GTA: San Andreas is what's goin' on. You down wit' dat?

Fo' sure.

Chap at a client rings up, asking if I'm interested in a piece of work. While I've worked for the company before, he doesn't know that and has, in fact, been given my name by someone at a third company. I tell him, briefly, about my past history with his company. We discuss some work. We agree that I could do it. He says he'll call back when the spec and sample data is sorted out.

Next day, rather sooner than I'd expected, another chap at the client rings. He's been given my name by the first chap. He talks other bits and bobs of work. Can I start Monday? I say yes, then we have a think about it and he says Tuesday instead. I say yes again. We agree a time to meet.

HR emails. Would the previous contract terms be ok? I reply with my current rate and payment terms, but otherwise yes. She quickly replies saying tough tits on the payment terms. I say nothing.

Sometime later, HR mail again - we checked what we paid you last time, which is less than you want now, which was more than we pay our other contractors. We thought it be that same as before.

Now this strikes me as a bit rude, really. Up to that point, nobody had asked me about how much I cost. The engagement is short, and I'm starting within four working days, at their convenience. I last negotiated terms with them a year ago, and haven't worked for them since the end of October last year. I, frankly, don't give a stuff about their other contractors. That's their business. If they were really worried about the price, they should have said so at the outset.

What's the etiquette here? Is it proper to bring this up now? Or am I get cheesed off for nothing?

• Fri 1 July - Warwickshire Bears vs Worcestershire Royals, Twenty20 Cup match at Edgbaston
• Fri 8 July - Nine Inch Nails, Carling Academy
• Tues 6 Sept - Bob Mould, Mean Fiddler

Want to come?

Made a minor grammar fix, and reworked location steps slightly so expressions like $doc/step1/step2 or $doc[pred] work (assuming $doc is bound to a node-set obviously).

Everytime I find a problem in the grammar, which actually isn't very often at all, I give thanks to the pragmatic programming Gods that I used Spirit rather than rolling my own parser. In this case, I'd transcribed
FilterExpr ::= PrimaryExpr | FilterExpr Predicate
after eliminiating right-recursion as
FilterExpr = PrimaryExpr >> *(Predicate >> PrimaryExpr);
rather than
FilterExpr = PrimaryExpr >> *Predicate;.
Time to fix - about 30 seconds. Time to fix if I'd hand-rolled - don't even want to think about it :)

In the bit of him the vet chopped out last week anyway. Feel a bit miserable.

Chum Tony: Yeh, it's kinda like the dentists. You know it's gonna be a painful few hours, but you feel obliged to go anyway.

My appointment's at half past eight.

I've also sorted out a document order issue, so that string(ns) returns the right thing. Most functions which operate on a node-set want the node that comes first in document order. However, until now the node-set returned by reverse axes where, unsurprisingly, in reverse order so they gave the wrong result. Node-sets now keep track of whether they are forward or reverse, so they do the right thing at the right time. Several other XPath implementations get this wrong, btw. For instance XPath Explorer have a play with.

Here's what I mean

<document>
  <chapter>one</chapter>
  <chapter>two</chapter>
  <chapter>three</chapter>
  <chapter>four</chapter>
  <chapter>five</chapter>
</document>

string(/document/*) = "one"
string(/document/*[last()]) = "five"
string(/document/chapter[5]/preceding-sibling::*[1] = "four"
string(/document/chapter[5]/preceding-sibling::*[last()]) = "one"
string(/document/chapter[5]/preceding-sibling::*) = "one"


One remaining issue here - my implementation of the union operator may not (depending on what you're joining together) return the node-set in any kind of order, in which case this all breaks down.

A couple of weeks back, I did my XSLT testing talk to the local Linux user group. I coincided with Revenge of the Sith opening so the turn out wasn't enormous, but it went pretty well. As well as could be expected with an audience who didn't know anything about XSLT, unit testing, Java or automated build tools anyway.

One thing I did notice was, as the evening's speaker, everyone treated me as a de facto expert on any subject, computing related or otherwise. In the bar afterwards, as soon as I said anything everyone stopped to listen and nod in mute agreement. I'd have put it down to awe at having an actual programmer in the room, but I noticed the same thing at the conference. Speakers got a shiny yellow name badge, while normal conference goers got a redblue one. As soon as a yellow-badge-toting type piped up, the redblue-badge-plebians shut down. It was really quite weird, but quite good fun once you realised.