example that prints xlink:hrefs,
void hrefPrinter::startElement(const std::string&, const std::string& localName,
const std::string&, const SAX::Attributes& atts)
{
xmlbaseTracker_.startElement(atts);
std::string href = atts.getValue("http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink", "href");
if(href.empty())
return;
std::cout << "href '" << href << "' resolves to the URI '"
<< xmlbaseTracker_.makeAbsolute(href)
<< "'" << std::endl;
} // startElement
void hrefPrinter::endElement(const std::string&, const std::string& localName,
const std::string&)
{
xmlbaseTracker_.endElement();
} // endElement
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# Back from a week's holiday. Jolly good time, even if it rained a bit. Did normal Cornwall-seasidey-holiday-with-children things - went to the beach, got a bit sunburnt, drove slowly down very narrow roads, day tripped to St Ives, ate a pasty,
bought a £2400 painting, that kind of thing. Super time.
anonymous said I spose that'll be written off for tax purposes :)) [added 27th Jun 2004]
kal said Just think how much it would have been if the artist had used a brush!
[added 27th Jun 2004] smellygit said Maybe we are just being philistines - I've got an ASCII chart on my wall so what do I know about art :p
[added 28th Jun 2004] http://www.jezuk.co.uk/jez/twilight-on-rosewall-hill
ASCII can be Art too ... [added 28th Jun 2004]
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# Phone rings. It's the Bean.
Bean: What book would you like for our holiday? We're standing outside Borders.
Me: I'd like a book called Red Mars, by a man called Kim Stanley Robinson, in the sci-fi section.
Bean:
Me: Got that?
Bean: I heard what you said, but I didn't understand.
smellygit said If only IT Managers were so honest ;)
[added 15th Jun 2004] kal said I think we all tend to have that problem with you, Jez :)
[added 16th Jun 2004] smellygit said That's a bit rich :p
[added 16th Jun 2004] kal said Troo...I should have added: "as opposed to SmellyJohn who speaks PKZIP and can only be heard if you are capable of inflating while listening." :P
[added 16th Jun 2004]
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# Feel like the XML toolkits' bug finder general. This morning, I think I've found a strangeness in the interaction between DOMSources and Saxon 6.5.3 and 8, resulting in some namespaces not being propagated into the result document. Filed a bug against 6.5.3 last week. I've got a bug report and patch to work up against Ant's xslt task, along with a small change request. Found more bugs in the Oracle XDK than you can shake a stick at. Bah!
danp said I didn't get a word of that. I can make more sense of the words 'jubajubanumanumanumajub' when my one year old wants something. Hopefully he'll be more hands on with tech speak when he's older. I'll need somebody to explain technology when it outstrips my ability to understand how to use it. My ability to understand how it works has already been well and truly drowned by phrases like yours above, Jez
[added 14th Jul 2004]
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#THE BLITHERING LAUREATE PENS AGAIN ...
The Public House Lament
He's comin' to getcha boy, fetcha rhyme boy, test a line boy.
Scrabble in the dirt of your worth
For your penny's worth, your misery, your mirth.
Split secrets leaked in one burnt gold, bruised, boozed breath.
Ragged and ravaged on a honky-tonk crawl; the gutter brawl
Told in guttural drawl.
Fight tooth and claw. It's time to draw ...
He is King-pin, the drinking man's bitter grin, glittered with gin,
Slit from ear to ear. And he is here
To gild his liquored anguish, to vanquish your languished guilt.
Verse of a savage tongue; the lonely one
In fine fettle and sharp as the sun on gun-metal.
You squirm. A worm; pace is beetle-slow,
Crouching, slouching with nowhere to go
Lassoed; harpooned in the gloom,
This marooned saloon is your stage, your page, canvas for your rage.
Slow down, spin around for the showdown.
You snarl serrated words like knifes
Not berated. He surfaces. He survives.
Your last ditch is ptched, and fizzles,
Spotting like rust in the dust, in the drizzle.
