This page is an archive, possibly an out-of-date one. You’ll find newer weblog postings at So… and more about norm on his homepage.

The short-form week of 19–25 Nov 2012

26 Nov 2012

The week in review, 140 characters at a time.

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 Tuesday at 09:53am

Programming is a race between programmers building better idiot-proof programs and the Universe producing better idiots http://t.co/xIy0LMXU—@OlivierCroisier
@OlivierCroisier smart money is on the universe.—@ndw

Monday at 09:29am

There is no video I can recommend more today https://t.co/i8MyCLqO—@shelleypowers

Monday at 10:13am

Starting to encounter apps that require a more recent OS X than 10.6. Shame about that.—@ndw

Monday at 10:32am

“Slow down when road is wet” #absurdtrafficsigns—@ndw

Monday at 11:06am

If you make me change my password then mail my password to me in plain text, you are in need of a clue.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Monday at 12:25pm

Why shopping makes introverts psycho. http://t.co/j1hnhvHK—@trieloff
@trieloff Ha! So it’s not just me!—@ndw

Monday at 12:54pm

If there's one thing we don't need, it's another US politician who talks about "disputes among theologians" over scientific questions.—@kendall

In a conversation that started on Monday at 03:10pm

Any recommendations for an Android tablet?—@ldodds
@ldodds I quite like my Nexus 7.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Monday at 05:09pm

OS X “Mountain Lion” FileValue 2 “Whole Disk Encryption”. What sayest thou?—@ndw
@ndw works for me—@adamretter
@ndw whole disk encryption has worked fine for me so far.—@hadleynet
.@ndw There's a reason it's nicknamed "Vile Fault"...—@nik_clayton
@nik_clayton The alternative is to fork over $114 and upgrade my Symantec PGP WDE license to 10.2. But most reports of FileVault have been +—@ndw
@ndw Can't speak to how secure it is, but I use it and it's always worked without problem.—@kasei
@ndw FileVault 2 whole-disc encryption gets the @siracusa thumbs up, IIRC—@fidothe

Monday at 05:42pm

Reflecting that we cannot escape time. "This thought is as a death, which cannot choose; But weep to have that which it fears to lose."—@johnlsheridan

Monday at 05:43pm

The quote in the last tweet was from Shakespeare, by the way.—@johnlsheridan

In a conversation that started on Monday at 07:16pm

Cardinal Dolan really should burn in hell: http://t.co/L05X5UT6—@kendall
@kendall Sometimes I think it’s a shame there’s no such place to send reprehensible individuals such as himself.—@ndw

Monday at 07:33pm

In the future, the only way to prove you're not a cybernetic organism will be to violate Asimov's first law.—@natesbrain

In a conversation that started on Monday at 08:21pm

I’m not sure why I get spam for apartment rentals in Ulannbaatar, but it is without question the most tempting spam I ever receive.—@ndw
@ndw I thought that was a cream for a rash. Would rather go to Bhutan. Got (yak) milk?—@kstirman
@kstirman I’m up for a road trip to Bhutan, but Mongolia has always had an allure all its own.—@ndw
@ndw my dad was in "outer Mongolia" in the mid 80s with NatGeo. Such cool photos.—@kstirman

Monday at 08:43pm

The power of wetware: only about 1 spam message in 1,000 have to be opened; 999 can be deduced from the subject alone.—@ndw

Tuesday at 05:41am

There can never be a bacon overflow error. There can only be an out of bacon error.—@CthonicSoftware

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 08:45am

Stupid App Store. I totally forgot that’s the only way to get @evernote updates. I guess 3.0.5 hasn’t been the most recent for a while ?:-/—@ndw
@ndw @evernote it is? Why does the app still have a "check for updates" option then?—@ceri
@ceri @evernote Hmph. Maybe I missed that option. I did look for it in 3 before upgrading to 5.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 08:51am

