#[linkfarm] Alexander Anderson, creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, dies - Anderson told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1991 that he found there was "something majestic" about a moose. "They're macho, but they have a comic aspect with that schnozzola of theirs. There are few creatures begging to be caricatured," he said.
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#[code]New release: The Mango Library
The 2010 October release of the Mango library is available now.
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#[mango]Mango Release. Panic ye not!

Nothing earth shaking. just a small handful of predicates and a sequence. The new predicates are Nand, Nor, Xor, and Xnor which perform the logical operations you expect and OneOf, which evaluates a number of other predicates and returns true if one and only one of those is true. The new sequence is the NullSequence, which returns null after null after null.

• mango-bin.zip (68,267 bytes)
• mango-bin.tar.gz (68,277 bytes)

The binaries are compiled with Java 6. The code builds fine with Java 5 though, so if you're using that just grab the source.

• mango-src.zip (88,097 bytes)
• mango-src.tar.gz (30,930 bytes)

The source bundle includes a javadoc build target, and the current Javadoc is available online, but you can grab the Javadoc seperately too.

• mango-javadoc.zip (104,691 bytes)
• mango-javadoc.tar.gz (42,454 bytes)

The Mango code lives in a Bazaar repository. You can pull the code from :

    bzr branch http://jezuk.dnsalias.net/bzr/mango/trunk

The previous non-generic release, built with Java 1.4, is still available.

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#More of what Harry did on his birthday

Missed part of the first vault when the balcony barrier took my by surprise.

He only managed to start with the circle up the day before, so I was pleased to see him refuse help from his coach.

The orangey cast on these videos when compared with his floor routine is due the not-super-in-artificial-light quality of my camera compared with the really rather spiffy camera toted by Natalie's mum.

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#[code]New release: Arabica XML and HTML Processing Toolkit
The 2010 November release of the Arabica XML and HTML Processing Toolkit is available now.
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#[Arabica]Arabica Release - 2010 November

For no particular reason than people like official releases and there hasn't been one for a very long time, I've cut a new Arabica release. I'm not entirely sure why I've labelled it 2010-November when it's clearly still October. There is no major new feature, just the gentle accumulation of more work on Arabica's XSLT processor along with sundry bug fixes.

Source tar.bz2
http://sourceforge.net/projects/arabica/files/arabica/November-10/arabica-2010-November.tar.bz2/download

Source tar.gz
http://sourceforge.net/projects/arabica/files/arabica/November-10/arabica-2010-November.tar.gz/download

Source zip
http://sourceforge.net/projects/arabica/files/arabica/November-10/arabica-2010-November.zip/download

---

Changes and Bug Fixes

SAX

• Exceptions thrown by MSXML are usefully reported, and no longer corrupt the stack
• updated for most recent Xerces release

DOM

• Corrected set/get/removeNamedItemNS functions
• splitText fixed
• fixed setAttributeNodeNS
• double delete when removing and re-adding an attribute fixed
• operator<< extended for wide streams
• operator<< correctly generates auotmatic namespaces prefixes for attributes

XPath

• Some optimisations in the expression evaluation
• variables may now, optionally, be resolved at compile time

XSLT

• xsl:key and key() implemented
• cdata-section-elements supported
• literal result element (aka embedded stylesheets) implemented
• minor speed optmiations
• xsl:sort/@lang is still not supported, but now issues a warning rather than throwing an exception
• function-available implemented
• element-available stub implementation
• xsl:sort attributes correctly implemented as attribute value templates
• allow and ignore attributes in foreign namespaces
• verify the qualified names used in the stylesheet (eg. as template names) have prefixes which are bound
• take precedence into account when resolving named templates
• disallow variables in xsl:key match and use expressions

Build and installation

• Solution and project files for Visual Studio 7 (2003) and 8 (2005) are no longer provided. A script to generate them from the VS9 files is provided. The results are not guaranteed, but has worked fine when used previously.

Other bits and bobs

• Builds without warnings
• xgrep example application now also outputs non-nodeset results

---

I never did write the release notes for the previous release, back in March 2009. For completeness sake, they are

XSLT

• generate-id implemented
• detect circular imports and includes
• escape tabs, carriage returns and line feeds when outputting attribute values

Other bits and bobs

• Improved URI parsing

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#Harry's Floor Routine

This is what Harry got up to on his birthday - competing in his club's Internal Competition.

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#[linkfarm] Steve Freeman On TDD - How Do We Know When We're Done?
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#[linkfarm] RED LIGHT PROPERTIES - the first novel in the tropical-horror comic series by Dan Goldman about a small real estate firm on Miami Beach that exorcises and lists "previously-haunted homes"
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#[linkfarm] Zine Fest Talk - about the emergence of the British Small Press Comics scene in the early 1980s
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#[elsewhere] Point, Spike! Point those toes.
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#[linkfarm] Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy - "I don't know how magnets work," I say, to put him at his ease.
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#

There is, all around us, a hidden Britain. Every day, hundreds of clubs, societies, gatherings of friends, groups of people who've never met before, are getting together for events, meetings, round tables, and to do, well, things.

Get pregnant, and suddenly you'll discover a network of baby groups, baby massage, parent and baby yoga, splash-babes, bash-babes, women selling washable nappies, people with cots going spare, coffee morning, tea and cake afternoon, shops hiding in plain sight, and more.

Extreme example, you say? Join a sports club, any sports club, and you'll tap into a previously unknown network of playing fields, training sessions, leagues, competitions, club houses, and on and on.

When Pete and I were much younger and more foolish than we are now, we tried to estimate how many people where making their own comics or magazines, extrapolating from the people we knew and the people they knew and so on. We came to realise that there really was no upper limit - right now, your next-door neighbour could be photocopying fifty copies of the science fiction poetry anthology they edit and you would never know.

Occasionally, you might catch little glimpses of this parallel land, a discarded leaflet here, an overheard word there, or, more concretely, items like this filler piece from a local Leicestershire paper :

Thanks to my eagle-eyed chum Mike.

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#[linkfarm] (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
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#[linkfarm] Jscheme (Scheme (in Java (by Peter Norvig)))
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#[linkfarm] Why Johnny Can't Program: A New Medium Requires A New Literacy - Just last year, while researching a book on America's digital illiteracy, I met with the Air Force General then in charge of America's cybercommand. He said he had plenty of new recruits ready and able to operate drones or other virtual fighting machines - but no one capable of programming them, or even interested in learning how. He wasn't even getting recruits who were ready to begin basic programming classes.
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#[linkfarm] The London-Paris cycle route that keeps getting you lost - The Avenue Verte is an idea - perhaps a dream - for a traffic-free cycle path, safe enough for a child, linking London and the French capital.
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