#[linkfarm] JSSpeccy: A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript
A language is only complete when you can use it to run old Spectrum games.
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# Made an offering to the goddess Sulis Minerva today. Bang go my athiest credentials.
In a similar vein, Happy Diwali.
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#I just wanted to go home
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At the junction of Hurst Street and Sherlock Street, the traffic lights include a special little crossing just for cyclists. You can see the little bike and arrow painted on the pavement right at the top of the picture. There's a contraflow cycle lane running down Hurst Street, and the crossing lets cyclists across join Sherlock Street and pedal their way out of the city centre.
At least I assume that's what it's for, because that's how I've used it in the past. I've occasionally felt it made me wait a bit, but it's little light turned green and away I want. Last night, however, it really, really didn't want me to cycle home from the pub.
I arrived at the crossing with the button pressed and the WAIT light already lit up, although there was no one else waiting. The traffic lights went through one full cycle, without the cycle light going green. The traffic lights went through another full cycle. Things were starting to get ridiculous, but I carried on waiting. The lights went through another full cycle. I waited through one further full cycle of the lights just to be sure, but the little green bike still refused to light up for me. I waited until there was no traffic and then, like the socialist-vegetarian-atheist-political-enthusiast-and-others potential terrorist I am, ran the red light.
As I said, I've used this crossing before. While I've sometimes felt it made me wait a bit, it's never blatently refused to change for me. Perhaps it's broken? Perhaps there are different timings at different times of the day, to make us post-pub cylists wait? The only other thing I can think of is there was traffic coming north-west up Hurst Street from Bishop Street. That's the road coming diagonally in from the right. It's got one of the magic induction loops, so the lights to let traffic through only goes green when there's actually someone there*. Perhaps that light changing trumps the cycle crossing, so everything resets and we all go round again. If the traffic keeps coming, like the seemingly unending trail of minicabs last night, the cyclists just have to wait and wait and wait. If that's the case, then obviously my indignation is entirely unjustified. Can't hold up the car traffic, can we?
* Unless you're on a bike, in which case the loop doesn't pick you up, and you stare at a red light forever. Graham, one of BCC's cycling officers, tells me it's probably broken and he's asked for it be fixed. Good man. [added 27th Oct 2008]
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# When I didn't hear the delivery chap knocking, my decorator answered the door and signed for the package.
Nothing unusual there except he is profoundly deaf and I am not.
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#[linkfarm] Fire crews hunt escaped hamster - Two crews used a chocolate-covered camera and a vacuum cleaner to try and locate missing Fudgie at six-year-old Zoe Appleby's home in Dunbar.
... I want a chocolate covered camera ...
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#[linkfarm] Is the way you dance written in your DNA? - What does the way you dance say about you? Or more specifically, what does it reveal about the quality of your genes - your 'fitness' as a potential mate?
It's a question that's obsessing cognitive psychologist Dr Peter Lovatt and his team at the University of Hertfordshire. But now he thinks he's come up with the perfect experiment to test the links between genes, physical attraction and dance.
A former professional dancer, Peter Lovatt has put together a series of short videos demonstrating subtly different styles. By varying both the scale and complexity of the moves (and blurring his own features to rule out the influence of factors like hair or eye colour), he believes he's developed a model to which men can compare themselves, and crucially, by which women can rate them.
Bah and, indeed, humbug. My goodwyf, who for the purposes of this little article I'll refer to "historian Dr Natalie Higgins", concluded that "good dancers need not apply". In her study of marriage in the 1930s and 1950s, dancing was one of the most popular leisure activities. However, women who selected their husbands on the basis of their dancing skills generally had a rotton time. Good dancers were peacocks who made bad, or even abusive, husbands. The chaps who hung around the edges of the dancefloor looking embarrassed were, on the other hand, much more likely to make decent, hard-working, caring husbands.
Note to self: Get Natalie's thesis out of Word and into HTML and on the web.
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#[Arabica]FAQ: When will Arabica's XSLT library be finished?
To tell the truth, I have no idea. Development is of Mangle, Arabica's XSLT engine, is ongoing, although progress varies according to the vagarities of how busy I am, how energetic I'm feeling, whether the kids have a swimming gala, and so on and so forth.
Although it's not done yet, it might well be done enough. I'm using the OASIS XSLT test suite to help drive development, and so it also provides a measure of how much has been done, what's working and what isn't. The results are published here, but all the code and test data is included in the download. The executive summary is the core stuff that you use every day works, but some of the bits round the edges (edges defined by my experience, anyway) are missing.
To my knowledge there's nothing that causes Mangle to crash, and anything that I haven't yet implemented generates a warning when the stylesheet is compiled.
Give it a go. It might do what you need.
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#[linkfarm] I wish I were the Moon
Sweet little game. Take a couple of minutes and see if you can find all five endings.
