Since there were lit candles, there was obviously a birthday going on. As the candles were inside the pumpkin, the birthday in question was clearly the pumpkin's own. If it's someone's birthday, then it is impolite not to wish them a happy birthday. Repeatedly. And often. This all makes perfect sense when you are two.

There is nothing my children have thus far broken that I haven't been able to fix with Araldite. Truly, it is a prince among glues.

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn't change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous

The really, really hard part is working out which of these might actually be true in your particular circumstance.

The Bean and I will be taking the knife to a very large pumpkin tomorrow afternoon. Well, he is a small boy and halloween is coming, and all that. When I say very large I mean once we've hollowed it out, we can fit Hal inside and put the top back on (or rather we could, but we'll probably do something more conventional like put a candle in it).

These pumpkin carving shenanighans will inevitably lead to a surfeit of pumpkin flesh. I'm going to roast some of it, to use in soup or risotto, but I'm sure they'll be a quantity left over. If you'd like some, give me a call and you can come and collect it. There are a million yummy things you can do with it - ravioli (if you're keen), soups (Thai or Italian style), risotto, pie, lots of stews - so why not, eh?

I've no idea how it'll taste. My Mum grew it on her allotment in sunny Cardiff, and everything else we've had from there has been top (if slightly smaller) so it should be fine. It'll be a bit bland at worst, I reckon. Anyway, if I haven't put you off, do call.

import org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser;
import org.xml.sax.XMLReader;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXSource;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMResult;
import java.net.URL;
...

  URL url = new URL(whatever);
  XMLReader reader = new Parser();
  reader.setFeature(Parser.namespacesFeature, false);
  reader.setFeature(Parser.namespacePrefixesFeature, false);

  Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
		
  DOMResult result = new DOMResult();
  transformer.transform(new SAXSource(reader, new InputSource(url.openStream())), 
                        result);
		
  // here we go - an DOM built from abitrary HTML
  return result.getNode();

See also Screenscraping HTML with TagSoup and XPath for an example using Xalan. It's less portable, but almost certainly has lower memory overhead. However, if memory is a problem, portability probably isn't ...

Oracle alert! If you're using the Oracle XSLT Transformer, you may get bitten by a bug in DOMSource. If this is the case, you'll have to transform to a StreamResult wrapped around a StringWriter, hook the String out, and then feed that into a DocumentBuilder. Still, it keeps Larry Ellison in jetplanes.

Foolishly bought Resurrection of Evil on my way home last Friday. Played it a little bit today. It is just as scary as Doom3. Right now, there's something outside the door making a noise and I don't want to go out there. So I'm going to walk the dog instead :)

Chez Jez has been back on the market for two or three weeks now. People aren't exactly breaking down the door to buy the place, although we have had a few viewings. A couple came earlier in the week and had a good nose round. They seemed to like the place, but the message that eventually came back through the estate agent was that the bathroom was too small.

Victorian semis, by definition, don't have large bathrooms. They didn't have them when they were built, so whatever space the bathroom is in now was created by chopping a bedroom in half. If, by some quirk, the house does have a large bathroom, then it means, like our next-door neighbours, you've given up a bedroom. People like bedrooms more than bathrooms, apparently, so most people go for the smaller bathroom option.

If you knew you wanted a big bathroom, why even bother going to look at a house which clearly isn't go to have one? You've have, a priori, rejected the place anyway, so why not save everyone the bother and not go?

Most of the time I spend in the bathroom, I spend alone. A larger bathroom wouldn't enhance my experience, particularly now they've resized The Guardian. Most of the remaining time is spent with the kids; they in the bath, me not. True, a little more square footage wouldn't go amiss now and again, but it's not something I'd make a special effort to secure. Is there some other bathroom related activity that needs lots of space that I just don't know about?

Passed Bom in the street again yesterday. Didn't say hello this time though, as he was on the other side of the Wake Green Road. Practicalities aside, there are, after all, only so many times you can stop someone and say you enjoyed their gig, especially when that gig is some time passed, without appearing to be some kind of nutjob stalker. One time, in fact. Perhaps calling out "Hi, Bom!" would break some sort of kayfabe. Maybe he isn't Bom when he's not on stage?

Can't confess to being overly fussed one way or the other when The Guardian went all new millenium and small. I'm now fully in favour as the new size is much easier to handle while on the throne. Turning pages is child's play in even the most cramped convenience.

