The short-form week of 14–20 Jun 2010

21 Jun 2010; last modified 13 Mar 2011

The week in review, 140 characters at a time. This week, 50 messages in 45 conversations. (With 6 favorites.)

This document was created automatically from my archive of my Twitter stream. Due to limitations in the Twitter API and occasional glitches in my archiving system, it may not be 100% complete.

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 06:38pm

@ndw [mode grouping element] I proposed it recently, I was surprised by the negative reaction in the WG.—@michaelhkay

@michaelhkay probably the best compromise is <xsl:import with-mode="..."/> #xslt—@innovimax

@michaelhkay Time for me to rejoin the WG :-)—@ndw

@ndw Welcome !!—@innovimax

Monday at 12:07pm

Some days two shell windows aren't enough. I've got five working hard right now.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Monday at 01:28pm

What's the state of the art in HTML templating systems these days? Easy ways for users to generate forms for backend systems, for example.—@ndw

@ndw Generate sucks, generally, IMHO. Seen Formee? http://bit.ly/aD3pwo—@mastermark

@ndw I have used TAL recently impl TAL proc in xquery) with great success, seems to hit that web designer/content management sweet spot—@xquery

Monday at 02:32pm

I want a voodoo doll for my VPN connection and the first thing I'm going to do is set it on fire.—@MattioV

Monday at 03:15pm

Dear Adobe, you implemented your shopping cart in Flash. Really? Really!? That's not helping your case.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Monday at 09:16pm

Dear Spotlight, please crawl back under your resource consuming rock and disappear.—@ndw

@ndw Here is where an SSD might help ;)—@ebruchez

Tuesday at 12:23pm

I wish we had lay scientists to stand on street corners shouting interesting things about how the world is. Better than lay preachers.—@derivadow

Tuesday at 02:52pm

∃ ("important information enclosed" ∨ "or current occupant") ⇒ ¬ (important information enclosed)—@ebruchez

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 09:04pm

A bottle of wine with a glass stopper. You just know somewhere there's a guy with a story about a broken corkscrew. Or bottle. Or both.—@ndw

@ndw Good wines need to breathe and cork stopper is helping...—@AlainCouthures

Wednesday at 03:32am

Odd. USBConnect 3G modem supported natively under 10.5 but not under 10.6. 3rd party drivers were so bad last time, reluctant to try again.—@ndw

Wednesday at 03:39am

I guess I'm going to be offline today since I haven't bought a #mifi or #nexusone yet. Here's hoping there's wifi at the meeting.—@ndw

Wednesday at 08:57am

Arrived NYP, next stop IDPF ePUB meeting.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 01:48pm

“@GlennF: People hate Apple's restrictive iPhone policies so much that they pre-ordered 600,000 units of the new model without touching one”—@zeldman

@zeldman It's funny now to hear the Windows "we sell lots of units, ergo we're right" defense from Apple fans.—@jnack

@jnack Not quite the same. We used to say Macs were better computers; we didn't say MS was making business mistakes.—@mrgan

@nevenmrgan Bingo.—@gruber

@gruber I'm not sure how "genuinely interested" the people are who just go into the "phone store" (Verizion) and ask for a "cool phone."—@siracusa

@gruber Those people are ending up with Android phones these days, starting a pool equivalent to the "disinterested PC buyers" of yore.—@siracusa

@siracusa @gruber I'm not disinterested, I'm voting with my wallet.—@ndw

@ndw You're not who I'm talking about :) I mean non-tech people (i.e., certainly not following me on Twitter!)—@siracusa

Wednesday at 03:21pm

Society used to have DRM on physical books, http://tinyurl.com/2uy8n6e Look what happened when we stopped and the book became ubiquitous.—@briansuda

Wednesday at 07:30pm

@dailyshoot "T" #ds213 http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndw/4707222103/—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 08:07pm

Fried. Hungry. Tired. Disconnected. Wish I'd installed a game on my laptop for this contingency. Recommendations?—@ndw