Blotting paper drinks your inky fingerprints.
But he's hurt; blood-red words spurt
From below the belt, and angry welt,
You lack the honour of a Celt.
And he shoots from the hip.
The rhymes tumble and skip. Loosens his grip,
Drop the gun by your side,
Your saddlebags, your sorry behind.
Thoughs escape and jar. Yoo little, too late to spar,
'Not me, not now'
But you're as stiff as the quiff framing your dead-dog brow.
[Exeunt the limping Celt with your pelt.
Angst riddle ammo spent, he's hell bent on getting' outta there,
The rider, the confider, the purveyor of prayer.
Clint-glint in his eye,
Flint and steel burn your words where they lie]
Found, taped up in various places around Moseley village on Friday morning. I have no idea what it's about, or who the author is. I let the Blithering Laureate's previous piece unremarked which I now regret rather, so made sure I got this.
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#Duck!
Little Halster's first word.
smellygit said We're you walking through a low doorway at the time ?
[added 14th Jun 2004] AngryJohn said Nah - he was serving up a rather tasty dish made from local, free range, produce.
[added 14th Jun 2004]
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# The election results for Moseley and King's Heath still haven't been declared. There have apparently been two recounts so far. An email from someone at the count gave the result as two Lib Dems and one Labour candidate, but the city council website doesn't confirm that. Am crossing my fingers, but am being to suspect we might be on the wrong end of a local
Nader effect. Never been so agitated by a local election result in my life.
[2005 results? Try here]anonymous said Still not declared on Sunday - can brummies not count ;) [added 13th Jun 2004]
There's some dispte over the result in Perry Barr, which is being recounted *again* today. [added 13th Jun 2004]
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#It's the nearest I've come to being canvassed
A car with a megaphone strapped to roof has just cruised past urging me to vote Liberal Democrat tomorrow. I won't be.
Tomorrow's election is quite an important one for Birmingham. The ward boundaries have been changed and so the entire council is up for election, rather than one third of the seats as normal. Sadly, many of the candidates in Moseley don't seem, to me at least, to be taking it especially seriously. There are eleven candidates standing for three seats - 3 each from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, a Green and a UK Independence party candidate. I haven't been door-knocked by any of the candidates and with the (slightly surprising) exception of the Labour candidates, their election leaflets through the door have been poor to completely piss-poor.
We've had exactly one leaflet from UKIP. It was a generic European election flyer with Say No to Europe on one side and an invitation to send them money join the party on the other. We've had nothing else, certainly nothing pertaining the the city election, like how voting UKIP benefits Birmingham general and Moseley in particular. Indeed, their candidate is so off-hand that he didn't even bother to attend the husting organised by the local Forum.
The Green leaflets have again been pretty generic, but the did at least outline their policies in some detail. Their candidate put in a pretty decent showing at the hustings too, avoiding cheap points scoring and happy to compliment the current council on things. Might give him a vote.
The Conservative leaflets have been entirely negative. A sheet of paper with the words "Labour are rubbish, so vote for us" printed on it 100 times would make an entirely adequate substitute. We did have one leaflet outlining citywide policies, but I threw it away when I got to the part about undertaking a feasibility study into building an underground train system. I know public transport is a hot issue, but that's a pretty wild way of sticking it on the back burner. Two of their candidates were at the hustings, a very grey chap who'd been a councillor for various wards for the last 20 years and a vigorous comedy 21 year old. The son of two past Lord Mayors, he spoke almost entirely from notes and hit completely the wrong tone. The only time he did depart from his notes, he cracked a rather good joke at his own expense though. Undoubtedly will become a councillor at some point, but not this year and probably not in Moseley.