Sadly the new format still leaves plenty of room for articles by Zoe Williams. This weeks effort in the magazine about her dog was bloody awful, worse even the her previous piece about her bike or the fawning celebrity oh-I'm-so-in-love-with-them profiles she seems to specialise in. I hestitate to suggest what her next subject might be, for fear of being right. I suspect she has a article on how much she loves her Apple Mac in the works, perhaps followed by one on her love affair with kitchen white goods.

£11,179.42 plus one car

If only ...

... That's Life was still running.

Went to bed rather late yesterday, and so heard Radio4 shut up shop for the evening. I'd forgotton that, rather charmingly, they head off into the night, or hand over to the World Service anyway, with a quick verse of the national anthem.

Our national anthem starts so well. There's a nice introductory drum roll, to let everyone have a bit of cough and a spit, but as soon as the words start it really falls away. It's just too slow. When ordinary untrained people sing slowly, we all tend to drop both volume and tone, which means sooner or later everyone has to jump up an octave or just silently slip off the bottom of their register. If the anthem was a bit perkier we would all stop trying to sound like Bryn Terfel (while actually sounding like a rather ill Lee Marvin) and just get on with job of singing.

The South Africa national anthem always sounds terrific, a fact I attribute largely to its pace. Of secondary importance, it has four verses in four different languages, so most people are singing most of it more or less phonetically. Consequently, people just get on with making a nice noise, without have having to, for example, make the word "our" last two seconds.

New Zealanders, on the other hand, generally seem a pretty cheerful bunch. Stumble on to a group of them singing God Defend New Zealand, though, and you might think you had interrupted the funeral of a not especially well-liked relative. It's no wonder the All Blacks do the haka afterwards, as it's probably the only way they can rouse themselves to play.

Of course, even if our anthem were a little perkier, there's the problem of the words. Now being Queen, or indeed King, isn't a job I would wish on anyone. You don't get to retire, obviously, you have to meet a lot of people you probably rather wouldn't and travel to places you'd rather not go to. It's a small consolation that at important national events people sing a song in your honour, but frankly I think it would be better all round if we let the Queen retire like a normal person. We could bin all the words about what a good egg the Queen is, and instead sing a good rousing song about how top it is being British. If we could leave God out too, that would be marvellous. Dontcha think?

• When everybody else has their lights on, you should too.
• Sidelights are completely useless for anything. If your lights are on (see above) then make sure you use your headlights.
• Unless it actually is foggy, you probably don't need your foglights on.

Item: I have been a Telewest/Blueyonder customer for over 5 years, and recommend them to other people because it just works.

Item: NTL are renowned for their crappy quality of service. Everybody I know who is an NTL customer hates them.

Item: NTL announces Telewest takeover.

Item: My Blueyonder connection starts going up and down like a whore's drawers.

Slides from my ACCU 2005 presentation on XSLT Unit Testing are available at last.

XSLT is a programming language - so treat it like one. Testing it isn't actually very hard, if you get your tools to do the heavy lifting.

XSLT Unit Testing slides available

XSLT is a programming language - so treat it like one. Testing it isn't actually very hard, if you get your tools to do the heavy lifting.

Committed several big patches over the last week or so, the end result of which is that the XPath engine, DOM and SAX are (as far as I can tell) fully parameterised on string type. There are a couple of things left to clear up, but it's essentially done.

Up to now, the XPath engine had been confined to std::strings, so this is good news I think. By way of a test, I've been building and testing using this custom string class
  class silly_string
  {
  public:
    silly_string();
    silly_string(const silly_string& rhs);
    ~silly_string();
  
    bool operator==(const silly_string& rhs) const;
    silly_string& operator=(const silly_string& rhs);
  
  private:
    ...
  }; // class silly_string
Default and copy constructor, equality and assignment operators - I think those are reasonable things to expect from a string class :) Everything else is dealt with by the string adaptor class, which I've also reworked a little. I'll describe that in more detail later.

Passed Bom in the street yesterday evening. I didn't notice his magic drumstick, but he may have had it about his person I suppose. I stopped and said hello, and how much I'd enjoyed his show at the Jug. Show seemed like the right word for what he did - stories, jokes, top-flight one-man-band style multi-instrumental playing. His face passed from initial alarm, through worry to quiet pleasure. Lovely.