Older blog entries for Dacta (starting at number 23)

Have any other Aussies notcied how all our diary's seem to show up close together? I guess there aren't many other people in our timezone...

Speaking of Australian issues - ajv is on the auDA Competition Policy Panel. Well.. we might not have competition in the .com.au market, but at least we have a Panel! Sorry.. not aimed at you, of course, but I guess you know my (and most other Australian's) frustration.

I saw a thing on the 7:30 Report on ABC tonight. They were talking to some American economist, and he gave the Australian goverment an increadible (and well deserved) roasting on their IT policies (If you can call a set of misguided, unenforcable and embarassing stop-gap measures a policy. IMHO their only value is as a paper plane for our much-loved Prime Minister to sit on while he tries to catch up with Wright Brothers.)

Relax....

Got a little way with the XML/XSL problem - I still can't make it work when the entire XML file has a default namespace (is that the terminology?). Oh well - having fun, because I still don't have any real work to do.

Now I know why XML/XSL has a reputation for being difficult. Does anyone know how to use XSLT on an XML file which uses namespaces? It should be easy....

My RSS XSL stylesheet works fine on RSS 0.9x, but chokes on 1.0, because they have added namespaces to it.

There seems to have been a big arguement on the RSS dev list about whether this was/is needed. I don't have an opinion, yet, but I know it does make it a lot more difficult

Thanks to campd's Diary entry, I decided to register corporatepropaganda.com - it's such a cool name. All I need to do is work out what to use it for.

Because of the falling Aussie Dollar, I didn't use the registry I've used before (DiscountDomainRegistry) - I tried gandi.net, which is only 12 euros. Since the euro is falling as quickly as the A$, that's only somthing like A$17

Been playing with XML/XSLT a bit. It's fun, and not nearly as difficult as I though XSL was supposed to be - in fact, it's downright simple.

New job seems pretty good. Learning lots of stuff - Java, J2EE, EJBs, JSP etc, but they are all to busy to give me anything real to do. Oh well... won't last I guess.

I did some XML/XSL today. I wrote a XSL stylesheet to format RSS files into HTML (works with Xalan & MS XSL engine), and then found out that if I use IE5, I can use Javascript to specify what stylesheet I want to use. Wrote a quick page to let you choose to view any RSS page on the web formatted (using MS Clientside formatting) to HTML using that. It's IE only, and depends on the beta MS XML parser, so it's pretty useless. Nice hack, though - I should put it up somewhere.

Did anything come of that "Open Source Software Journal" people were talking about?

Saw someone in Rundle Mall in Adelaide wearing a SALG Installfest T-Shirt today. Cool.

Anyone used Power J?

mrorganic: I like Delphi/Pascal, so I'm biased, too. I do agree that the STL is a great step forward, and I wish they had something like templates in Delphi.

As for "real like C++" OO languages... Oh boy. I can't agree with you there. Why is C++ anymore an OO language than Object Pascal. The only things C++ has that O-P doesn't is multiple inheritence, and templates.

O-P doesn't need templates (okay, they would be nice, but you can hack around them) because, like Java, it has a singly rooted hierarchy. (I was just reading about this earlier last week in "Thinking In Java")

Sure, in Object Pascal you can program in a non-OO way, just as in C++ you can revert to writing in C.

Anyway, it's not so much that I'm a huge Object Pascal fan - more I'm not a C++ fan. I think that writing large systems in C++ is not a great idea, because the language lends itself to bugs that are hard to track down. (okay, perhaps for embedded systems C++ is a reasonable choice, but for large business systems - no way)

Don't let a Smalltalk fan hear you say C++ is a proper OO language, or we'll never hear the end of it

cmacd: Thanks. Once I figured out it was a gnu product, I went to www.gnu.org, then software.html, and there it was... Easy!

Who was complaining about STL vs Borland's VCL the other day? Don't forget that the VCL has been around since 1994 - that's a fair while before the STL exisited.

Discovered that wget or webget is not included in Redhat 6.2. Why on earth not? Also found out that searching for a place to download wget is difficult, because most "How to use wget" documents include the words "wget" and "download"

I like Java.

Played with apache xerces & xalan java xml & xsl things last night. Very, very nice..

Had a bit of trouble getting the IBM 1.3 JDK working - I was looking for "classes.zip" or "classes.jar" to add to my classpath, and I couldn't find it. Turns out they have changed it to "rt.jar".... duh! Someone should have told me..

It's pretty impressive now it's working, though.

Riding lots... getting attacked by lots of birds, in particular magpies.. I'm going to draw eyes on the back of my helmet. I've been hit by one, once - not fun.

Saw the Searia (sp?) Leone track team trying to qualify their 4x100m team for the Olympics today. They were running at some school sportsday for the competition. That's what the olympics should be about. There seems to be quite a few teams in town. I think I saw some people from another African team run training when I was on an early morning ride. Their coach was sitting out the front of a caravan park down at the beach, and they had so many clothes on, it was funny.

Having ISP problems... it's taking 3 seconds to ping telstra.com.au, and I'm losing 50% packets! Found out that telstra is doing unlimited ADSL for $100 a month... that's a little much, but if it were $50 I'd be there, and $75 would have me real, real tempeted.

Start work on Monday... must do some more Java

Joe Haldeman is a god

nymia, there is already a GPLed transaction server out there. It's called (surprisingly) GTS (Gnu Transaction Server), and it implements the distrubted transactiosn services specified by the Open Group.

I don't have a direct link, but I was on the mailing list for a while. Have a look at this page towards the bottom on the page.

How do people like to learn new languages? I tend to try and write a program in them (learn by doing), but I need to pick up two languages (Java, which should be okay, and Powerbuilder, which I'm not that interested in) for my new job.