The LibDems leaflets also took the Labour are no good track, backed up with lengthy lists of how much graffitti they'd had scrubbed off and how much rubbish they'd had collected. Now, I'm pretty sympathetic to the LibDems and if they'd put in a good showing at the hustings, I'd might well have voted for them. It was somewhat surprising, and indeed alarming, to discover they were by far the most reactionary bunch there, and by some considerable distance. They painted a picture of Moseley covered in dumped rubbish, graffiti, and people shooting up in the streets. The city's going through a pretty big devolution exercise at the moment, and in answer to a question about how they would consult the local population went off on an extended rant about how the Forum (the lowest level of the new structure) was completely toothless, a waste of money, and so on. At a hustings organised by that same Forum, it seemed like a pretty odd thing to do. They've also had no trouble working with the Forum in the past. I should declare an interest here as Natalie's on the Forum committee. The same chap who bad mouthed the Forum at the hustings didn't, strangely enough, mention his reservations at a meeting he attended where Nat was the Forum representive. As I walked home from the hustings, I did see some fly-posting (which I'm not overly worried about, mostly reflecting as it does Moseley's "vibrant scene", man) but I didn't see any graffitti or junkies. Perhaps the LibDems had rounded them all up earlier in the evening. They also made a number of other pretty ridiculous statements, rejecting the costing for renovating the local swimming baths and claiming that a police van equiped with CCTV didn't exist.
The Conservative and LibDem approach of banging about Labour failing so vote for them is a fair enough electoral tactic, I suppose. Trouble is I don't look about me and see a city in ruins, quite the opposite actually. I love living in Birmingham, and the longer I live here, the more I love it. The credibility of the case for failure is also damaged by the lack of specific examples. Public transport is often cited in the general case, but planning to build an underground (Cons) and reopening the Camp Hill branch line (LibDem) sound like solutions to problems that don't exist. If I want to travel into the city right now, I can walk 200 yards and catch a bus. I'll probably have to wait under 10 minutes. Where's the problem? (Chum Pete who relies entirely on public transport and his own legs immediately identified it as "night busses". No mention of that anywhere.) At the hustings LibDems raised the issue of "waste", saying they'd identified £8million of money wasted by the current council. Birmingham City Council is the largest unitary authority in the country, with a budget of around £2billion. £8million is 0.4% of that, which I'd say was pretty fucking good.
The governing party, of whatever stripe, needs good and credible opposition. At this very local level, I don't see the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives providing it.
The Labour leaflets, and there have been several, have been by far the best in terms of actually telling you things. Campaigning is always slightly easier for sitting candidates, I know, but there leaflets have been very focussed on policies for the city and for Moseley. They've outlined things to do as well as what they had done, something notably lacking from the Conservatives and LibDems. At the hustings, there was a willingness by the various candidates to admit council mistakes and failings, and to outline future directions. I was impressed actually, and I didn't expect to be. I will be voting for at least two, if not all three, of them.
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# Michael Howard, interviewed on the Today programme, invoked the name of Margaret Thatcher five or six times. Wasn't Howard supposed to be the forward looking future of the Conservatives?
Ben [e] [w] said From the Conservatives' perspective, Thatcher is forward looking. It's all a matter of where you start from ...
[added 9th Jun 2004]
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# Ducks 'quack in regional accents' - ... The cockney quack is like a shout and a laugh, whereas the Cornish ducks sound more like they are giggling ...
Mailed in by The Coffee Grounds Jewish Affairs correspondent.
Stu said I had wondered whether your local ducks had a noticeable "ozzy" quack.
Of course the ducks in Golders Green park shrug their wings in a particular way while quacking [added 7th Jun 2004]
The ducks don't, but all the local chickens go "fook, fook". [added 8th Jun 2004]
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# Amazingly, for an installer builder,
WiX is turning out to be almost entirely pleasant.
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# Windows installers keeping
popping up like
a bad smell at the moment. Am working with
WiX for the first time today. Wrote a few paragraphs about it, then
Firefox, obviously trying to steer me back from the darkside,
abended on me.
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# Oxford may not be a place I want to live, but it's certainly a jolly pleasant place to visit on a sunny day. Particularly when people lob large quantities of work in your direction.
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