@ndw should always have nethack handy. Just in case.—@pfhawkins

Wednesday at 08:07pm

Oh, well. At least I have a few levels of Angry Chickens left.—@ndw

Thursday at 08:32am

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl Go ahead, do it.—@timbray

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 09:10am

Why does iframe have @srcdoc instead of just putting the src in the iframe? Just so you can fall back to "I don't understand iframes?"—@ndw

@ndw There is a change proposal to get rid of srcdoc—@shelleypowers

@ndw If srcdoc was included in the contents of the iframe it could close the iframe.—@gcarothers

@gcarothers Sorry, you lost me. Do you mean because the parser might trip over oddball markup and infer an </iframe>?—@ndw

@ndw Yep, that was the reasoning.—@gcarothers

@gcarothers Surely the same problem arises in the attribute value, just with different rules.—@ndw

@ndw Yes, but somehow that kind of server side escaping is OK. I guess some folks think it's simpler? (IMHO: All of sand boxing needs work)—@gcarothers

@gcarothers Totally changing the OM so that attributes contain markup seems too high a cost to me for a solution that isn't complete—@ndw

@ndw Please provide that feedback to the HTML WG, the whole of idea of srcdoc managed to keep me up one night ;)—@gcarothers

@gcarothers I'm loathe to enter the #HTML5 fray. I keep hoping @shelleypowers will save us. But I'll formally object to @srcdoc if req'd—@ndw

@ndw @gcarothers There will be a survey for the WG on srcdoc some time, not sure when. See if a WGmember can record your concerns.—@shelleypowers

@ndw Well, not just "infer", srcdoc is connected to the whole sandboxing stuff, so you can't assume the content of srcdoc is safe. Eww.—@gcarothers

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 11:12am

We're getting a new deck. The new deck did not look this big on paper. I'm just saying.—@ndw

@ndw You can't argue with a big deck!—@TerrisLinenbach

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 11:33am

I will never again persist YAML/JSON. If it's not RDF, which most folks simply can not handle, it must be XML. That sounds like some slogan.—@TerrisLinenbach

@TerrisLinenbach Good slogan!—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 12:04pm

Onething.com is interesting - you get to tag people on Twitter and then other people can vote you up. Here's my page: http://bit.ly/a9lkMM—@tomcoates

@tomcoates Sort of cool, maybe. But why does onething want *update* access to my twitter account?—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 01:10pm

@ndw Where did http://xprocbook.com go?—@mpelikan

@mpelikan Oh, ack! My bad. I was running a nightly build and had to reinstall but must have forgotten that server. Will fix.—@ndw

Thursday at 04:03pm

RT @TheRepoRat Falsehoods programmers believe about names http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Thursday at 05:18pm

OMFG! My VMWare Fusion install of XP has rebooted 5 times during this update cycle!—@DaveO

@DaveO Is that more often than on bare metal? And if so, why?—@ndw

Thursday at 06:36pm

Doing some deep and serious refactoring of the DocBook XSLT 2.0 stylesheets. @JeniT's XSpec is saving my bacon!—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Friday at 08:36am

Programmer/author said to me, "Source integration is usually no big deal. DocBook seems very resistant to integration." Fair assessment?—@adamwitwer

@adamwitwer I don't understand the statement.—@ndw

@ndw e.g., writing on 2 machines, forgetting to commit on one, making changes on another, using SVN to attempt to resolve conflicts.—@adamwitwer

@adamwitwer Ah. Nothing to do with DocBook per se. XML doesn't play nice with line-oriented tools, esp if your editor reflows serialization—@ndw

@adamwitwer I'd use mercurial and http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MergeToolConfiguration to configure oXygen XML diff.—@gcarothers

In a conversation that started on Friday at 08:46am

The trade-off is ugly: two passes over the whole document is slow, one pass is hard. The former too slow, the latter too hard? Ugh.—@ndw

@ndw If only one and half passes were an option...—@vojtechtoman

@ndw go for the 'too slow' option and throw RAM at it—@xquery

In a conversation that started on Friday at 09:48am

this is an amazing milestone in the Game of Life: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0—@jtauber

@jtauber Anyone posted a image of what it looks like? Google says bandwidth limit exceeded on the sources.—@ndw

