Advogato blog for Dom2

15 Feb 2001

Thu, 15 Feb 2001 13:46:07 GMT

dirtyrat, why not just use cron to generate HTML fragments every 5 minutes or so, then use an index.shtml for your homepage. Far more effective than waiting for somebody else's shoddy server to respond!

17:00: Fun with htmldoc!

Formatting page 714
...
Formatting Page 791
...

Now, I know why we choose small datasets to test with.

1 Feb 2001

Thu, 1 Feb 2001 13:46:21 GMT

SGML makes my head hurt. I'm trying to do post-processing of SGML documents (well, the ESIS that nsgmls spits out) in perl and it seems there's a really big impedance mismatch. I've often wondered what a version of awk that had SGML (or XML events) would look like. Given that awk is (kind of) event driven anyway, it could work well. But I suspect that it would still come out a little bit difficult.

Stylesheets would probably do the trick better, but I have no idea where or how to start looking at DSSSL (which seems phenomenally complicated from what little I've seen of it). So, there's an even bigger impendance mismatch between me and stylesheets... Best stick to what I know for the moment, no matter how "Brute Force". I can always come back to it later.

Of course, my real problem is the fact that I'm trying to transform SGML from one DTD into XML from another DTD without really knowing enough about the individual DTDs. That'll teach me to try and rush these things.

25 Oct 2000

Wed, 25 Oct 2000 21:34:35 GMT

Time to come out my shell and post a diary entry. Even though diary is a bit of a misnomer for most the articles that pass through here these days... Not that this is necessarily a bad thing!

Zaitcev tries to dis VNC, but he's missing the one point that really makes VNC. It's portability. I can run my Windows systems from my Unix boxes. I can run my Unix boxes from my macs. And so on. And with a java web browser, I don't even need a VNC client installed. This flexibility is what makes VNC so popular for administrators. Whilst sun ray may be a better protocol for users, right now, most users don't have one. But administrators need that flexibility. And we're using remote control a lot more than most users right now.

When I was introduced to my present job, I was shown how to control the remote NT servers with PC Anywhere. When I asked how I could do that from my FreeBSD box, I got no answer. That's why VNC is so important. Whilst the Sun Ray may be cute, if the protocol continues to be proprietary it'll go nowhere. If Sun decide to open it up, it could go far. However, based upon my experience of Sun so far, I wouldn't bother waiting to see that happen... :-(