found_drama

1. Google Web Alerts could be cool…
2. “How to Be a Programmer” — featuring important skills like “How to Debug” … of course, I’ll be shooting this link to some of my team members…
3. MacWarriors build a better browser history with Trailblazer.

(via cnet…) Apple told to halt ‘world’s fastest’ claims for G5

1. To Dell: You’re just jealous because you weren’t ballsy enough to use that as your ad slogan. Oh, and where is your 64-bit non-workstation PC line?
2. To consumers: If you’re not reading benchmarks, you’re not researching. If you’re not researching, you don’t need “the world’s fastest personal computer” anyway. Get yourself a Dimension and call it a night.
3. To Apple: You got away with it for a while. Let’s cut the crap.

All I can say is, Joanne Klein would be down with this plan.

b’gock?

Near article from a year ago that makes me so so glad that I reformatted my Western Digital drive before shipping it off for its RMA…

One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register.

Mo’ XSL ish for your eye-hole. (Been a while since I blogged the geeky core of my soul out on this madness.)

Problem: Generating well-formed xml-based FAQs that are easy to read and (even!) pretty (if there is such a thing) is all well and good. But who wants to read through a whole huge FAQ for the one Q? Why spend all day browsing it when the question you want to ask should be at the very top? So you can single-click and drill down to the details?

Solution: (the theoretical..) Why not then just program the XSL to output an assigned number (or some such) to the questions and do exactly that?

The way this played out in XSL was a bit different from how I would have done it in any other language that I know. Therefore, it took twice as long to arrive at the (actually quite elegant) solution.

Given how I’ve done maybe-not-the-same-but-definitely similar things in JavaScript, Velocity, and PHP– My initial thought was to invoke a for loop or something along those lines. Something that would keep a counter, number each ques and increment the counter at the end of each line. Those numbers would get dumped into a hrefs … #hashed, of course (to keep everyone on the same page). Only problem so far is that XSL doesn’t really have for loop constructs like that. At least, none that I know of.

So my thoughts turn to xsl:variable. Examination begins and continues ad nauseum for some time. Several man hours invested here. Lots of What about this? and How about that? and I wonder if I… Potentially … nay … definitely maddening.

Then out of the freakin’ blue we (‘we’ being ‘I’) stumble across xsl:number and it’s like a bolt of miraculous lightening. We’re still invoking xsl:variable but rather than look for existing content nodes, we look at them and get our counts from there. Suddenly lots of stumbling, sickly select="." statements become:

<xsl:variable name="count">
<xsl:number count="ques" level="any" />
</xsl:variable>

Just remember to drop the {$count} in the right places and all you have to worry about is scope. Hoo-haw!! NOW… If I could just figure out why it’s dropped in as {$count} and in once place and needs to be {$count+1} in the other… Weird.

–
Oh, and I’m going to be an uncle. Wish I could say that I was happy. But I just managed to numb myself from the sickening shock of lies and deception that constituted my brother’s wedding.

Welcome to Rivendell…

Read.

1. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
2. Assorted Resin docs
3. XSLT : Programmer’s Reference by Michael Kay
4. Jepson & Rothman’s Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks (where’s my copy!?)
5. Canon i860 docs (the BJC-250 finally gave up the ghost)

DVD.

1. The Crow
2. The Sopranos Third Season (…where did we leave off…?)
3. The Simpsons Third Season (doesn’t seem to ever leave the player…)
4. Trois Coleurs trilogy
5. Queen Margot

Tune.

1. GU023 Barcelona – James Lavelle
2. Music Has The Right To Children – Boards of Canada
3. More Human Heart – Acumen Nation
4. East Side Militia – Chemlab
5. Northern Exposure II: East Coast Edition – Sasha & Digweed

Ah great… Just what I needed: another comic to get hooked on…

Actually, in just briefly flipping through it tonight, I think I could really get into this one and add it to the ol’ sidebar. It’s got a neat feel to it. Alt history ish that’s part post-Colonial and part What If? Cold War and part Sci-Fi-World-War-III-Through-The-Way-Back-Machine.

Oh, and I think it’s clever the way it’s presented in Flash. Props.

You see, file-sharing can kill:

According to law officers, Mathers was hysterical when police arrived and told them that she killed her boyfriend only after he accused her of illegally downloading music and erased about 2,000 of her MP3s. Mathers complained that it took 3 months to build her music collection.

But hey, it’s a great testimonial on the iPod’s durability: According to Apple’s website, the iPod is partially made of a hard metal plate that’s been praised for it’s resistance to regular wear and tear, like drops and coffee spills.

OK… Nevermind the L Grand Canyon… All I want for Xmas is this: