Off for a week in Cornwall tomorrow. One day we'll take the kids somewhere else, and they'll get all disorientated - ... on holiday ... but not in Cornwall ... blub-ub? ...

Returning to work for those lovely chaps in Cardiff when I get back. Four solid weeks of proper crunchy programming goodness, with the promise of more to come. No web development. No poncing round with application servers or scripting languages. No waiting for the client (or the client's client) to decide what to do next. Just code. Lots of it. Am most looking forward to it.

92-7 at close of play.

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

97-5 at lunch.

ptptptptptptptptptptp!

DCOM Event Log error like this?

DCOM got error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. " and was unable to logon .\IWAM_[machinename] in order to run the server: {3D14228D-FBE1-11D0-995D-00C04FD919C1}

W3SVC Event Log warning like this?

The server failed to load application '/LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT'. The error was 'The server process could not be started because the configured identity is incorrect. Check the username and password.

Tried this PRB: Configured Identity Is Incorrect for IWAM Account, but still got a problem? Did synciwam.vbs fail?

Then try this. Make sure the ASP.NET State Service, COM+ Event System and COM+ System Application services are all enabled and running. Then it might all just work. Did for me.

Document order. You can define it for nodes in a document, obviously, but what about nodes from different documents? Or nodes disconnected from the main document (in a document fragment, perhaps). Well, you can't. XPath makes it pretty easy to deal with multiple documents within the same expression, so, however rare, attempting to sort nodes from different documents has to do something sensible. And now it does. Hurrah.

A few little clean-ups, move it over into the main source tree, and it'll be time to release.

On Tuesday, I took myself down to an XML UK meeting. XML UK is the United Kingdom Forum for Structured Information Standards, if that helps, with the main objective of the group being to share information and experience concerning the use of XML and related standards. The meeting on Tuesday was a little one day conference, with a variety of speakers talking for twenty minutes or so. I went because there were three of my client companies in the room, so I went along to see what was what.

When you go to a programming conference, or a Perl Mongers meeting, or something like that, people tend to give talks aimed at the whole audience. They talk about how a particular pattern of classes solves a particular problem, say, or a threading strategy to help avoid deadlocks, or something like that. Something definite, something specific, something (hopefully) potentially useful to everyone there. The XML UK meeting was not like that. People stood up and talked about what they were "doing with XML". As a common thread goes, it's not a a pretty weak one. If everyone ended their talk by saying "and then we had a nice cup of tea", the link would have been just as strong.

That's not to say there wasn't some interesting stuff. A chap from the UK Hydrographic Office told a nice little war story about how they moved their big book'o'charts away from Quicksilver towards GeographyML. Robert Brook, from the depths of the House of Commons, gave an entertaining sprint through what he deals with as a servant of the people. On the one hand, there's an endless stream of stuff coming in (transcripts of proceedings in the House, early day motions, draft legislation, and so on) which has to be delivered out to The Stationary Office, bits of the goverment and other places in Parliment. The exciting part of this is that he has no control over the how the incoming stuff arrives. He might want it to be nicely markuped up as DocBook, but if whomever wants to give him Word documents he just has to get on with it. It sounded really fun, actually, but probably deeply frustrating at times too.

Against those, there were some rather hand-waving presentations that didn't really say anything. We were told, for instance, how local government will be improved if only we had a schema repository described in ebXML. Of course it will. And assuming the repository ever exists, how will schema evolution and versioning be managed? Oh yes that's right, it wasn't mentioned at all.

Some of the other presentations had potential but just kind of missed the mark. A chap from a typesetting company said he firmly believed using XML gave them a competitive advantage, but completely failed to say why it did, or how this magic XML drove the typesetting software (which, he kept reminding us, had been around for 20 odd years). Someone else gave a big list of the bits of software his CMS was built with, without actually saying what it was that the CMS did.

Still, quite a fun day really. Well, I'd have preferred to have spent the day sitting on the sofa watching the cricket, but that was never an option anyway.

Just about rehydrated after the Nine Inch Nails gig on Friday night. It was blisteringly hot inside the venue even before things kicked off. By the end of the evening, I'm sure I saw two or three people who had fainted from the heat. That, or the excitement of being so close to Trent Reznor.

Happily all that suffering wasn't for nothing. Nine Inch Nails are only notionally a band. In reality, Trent Reznor is the band, closeted in his studio working away, emerging occasionally with a new recording. On stage he was accompanied by an anonymous guitarist, bassist, bloke on keyboards and drummer, arranged in the corners of the stage so as not to distract from front-and-centre Trent. They did what they were paid to though, blasting out song after song, ranging back and forth through the NIN back catalogue. While I suspect that a fair chunk of the audience weren't long out of nappies when Pretty Hate Machine was released, it didn't matter. Every song was delivered with intense aggression, every song was received with applause, cheering, and sweaty, slippery dancing, regardless of how new or how old. There's something fantastically enjoyable about bashing around in the middle of an high energy mosh pit every now and again. It was marvellous.

Earlier, as I left, the Bean asked to come with me. I said no, because while it was undoubtedly going to be rocking, it probably wouldn't be to his taste. He wasn't convinced and went into a bit of a huff. The next morning I gave him the shirt I'd been wearing. I'd taken it off and wrung it out when I left the gig. Now, it was still very damp, cold and quite smelly. He decided, in retrospect, that perhaps it was ok that he hadn't gone too.

Hop in the car. Start ignition. Radio comes on playing opening bars of Killing in the Name of.
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Surprised myself with a little surge of national pride when I heard that London had secured the 2012 Olympics. When I told Nattle, she scowled slightly but was probably rather preoccupied. She cheered considerably later on when we heard that Birmingham's Olympic bonus might be a 50 metre swimming pool.

Rock and, indeed, roll!

Committed some changes which allow NodeSets to be sorted into document order. This, in turn, allows union expressions to be evaluated correctly. So far, the node comparision works for nodes within the same document. I haven't yet implemented comparisions across documents, or for orphaned node and subtrees.
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w00t!

The identity transform - what goes in is what comes out.


<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>