Stuffed a wireless networking card (Gawd bless them) into the back of my big machine, and lugged it, the monitor, my desk, Nat's desk, her machine, and a small pile of other officey gubbins down to our bedroom. This is my new "attic" while the plasterers, decorators, and carpet fitters go about the plastering, decorating, and carpet fitting business. For the first time in seven or right years, I can see a window from my desk. It is extremely distracting, all the more so because it's snowing very prettily at the moment.

BindOTron is an early experiment in XML databinding, which I'm releasing now for historical interest. BindOTron reads a DTD and generates a C++ or Java class hierarchy mirroring the DTD's structure. Pretty much, anyway. It maps elements to classes and attributes to member variables (properties).

The C++ support is pretty good actually, generating classes, deserialisation stacks of SAX filters and XML output serialisation. The classes it creates are value classes, so includes all the handle-body ref-counting gubbins you need to pass around arbitrarily large object trees cheaply. The Java support is pretty token, generating only the class definitions, and largely exists to prove that once you have an in-memory representation of the DTD creating class hierarchies in whatever language is a case of cranking the handle.

Given that DTDs were never intended to define anything other than document structure, generating class hierarchies from them wasn't ever going to produce sparkling code. It is possible to produce reasonable and useable code though, as BindOTron demonstrates. These days, schema languages like RelaxNG and W3C XML Schema provide a much richer base for code generation, and its use is quite wide spread in many areas. That's particularly true for Java - see JAXB and Zeus for instance. They're quite large and full-featured bits of kit though, and I suspect there's still room for BindOTron style quick'n'dirty/straightforward^* binding.

Anna and Matt have just left. They brought food with them when they arrived. They can come again.

I thought Anna was taller than Matt, but closer inspection revealed that they are, as they claimed, the same height.

No trips in two years, then two in four days. The splendid city of Bristol, that is. Swept down by rather comfy train on Wednesday for a spot of lunch with programming chum Kevlin. I'd spent the previous few days in what Bertie Wooster would recognise as "a funk". Although I probably spent most of our time at Wagamama's and Boston Tea Party talking complete tripe, I feel considerably cheered by it.

Travelled down by less comfortable car yesterday for an ACCU committee meeting. It turned out to be one of our more productive get togethers. We even made a decision. It's an interesting if slightly uncertain time for the ACCU at the moment. The ACCU began as a club, as a hobbiest organisation. Over time, and largely by unintentionally I think, it now has around a thousand members, runs one of the better programming conferences in the UK (if not the world), publishes 12 magazines a year which stand up pretty well against DDJ and CUJ, and describes itself as standing for professionalism in programming. Much of the way we operate though still harks back to those hobbyist roots. The committee is not especially good as communicating what's going on the membership for instance, although we are trying to change. The 12 magazines comprises of 6 issues of two seperate journals, both of which come out on the same bi-monthly schedule. Our website isn't what it might be, although this too is about to change. Things are moving. We need to work out in which direction and how far.

Watching Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. The usually reliable Radio Times rates it as a measly one star. The Guardian Guide, always certain to a call a shit film a "shit film", disagrees: it's got tombs and raiding.

It's not the greatest film ever, but it rocks in almost exactly the way a no-brain global-trotting spy-flick should. Score one for The Guide.

The full ACCU Conference programme has been published. It looks brainbendingly good (with one or two exceptions ...), and it's probably the best, most technical developers' conference in Britain, if not the world.

Get your boss to pay for you to go (it's cheap too), and if they won't then get a different boss.

Idling away watching Tony Robinson ping from academic to academic and from church to church in his quest for the holy grail, or as that cash-in title has it The Real Da Vinci Code. I'm reading The Da Vinci Code at the moment (as predicted by Mark Lawson on Radio 4 - you or someone you know will receive a copy of The Da Vinci Code for Christmas), and it's bollocks frankly.

The book rips along, no doubt about that, but it's dreadful, really, really dreadful. The constant cliffhangers are heavy-handed, there's a reliance on extended flashbacks (each invariably introduced by He thought back again to that night ...), the plot (300 pages in, so far) is really pretty thin (and, to me at least, a bit familiar). Dan Brown makes his living as a professor of English, so he's obviously read a few books. He's unable to translate that knowledge into good writing of his own though. His characters, for example, are pretty flat, defined by adjectives (The reknowned curator Jacques Sauniere - the prologue's opening words) rather than dialogue or action. He states, he doesn't reveal.

The book actually begins with a page headed FACT with a few lines about Da Vinci and about Opus Dei. Throughout, there are little digressions on Da Vinci, the golden mean, the Knights Templar, and so on. No doubt I'll get a little potted history of the Cathar heresy, Carcassonne and Rennes-le-Chateau before too long. That stuff's real it hints, maybe the rest is too. It's a really cheesy device to try and give the story more weight that it really has. Precisely the kind of device beloved of the pulp authors of the 20s and 30s, authors who would no doubt recognise Dan Brown as one of their own. Except we won't be reading Dan Brown in 70 years time, but we will still be reading Tarzan and Conan. No, we will.

Should you really want to read a big fat novel packed to the gunwhales with graily, templary, rosicrusiany, masony, full-on-high-fibre semiotics stuff then run, don't walk, to Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It's bloody marvellous.