@ndw the second page has a mirror which I successfull y used. This New Scientist article has a video: http://bit.ly/caLOAh—@jtauber

In a conversation that started on Friday at 09:50am

Ugh. If I'm going to submit a paper to the XML conference, I guess I better do it soon, eh?—@ndw

@ndw I find it very difficult to picture them saying "No, Norm, your submission was too late, so we can't use it."—@bobdc

In a conversation that started on Friday at 11:30am

Submitted for XML 2010: Topic-based authoring in DocBook. A showcase for the new V5.1 topic-based authoring features.—@ndw

@ndw cool. Guess I should set aside my current DITA focus to catch up on the latest in Docbook... My original content model BFF.—@JeanKaplansky

Friday at 11:44am

#W3C #TAG proposal for 3023bis making me irrationally angry. T-minus 4:15:00 until Tequila time, right? http://bit.ly/aYnC3q—@ndw

Friday at 12:18pm

Nice! RT @acroll When it's sports, it's vernacular. When it's science, it's "elitist jargon." Great example of this: http://bit.ly/9LJOCm—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Friday at 01:17pm

@gcarothers @ndw Sorry Gavin, you are a member of the group. I don't think Norm is, and can't send email to HTML WG email if you're not—@shelleypowers

@shelleypowers I'm an AC rep, I'm pretty sure I can fix the membership problem if I want to. The wanting to, that's the hurdle.—@ndw

@ndw I more than understand.—@shelleypowers

Friday at 01:18pm

@gcarothers @ndw The HTML WG admin changed email permissions because they were annoyed at emails from a certain unnamed, ahem, individual—@shelleypowers

Friday at 02:37pm

Hot stuff! Upcoming webcast: 'RDBMS Alternatives: #NoSQL, XML, & other game changers' with @hunterhacker & @nyuhanna http://bit.ly/bCD22C—@ndw

Friday at 04:16pm

Router is 192.168.1.x. Want wifi to be AP not router. Set its IP to 192.168.1.y and turn off DNS on it. Or is there more to it?—@ndw

Friday at 07:02pm

select="{local-name}" may look right at first glance, but it's not. I'm just sayin'—@ndw

Friday at 07:24pm

The DocBook XSLT 2.0 XSpec report is green across the board. That's it. I'm done for the night.—@ndw

Saturday at 09:40am

Cycled to fav breakfast spot, Stables in Hadley. +eggs +bacon -guilt—@ndw

Saturday at 11:45am

Glad the deck guys wanted to work today. Will be even gladder when they go home and I don't have to listen to that damn compressor anymore!—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Saturday at 12:27pm

Would it seem rude if I did a little experimental DocBook stylesheet work at github instead of SF.net?—@ndw

@ndw [using github instead sf.net] does versioning system really matters so much in this case?—@jirkakosek

@ndw do it. Can do svn or hg from github too.—@abdelazer

In a conversation that started on Saturday at 08:09pm

Drat. I can request an OAuth token from the term.ie test server, but not from twitter (fail to val. sig & token). Debugging sugg. welcome.—@ndw

@ndw Good blog about Twitter OAuth http://bit.ly/9qMBEzz. I also hit val.sig error in my XProc lib, likely silly mistake, but debug nightmare—@vojtechtoman

@vojtechtoman I'd carelessly implemented a belt+suspenders approach, sending auth data in a header and in the request. Bad norm, no biscuit.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Sunday at 04:11pm

Television negotiations over this evening; Treme, Leverage, Masterpiece Mystery all on at same time or overlapping. Insufficient no of TVs.—@jillmwo

@jillmwo Treme & MM over Leverage, no contest. And I really wanted to like Leverage, too.—@ndw

@ndw leverage choice of dad in house on fathers day; PBS will show mystery nxt wkend; son and I will watch treme on little tv upstairs—@jillmwo

In a conversation that started on Sunday at 04:14pm

Hmm. Flight track says Deb will be early, Delta says she'll be late. Who to trust?—@ndw

@ndw based on my experience only, FT. Better early in any case?—@bdarcus