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#[Arabica]FAQ: What are all those failing tests, and why are they ignored?
If you run the tests, the final testsuite exercises the XSLT engine and it will list a number of failures. Quite a large number. XSLT development is ongoing, and I'm using the OASIS XSLT test suite to guide that. Consequently, the tests that fail generally indicate something I haven't done yet, rather than an actual bug. The XSLT tests are, therefore, ignored by make check (should you be lucky enough to be working on a Unixy platform).
Failures in any other tests are, however, indicative of a problem that needs investigating.
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#[Arabica]Arabica October 2008 Release
The "Probably long overdue release" bringing a big chunk of new functionality.
Source tar.bz2
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/arabica/arabica-2008-october.tar.bz2
Source tar.gz
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/arabica/arabica-2008-october.tar.gz
Source zip
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/arabica/arabica-2008-october.zip
Exciting New Stuff
The exciting new stuff is Taggle, a port of John Cowan's rather super TagSoup package.
TagSoup, if you're not familiar with it, is
a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: poor, 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.
Obviously, if you have a SAX parser you can apply all your standard XML techniques - not only SAX filters, but building a DOM,
applying XPaths, or XSLT transformations as well.
Cowan describes what TagSoup does as
TagSoup is designed as a parser, not a whole application; it isn't intended to permanently clean up bad HTML, as HTML Tidy does, only to parse it on the fly. Therefore, it does not convert presentation HTML to CSS or anything similar. It does guarantee well-structured results: tags will wind up properly nested, default attributes will appear appropriately, and so on.
The semantics of TagSoup are as far as practical those of actual HTML browsers. In particular, never, never will it throw any sort of syntax error: the TagSoup motto is "Just Keep On Truckin'". But there's much, much more. For example, if the first tag is LI, it will supply the application with enclosing HTML, BODY, and UL tags. Why UL? Because that's what browsers assume in this situation. For the same reason, overlapping tags are correctly restarted whenever possible: text like:
This is <B>bold, <I>bold italic, </b>italic, </i>normal text
gets correctly rewritten as:
This is <b>bold, <i>bold italic, </i></b><i>italic, </i>normal text.
Looks straightforward, doesn't it? Well, that's a simple example and it's still a tricky and awkward result in practice. Cowan's patience in persuing this and what looks like a rather elegant solution is to be applauded. Porting his code to C++ was quick and painless, and Taggle is a useful addition to Arabica. Thanks, John.
Arabica Taggle chews through HTML, providing the same SAX XMLReader interface as the XML parser, and can be used in exactly the same way. HTML source can be fed through SAX filter stacks, used to build DOM trees, queried with XPath, or transformed using XSLT.
Changes and Bug Fixes
There are, of course, many other fixes and changes. Most are relatively minor, and if you haven't been bitten by them you won't notice. The most significant changes are in Arabica's XSLT engine, Mangle. While still not feature complete and under development, it takes, in this release, a fairly big step forward.
SAX
- Fixed
AttributesImpl.getIndex. Thanks to Isak Johnsson for that, and what on earth was I thinking to me
- Return attribute type as "CDATA" not the empty string
- After all this time, realised I had too many template parameters on
XMLReaderInterface. It only needs the string_type and string_adaptor. Any addition parameters are only of interest the implementing parser class
DOM
- Output DocumentFragment properly
- Output <elem/> for empty elements
- Slipped a
TextCoalescer filter into the DOM builder, so that consecutive bits of text get applied to a single Text or CDATA node, rather than as a series of nodes. (A series of nodes is perfectly legal, it's just slightly unexpected. Even to me, and I work with DOMs a lot :)
XPath
- Some time ago, it was gently suggested to me that
XPathValuePtr and XPathExpressionPtr both exposed implementation details and provided an interface that was inconsistent with the DOM classes, because you accessed the member functions via -> rather than . At the time, I was just pleased to have got the XPath stuff done and wasn't really fussed, so I left it. Since then though, it's niggled and niggled away at the back of my mind and now I've done something about it. XPathValuePtr has become XPathValue and XPathExpressionPtr has become XPathExpression, with the member functions accessed through the . operator. The XPathValuePtr and XPathExpressionPtr name and -> member access are retained for the meantime, so that existing code won't be broken. Existing code using XPathValuePtr will still work, but new stuff should use XPathValue
- Correctly implemented Namespace Nodes. The XPath data model requires that namespace nodes are associated with an element, and sort ahead of attribute nodes in document order. Until now, Arabica's namespace node had no parent, or owner document and so was failing these requirements
- The default namespace is included when constructing namespace nodes
- Amazingly, the XPath
prefix:* didn't compile. I had no test for it, and had overlooked it. Now I do, and it isn't
- Unbound namespace prefixes throw an exception
- Corrected
text() test to match CDATA nodes as well as text nodes
- XPaths are now evaluated as if the DOM had been normalised, even if it hasn't. That is, consecutive text nodes are treated as a single node
XSLT
- Params are not passed on through an
xsl:apply-imports call
- Template names are now QNames
- Template mode is now QName
- In XPath
node() matches any node of any type. In an XSLT match pattern, node() matches everything except attributes and the document root node. Fixed.
