Inasmuch as my proposal was accepted, I will be presenting about XSL 2.0 features and progress at XML-in-Practice 2009 on 30th September in Arlington, VA, USA.
XSL 2.0 at XML-in-Practice 2009
July 20th, 2009Inasmuch as…
July 20th, 2009Inasmuch as I finally acquired the domain name, this walking shadow as now wandered over to http://inasmuch.as/. Read the rest of this entry »
XSpec
July 20th, 2009I forgot to mention that I’m also a member of the project for Jeni Tennison’s XSpec project at http://xspec.googlecode.com/, which is a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework for XSLT. Mind you, the few changes that I have made would only count as gilding the lily.
Break your own tests
June 11th, 2009Some days you may be the best XSLT exponent on the planet; other days you may make a simple mistake and not realise it.
Particularly when you are writing tests after someone else wrote the stylesheet, if you find yourself on a roll with all your new tests coming up green first time, it can be useful to occasionally break a working test a little so that it’s bound to fail. Read the rest of this entry »
Sizing a graphic to the font size in XSL FO
March 16th, 2009Making a poster about XSLT usage in xmlroff for XML Prague, the fun moment was replacing the uses of “xmlroff” with the xmlroff logo.
xmlroff 0.6.2, libfo-examples 0.6.0
March 12th, 2009xmlroff 0.6.2 and libfo-examples-0.6.0 are now available from
http://xmlroff.org/download/xmlroff-0.6.2.tar.gz and
http://xmlroff.org/download/libfo-examples-0.6.0.tar.gz
libfo-examples 0.6.0 adds xmlroff-gtktree as a work-in-progress
demonstration of using a GTK+ tree widget to view the FO tree with what
will eventually be a side panel showing the current FO’s properties.
xmlroff 0.6.2 really only has some changes in the header files necessary
to support libfo-examples 0.6.0.
The next xmlroff version will be 0.7.0, which will have some support for
static fo:static-content.
Converting QuickBooks to SAGE
February 18th, 2009It seems that accounting packages are better at importing data than they are at exporting data in a generally usable form. Which is unfortunate since I use QuickBooks and my accountant uses SAGE.
To make life easier for my accountant when doing my annual return, I wrote some Perl scripts to convert the little that QuickBooks exports as files plus, via Excel, the data from a non-standard transaction report into what SAGE imports. The account balances on the two packages now all match (though at one point yesterday, account balances in one were -2 times the balances in the other).
I am expecting that the accountant will find few enough things to correct that I won’t have to automate conversion in the other direction.
Juxy
February 16th, 2009Juxy (http://juxy.tigris.org/), by Pavel Sher, is a library for unit testing XSLT stylesheets from Java. After a long time spent threatening to do so, I finally contributed an XML format for Juxy tests.
I’ve been riding my hobby horse for a while about the usefulness, nay necessity, of using more than XSLT when testing XSLT (and I’ll be back in that saddle again at XML Prague). Juxy fits that bill, since it’s in Java, but it always seems to me that writing tests in Java is more than many XSLT practitioners would want to do. So I wrote a stylesheet to generate Java from XML descriptions of the tests. Read the rest of this entry »
Netizen of the world
February 12th, 2009I must be a netizen of the world: I receive emails in Russian that I can’t read, offers of earthmoving equipment in Singapore, discounts for Tim Hortons in Canada, and security warnings for accounts that I never knew I had at nearly every major bank in the English-speaking world.
Maybe it’s this innate netizen-of-the-worldliness that prompts many kind people to offer to share their inheritances with me. Though I do worry about my health, since there must be a reason why I also receive offers for so many different pharmaceuticals.
Obscure Emacs variable of the week
February 6th, 2009`fancy-splash-image’ points to the image to show when Emacs starts up. I can think of only two groups who’d need this: the Emacs maintainers and the XEmacs maintainers who’d set it to their respective logos. So naturally I customized mine:
