It not often an advert makes me stop and gape like an idiot, but Domestos' new poster did. In large letters it proclaims

Kill Flu Germs
It's Self-Defence

And then I though how? How is a bleach spray going to project me from the flu? Am I supposed to spritz visitors to my house with Domestos? Perhaps a footbath on the threshold of my place of work? In the event of someone sneezing in my vicinity, should I shove the nozzle up each nostril and inhale a healthly germ-killing squirt? Maybe I should gargle with it?

It's idiotic. No, actually, it's fucking idiotic. It's a stupid, stupid advert.

New DOM extension implemented as a member function on Node. Removes the child from the DOM and deletes it, freeing the memory and nulling out child. After a call to purgeChild, child = 0. This is in CVS now. I've added a couple of tests to SiblingsTest, but it's not been exhaustively tested.

For the rationale see this.

Just built current CVS through with GCC 4.0.2 on Cygwin. It might be imagination, but it seems significantly quicker that 4.0.

VC++ 2003 also builds through, and I've GCC 3.3 on Darwin going at the moment as does GCC 3.3 on Darwin, with the exception of the XPath tests. There are conflicting assert macros I think - probably just need to juggle some paths.

• Farmer's In His Den (Trad)
• Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (Trad)
• Flip Your Wig (Bob Mould/Hüsker Dü)

Here we are in Birmingham. The nation's second city. Nearly one million people live here. The Greater Birmingham area is home to over two million people - an area that includes Wolverhampton and Walsall, significant population centres in their own right. Birmingham City Council is the largest local authority in the country. The city has one of the highest levels of public transport usage in Europe. One third of the jewelry manufactured in the UK is made within one mile of the city centre. The city sits at the heart of the motorway, west coast rail and canal systems. There is so much going on here, all the time. I could crap on with the superlatives for ages.

And what's the front page news on tonights Birmingham Mail? Nursery custard scalding.

A FIVE-month-old child was scalded when hot custard was spilled over her as she was being looked after at a day nursery in Birmingham.
Mya Hunt was strapped in her highchair at the Munchkins Day Nursery in Long Meadow Crescent, Shard End, when the accident happened during lunch.

"Six weeks on and she is making a good physical recovery except for a few blemishes. She has not slept through the night, however, since the incident and I am not sure if that is because of her bandages or because she is traumatised."
...
Munchkins proprietor Suzanne Holmes said: "An unfortunate event happened in nursery on Thursday, September 22, and the child was immediately taken to a hospital by her parents.

Joined Pete's GDFAF posse last night to see New York popular beat-combos Schwervon! and Jeffrey Lewis. They were both jolly good and loud and agitated.

Rather meanly, I ribbed Pete about which bands he'd compared other bands to in his reviews thus far. During the gig I even borrowed Pete's pen to write down the bands I thought he might touch on for this gig's review, but didn't tell let him see. I reckon if I can get one reference for each band, then I win. Got up nice and early to read his review, to find he's declared himself to be suffering writer's block. Arse!

In the one corner you have an XML instance. What you'd like in the other corner is a nice object model of your own devising build and populated from the XML. Easy, right?

Write a SAX ContentHandler, or set of ContentHandlers, to build the objects as you go. That would work.

Build a DOM from the XML and work it over with some XPath queries. The nodes you get back tell what objects to build. That would work, too.

Now consider an XML instance several megabytes long. An instance with lots of optional elements. An instance where the presence or absence of an element, or set of elements, might determine what objects you need to create. The size of the instance tends towards a SAX approach, while its relative complexity tends towards DOM+XPath. In fact, something in between might be more useful - dual streaming and DOM mode.

Of the existing XML processing libraries that I'm aware of, the one that provides the best support for this kind of thing is Elliotte Harold's XOM Java library. This is hardly surprising as Harold is one of the few guys writing XML libraries who really seems to both care and think. His books are good too, I'd recommend both his XML In A Nutshell and Effective XML as indispensible for the jobbing XML slinger.

Dual mode XML processing allows you operate on individual nodes as the DOM is being built. The can be modified, altered or queried in-flight, as it were. XOM uses a node factory class, and implements dual mode by allowing you to substitute an alternative factory. We could do this in Arabica, but my uberuser Terris has an alternative approach using Boost::Function callbacks which looks much more C++ish.

Callbacks are one thing, but there's still the memory issue. XOM builds has its own tree model, that allows nodes to exist seperately from their document. This allows nodes to be trimmed out and discarded. The DOM, which Arabica implements, doesn't. Any node is intimately tied to the document. Even nodes which have been removed (through replaceNode or removeNode) can not be deleted, and must be held in memory until the entire document is discarded. (Basically, without adding a reference to count to every node, there's no way to know if a removed node is still needed or not. The memory overhead of the DOM is large enough as it is ...) To overcome this and allow removed nodes to be *really* removed, the DOM API needs to be extended with something like NodeT::discard() or DocumentT::prune(NodeT node). Something like that, anyway.

So that's where we're going in the next few days, I hope. Watch CVS for code excitement.

Feel a bit better this morning. Went for a swim. The local baths reopened after a stretch of remedial building works, and people arn't exactly breaking down the door to use it again. This lends it a rather relaxed air, as it means you usually get a lane to yourself. If a big-boned Scandinavian gave you a rub down and massage afterwards, it would be just like a private health club^[*].

Dogger and the cats have joined me in attic. Still haven't shaved though.

^* And the baths have appeared in Dalziel and Pascoe as exactly that

Seized by such a lethargy it's an effort even to type this. The whole house is in its grip. Badger and the cats haven't bother to join me in the attic this morning. The post didn't make a noise when it came through the letter box. The light through the windows is weak and watery.

Earlier this year, a swan took up residence at the park. It sculled around in the way swans do, hanging around with the ducks, eating bread and getting its bum bitten. Over time, it got gradually more assertive, hissing at Dogger for instance, and muscling the geese out of the way.

And now it seems to have gone. I've not seen it since Thursday I think. It is pretty dark at 6:30 in the morning, but I'm pretty sure I'd spot a large white bird floating about the place. Hope she's ok.

Here's what I made with some (tiny quantity) of the pumpkin. This recipe is adapted from one in Amanda Grant's The Joy of Vegan Cooking. It's a top book, and no where near as happy clappy as the title might lead you to think.

• a bundle of rice noodles
• a kilo or so of pumpkin or squash, cut into mouthful sized pieces
• a few chilli flakes
• 400g can of coconut milk
• 75g lump of coconut cream
• 500ml of vegetable stock
• a couple of tablespoon of soy sauce
• two teaspoons of sugar, preferably soft brown
• a handful of bean sprouts
• handful of mange tout
• a couple of carrots, cut into thin sticks
• coriander leaf

OK! Let's go!

1. Fire up the oven to 220 centigrade. Drizzle some olive oil over the pumpkin and roast for 40 minutes or so.
2. Make up the rice noodes like it says on the packet.
3. Gently heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Fry the chilli flakes for a minute or so. Be gentle with quantity and time - if it burns your throat while your cooking it, you've got too much :)
4. Add the coconut milk, coconut cream, and the stock. Simmer and stir until the cream is dissolved. Add the soy sauce and sugar. Season now, if you're inclined.
5. Added the bean sprouts, mange tout and carrots. Simmer for another minute.
6. Drain the rice noodes, and add to the soup.
7. Mix in the pumpkin chunks.
8. Throw some chopped coriander leaf over the top, and bing. All done.

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