- Fixed variable scoping in
xsl:for-each, xsl:if, and xsl:choose
- Escape naughty text when outputting processing instructions and comments (eg ---)
- Use
std::stable_sort instead of std::sort. When xsl:sort specifies a numerical sort, but you've got some string data in there we need to maintain the relative positions of that string data. This is the first time I can recall actually using std::stable_sort. I will mark it down in my big book of programming accomplishments.
- Fixed local-name for namespace nodes
xsl:message can contain another xsl:message - now handled properly- Empty comments output correctly
- Ensure
xsl:choose has at lease one xsl:when
- Make sure any
xsl:template mode attribute is not empty
- Verify
xsl:sort attribute values
xsl:call-template now throws if it can't find a matching template- Duplicate variable and parameter names are rejected
- Disallowed
current() in match patterns
- Verify
xsl:for-each selects a node-set
- Disallow pcdata ahead of an
xsl:param
xsl:stylesheet now allows top-level elements when they are in a foreign namespace - Implemented
position(), last() and positional predicates in match patterns
- Throw error if transform is run with no input
- Verify QNames at transform compile time
- Detect circular variable references
- Reject variables and parameters which have both a
select attribute and text content
- Top level variables and parameters handled according to import precedence
- Fixed internal QName resolution - unprefixed names are not in the default namespace
- Fixed
xsl:element unprefixed names - when no namespace uri is supplied are in the default namespace
- Don't suppress output of element namespace prefixes or attributes which are in the XSL namespace
- ensure
@xmlns|@xsmlns:* selects no nodes
- direct information messages to
std::cerr, not std::cout
Build and installation
- Fix for problem installing headers on FreeBSD, where install doesn't understand -D
- Changes to help out-of-tree builds
- Added build files for Visual Studio 2008
- Added configure tests for
std::mbstate_t and/or mbstate_t. Some platforms
don't have it (VxWorks, for example)
- Visual Studio 2005 and 2003 project files are now munged from the Visual Studio 2008 files. (Don't try this at home, folks)
Other bits and bobs
- Fixed for base URIs with leading
../
- Convert \ to / for relative paths as well as absolute Windows paths.
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#[Arabica]Arabica: Cutting October 2008 release
A couple of months ago a release was, I said, impending. And it really was, but then I found a niggly thing I really want to fix. And went on holiday. And got really busy at work. And all that other stuff that happens when you're not programming.
There really is a release coming now, because I'm cutting it now. The source bundles will probably go are up on Sourceforge this evening now, and tagged in subversion. Release notes should follow later this weekend or early next week. I'll write up the niggly thing too, because it's quite a nice one.
The last release was just over a year ago. That's probably a bit too long.
John Cowan [e] [w] said Is Taggle part of this release? If so, I'll propagate this to the TagSoup community.
[added 18th Oct 2008] Hi John, Taggle is indeed part of this release. [added 20th Oct 2008]
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#[code] New
Arabica release. This release adds an HTML parser, and significant improvements to the XSLT library.
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#[linkfarm] Injury to cyclist leads to delays
Injuries only life-threatening. Won't somebody think of the motorists?
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#[linkfarm] Turing Machine implemented in Conway's Game of Life
Remarkable. All your computing needs in cellular automata.
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#[linkfarm] See the Light - So get ready, here it comes; The Cringely Plan calls for:
Prohibiting the manufacture and sale of incandescent lights.
Kind of a letdown, eh?
Bob Cringely proposes saving the US economy by outlawing lightbulbs. Like all of Cringely's many crazy sounding plans, he's done his sums and his reasoning seems sensible. Go for it, America!
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#[linkfarm] Disney Goes EULA Crazy On Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray - ... 57 PAGE EULA ... 63 Page Privacy Policy ...
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#[linkfarm] Array.org EeePC Ubuntu Repository - This site is home to a repository of unofficial Ubuntu v8.04 (Hardy Heron kernel packages that have been optimized for the Asus EeePC
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#[linkfarm] "antisocial" - a Javascript demo by Gasman in association with ZX Spectrum Orchestra
Jolly good.
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#[linkfarm] The Shab-al-Hiri Roach - The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a dark comedy of manners, lampooning academia and asking players to answer a difficult question - are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization?
No?
Even if it will get you tenure?
Sounds intriguing.
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#[linkfarm] Software Patents
Mike "You've almost certainly benefitted from his software even if you don't know it" Kay's against them. Good man.
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