Is there an XQuery DB that can parse & store HTML using proper HTML5 parsing? I see Zorba has something, but it's Tidy, not real parsing.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon we also just have tidy. What/why you trying to do?—@adamretter
@adamretter But I need it properly parsed as HTML. Tidy will change the syntax and parse as XML, so the Infoset will be different.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon I'm a little ignorant of html5 parsing, can you provide a simple html5 example where an xpath result would be wrong after tidy?—@adamretter
@adamretter E.g. namespace declarations shouldn't be namespace declarations. See tweetthread with @ndw—@robinberjon
@robinberjon @ndw I could parse with nuvalidator html5 library and then store in eXists persistent DOM easily enough. Would give you xquery—@adamretter
@adamretter Aha, that's a lead. But as @ndw indicates, would the XQ then accept the likes of fn:id("42")?—@robinberjon
@robinberjon @ndw if not, could just use //@id[. = "42"]—@adamretter
@robinberjon @adamretter Yes, probably. XQuery is reasonably relaxed about ID values, actually. But “/fb:foo” is still going to be a QName.—@ndw
@ndw @robinberjon I rather wondered if the html5 parser would drop those pesky xmlns:fb decls—@adamretter
@ndw That's fine so long as you can fn:QName("", "xmlns:fb") and such — you can always compare with /*[…] instead @adamretter—@robinberjon
@ndw In other words, having to be careful with some queries isn't a problem so long as it doesn't barf on weird constructs. @adamretter—@robinberjon
@robinberjon It’ll barf on some, like xs:QName(“”,”foo:bar”), but you can probably work around most of them. Example of interesting query?—@ndw
@ndw That might trip it or in general?—@robinberjon
@robinberjon In general. What’s an example of a query you’d like to run efficiently on the corpus.—@ndw
@ndw I'm trying to decide if alt text is used as replacement (as claimed in HTML5) or as a meta description (as claimed by WCAG).—@robinberjon
@robinberjon @ndw Good luck, this seems as easy decision as solving NP-complete problem :-)—@jirkakosek
@jirkakosek LOL :) I'm just generating the report — for the NLP parts I'm using a human being. @ndw—@robinberjon
@ndw Here's the relevant snippet from the JS I'm using https://t.co/vPScgPoX—@robinberjon
@ndw A simple example from right now: show all img alt text highlighted in the context of surrounding text (if any).—@robinberjon
@ndw Where surrounding text is any text before or after the img inside a block-level parent.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon XML Calabash uses Henri’s parser; you could go from HTML to XML that way and then use, uh, for example, http://t.co/fArHsI26—@ndw
@ndw i.e. I need to query the real Infoset one gets from HTML parsing; that doesn't always round-trip through XHTML.—@robinberjon
@ndw Would it be able to store to MarkLogic without serialising to XHTML in the middle? Because that won't work, sadly.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon It’ll be serialized as XML in the middle, not particularly XHTML. What are you afraid will get lost, exactly?—@ndw
@ndw E.g. I see a bunch of xmlns:fb in the corpus from people who use Facebook's scripts. That must not be parsed as an NS declaration.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon Uhm, I think you’re SOL. XQuery operates on instances of the XPath Data Model. That HTML is broken wrt namespaces is a shame.—@ndw
@ndw Ah, indeed, I'm not ever going to get local names of xmlns:fb am I. *sigh* Someone should make a tool that properly handles HTML *hint*—@robinberjon
@robinberjon Or HTML could…no, @al3xbrown is right. I’m going to shut up too. Or start cursing.—@ndw
@ndw I'm afraid that ship has sailed a long, long time ago :) I'm just in the trenches trying to marry good data to good tools! @al3xbrown—@robinberjon
@robinberjon @ndw Yeah *sigh* I know - so ... all power to your editor's elbow :-)—@al3xbrown
@al3xbrown Haha, I doubt all the power in the world could update that much legacy content :) @ndw—@robinberjon
@ndw For a subset of queries it would be good though — I just need to mull over whether it's large enough.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon If you point me to the corpus, I’ll see what I can do over the weekend.—@ndw
@ndw I'm operating on http://t.co/XTcsvr55 I reckon I might be able to use ML with just the NS limitation. Pondering that. Thoughts welcome!—@robinberjon
@ndw Oh, btw, it's a real world corpus of the top 10K sites so be warned that not all of it is, erm, necessarily tasteful.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon *snort* I’ll try not to blush.—@ndw
@ndw I *wonder* if there's a business in indexing HTML documents (properly) with powerful querying abilities…—@robinberjon
@robinberjon *shrug* You’d need a query language for it and such. Seems unlikely to me, but my crystal ball is uniformly opaque.—@ndw
@ndw @robinberjon Guys, you still have 10 days to draft necessary changes and submit it for #xmlprague. Then 2 months for implementation :-)—@jirkakosek
@ndw XQuery could work just fine with the same relaxations applied I reckon.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon how much are you prepared to pay for queries over serious indexes of HTML documents? cc @ndw—@chaals
@chaals I don't know, I've always sucked at setting prices. I'd use it on and off but regularly. Yesterday it cost me 5 hours. @ndw—@robinberjon
@ndw So I'm thinking there's no reason there couldn't be a "loose" XDM mode that could handle HTML as such.—@robinberjon
@ndw Thinking about it, I reckon most/all of the XDM checks that make processing HTML impossible aren't needed for optimisation, right?—@robinberjon
@robinberjon Seems likely to me. The only problem will be queries that rely on the broken^H^H^H^H^H^Hnon-XML nature of some HTML documents.—@ndw
@robinberjon @ndw okay thanks Robin - I don't think I can tweet anything constructive wrt this, so I'll shut up now :-)—@al3xbrown

Tuesday at 09:01am

Perform a google maps search on my laptop. Next time I look at my phone, it’s showing me an ETA to there. That’s cool. Creepy too, but cool.—@ndw

Tuesday at 09:02am

Oh, look, the App Store has put up a dialog that won’t go away. App Store, how I loathe you in concept and execution.—@ndw

Tuesday at 09:11am

I’m actually going to have to *reboot* to get rid of this stupid spinning beachball of death dialog, aren’t I? #ffs—@ndw

Tuesday at 09:24am

RT @rem: “However dark the universe, we must supply our own light” — beautiful quote from Stanley Kubrick at #btconf—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 09:39am

.@robinberjon @ndw "[HTML 5 infoset] doesn't always round-tripped through XHTML" <-- what?!—@al3xbrown
@al3xbrown There will be small but real differences with script content and xmlns attributes (which I do see in the corpus). @ndw—@robinberjon

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 12:23pm

@ndw @robinberjon This is late and probably ill informed, but why not preprocess the HTML as XML and XSL all the fb:* to fb-*?—@fidothe
@fidothe That was just one example, there are many things that simply don't map very well to XML at all. @ndw—@robinberjon

Tuesday at 01:39pm

WOW. Who'd have thought a 470 year old institution founded solely to facilitate a King's philandering would be so backward and misogynist?—@MitchBenn

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 03:47pm

Well said RT @arosenbaum: @dscape @MarkLogic CJL! Who cares about the title. Lack of technical leadership has never been MarkLogic's problem—@JoshNarva
@JoshNarva @arosenbaum i disagree — if the technology is so awesome then how come no ones uses it? cause of wrong technology choices 4 devs—@dscape
You’re trolling, why, @dscape?—@ndw
@ndw of course not Norm — opinion, frustration, yes. trolling, no. wish this was different, others have done it different and won. redhat?—@dscape

Tuesday at 05:30pm

Past, Present and Future walked into a bar. It was tense.—@BadJokeCat

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 06:01pm

Christian Taliban in the House! http://t.co/RdvWjrho—@kendall
@kendall I must stop following links like that. The stupid, it burns.—@ndw

Tuesday at 06:28pm

Blah blah Jesus blah blah talking snakes blah teach the controversy blah why can't Johnny do math or get a good job?—@kendall

Tuesday at 06:49pm

Processing iCal data with #XQuery, http://t.co/Z14N3A1l—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Tuesday at 08:51pm

Update: my office smells like fries and discarded sandwich bits—@JoshNarva
@JoshNarva TMI, buddy.—@ndw

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

It's funny when people think nothing can have value unless the is a god. That must be the dumbest thing ever said.—@kendall
@kendall Just about.—@ndw

Wednesday at 12:34am

Ok. Reserva de la Familia is just damned fine. http://t.co/Cj9TcLJ8—@ndw

Wednesday at 03:13am

The official twitter hashtag for Susan Boyle’s new release is #susanalbumparty Her social media team are either very naiive or geniuses.—@pjstead

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 04:00am

If you've tried writing (code, articles) on one of the 7" tablets I'd be interested in hearing your experience.—@robinberjon
@robinberjon It’s significantly better than a 4” phone. With a real keyboard, I think it’d be quite practical for prose; not sure about code—@ndw
@ndw Ah, thanks for the input — you're the first positive feedback so far :)—@robinberjon

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 04:37am

*sigh* KeepNote is nice, but has too many issues and missing features for me; major (for me): no support for numbered lists—@marjoleink
@marjoleink Not sure exactly what you’re looking for but Emacs org-mode is awfully good.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 09:12am

Hmmm. A petition to get the FCC to revoke Murdoch’s broadcast license for Fox News. I don’t know about that.—@ndw
@ndw why not a petition to move it from the 'News' section of the entertainment guides to 'Entertainment'?—@bazzargh
@bazzargh That’s certainly where it belongs. Except for the part about it not being very entertaining.—@ndw

Wednesday at 09:15am

RT @cstross: You are committing a crime right now: http://t.co/fqT4Ag4Y—@ndw

Wednesday at 02:25pm

Ugh. Importing my calendar in 10.8 has introduced a whole raft of appointments from some other random calendar that I can’t delete.—@ndw

Wednesday at 04:38pm

Oh, look. Importing a calendar exported from iCal 10.6 causes Calendar 10.8 to crash. Lovely.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 08:02pm

OMFG! The skeuomorphic calendar and contacts are <maximum-emphasis>awful</maximum-emphasis>!—@ndw
@ndw 10.8 calendar and address book are ridiculous eyesores, but there's hope: all high-ranking skeuomorphocists are no longer with apple.—@dret

Wednesday at 08:03pm

Also: it is apparently impossible to create a local calendar named “Reminders”. #fail—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 08:37pm

No second external monitor for me. DisplayLink isn’t supporting 10.8 yet. :-/—@ndw
@ndw Did you get 10.8 early or am I confused?—@kendall
@kendall You’re confused. 10.8.x is Mountain Lion.—@ndw
@ndw Ah, yes.—@kendall

In a conversation that started on Wednesday at 09:27pm

I live in the south now (oh, shut up). That means Pecan Pie instead of Pumpkin. Heathens. And yet, I claim #winhttp://t.co/xAIYipzm—@ndw
@ndw do you like this "south" place? I've heard rumors...—@abdelazer
@abdelazer On the advice of council I decline to answer that question on the basis that it may violate my fifth amendment rights.—@ndw
@ndw Welcome to the South! Most Southern cooks can prepare "foreign" dishes. Just have to ask. ;-)—@patrickDurusau
@ndw Just s'long as y'all remember thems called "peck-awns" and not "pee-cans" :-)—@docum3nt
@ndw So how do you feel about both at once? https://t.co/AdnM0fBC—@cramerdw
@ndw pecan pie is food of the gods, dude.—@kendall
@kendall My practice one turned out reasonably good, so I believe the gods will feast well tomorrow :-)—@ndw
@ndw The north officially approves of Pecan, too. Oh wait. His grandma was southern... But it's PIE! :) HTG, Norm.—@JeanKaplansky

Thursday at 01:04am

Knocking on wood & getting no reply. http://t.co/W87Q1QX2—@ndw

Thursday at 02:44am

"@ndw: I live in the south now. That means Pecan Pie instead of Pumpkin. Heathens. http://t.co/MWFVGw6y" corrctn: means pumpkin AND pecan.—@aljopainter

Thursday at 02:47am

@ndw Furthermore, people in Texas don't say "I live in the South." They out 'n say it: "I'm from Texas!"—@aljopainter

Thursday at 03:08am

@ndw Old saw: "I never ask a fella where he's from. If he's from Texas, he'll out 'n tell me. If he ain't, well, don't wanna embarass him."—@aljopainter

Thursday at 07:03am

XML Stars, the journal is out! http://t.co/ROxWswkD ▸ Top stories today via @ndw—@dominixml

Friday at 04:24pm

In a conversation that started on Friday at 07:22pm

OMFG! @stephenfry builds a medieval printing press. http://t.co/aOjBa6lo #squee—@ndw
@ndw He's just about the coolest person ever.—@kendall

In a conversation that started on Friday at 08:10pm

$DIETY protect me, I will now attempt to setup syncing between my OS X 10.8 Contacts and Calendar and Google contacts and calendar.—@ndw
@ndw nothin up his sleeve... Presto!—@peteaven

Friday at 09:00pm

RT @n1vux RT @ndw: OMFG! @stephenfry builds a medieval printing press. http://t.co/NaKYHlJo #squee—@Squ_ee

Friday at 09:23pm

First level approximation of the status of syncing my contacts and calendar data with Google: I’m fucked.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Friday at 11:40pm

“Bet you $50 it hasn’t.” http://t.co/Hmy5GNIN—@ndw
RT @ndw “Bet you $50 it hasn’t.” http://t.co/2DQ5QOsW #StrongPriorsFTW—@n1vux

Saturday at 04:15am

@ndw Your recent tweets make you sound like a real grumpy ole man Norm. You're not... are you?—@dpawson

In a conversation that started on Saturday at 12:00pm

To the woman with the "biohazard" symbol tattoo visible in her cleavage: what!?—@ndw
@ndw Women are indeed dangerous?—@bortzmeyer

Saturday at 12:37pm

Black Friday was America saying "Yeah, I know yesterday I said I was grateful for what I have, but today I want a lot more and for less."—@rickygervais

Saturday at 03:05pm

"I don't pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages." ~Robert Bosch #business #leadership—@ManagersDiary

In a conversation that started on Saturday at 08:14pm

Rasterized, circa 1983: http://t.co/sCVFviHo—@ndw
Still got the tie? RT @ndw: Rasterized, circa 1983: http://t.co/uZWlURKA—@docum3nt
@docum3nt No, I’m afraid that tie has long since gone the way of all things. I have other ties though. Thinking of the XMLSS formal dinner?—@ndw
@ndw Do I sense a new avatar, right there?—@sgmlguru
@ndw surprisingly good quality :-)—@adamretter

Saturday at 08:20pm

Neighbor is not home. Playing The Clash unreasonably loud.—@ndw

Saturday at 08:22pm

On the assumption that it’s foolish to leave any stone unturned, wanted: 1 (or 2) br appt (duplex pref) in Austin, TX. Non smoking, no pets.—@ndw

In a conversation that started on Sunday at 08:47am

Dear #Apple, “is not a member of” is not the same as “is a member of some other”. #logic #fail—@ndw
@ndw Not without a hidden variable that binds to a disjointness axiom. :)—@kendall