Translation: I came, I saw, I posted about it on a collaborative site.
Cf. Wiki, Vidi, Veni (Place or event reviewed on a collaborative site, I saw, I came)
Why use more that XSLT for testing XSLT?
Why should you prefer an XSLT unit testing framework that uses more that just XSLT? Two reasons: xsl:message and multiple output documents. Continue reading “Why use more that XSLT for testing XSLT?”
Who needs Irish?
I first saw this book when someone was reading it on the train a couple of years ago. The title, Who needs Irish?, was intriguing, so I borrowed the book when I saw a copy in the Skerries Library. The publisher describes the book as “a collection of essays in English for all those interested in the Irish-language today.” However, maybe the title should have been “Why you need Irish” since all of the essays are in favour of Irish. Continue reading “Who needs Irish?”
Dictating viral marketing
Nuance, makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking, are running a “Do you speak Dragon?” competition.
They did a similar contest last year to collect favourable accounts of using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It must have made the Nuance marketing people feel all warm and soft inside to read the accounts, but you still had to already be at the Nuance web site before you could see what people had said in the hope of winning a prize. I did enter last year: it was one sentence, it was genuine, I didn’t gush, and I got the dragon fingerpuppet that every entrant received and that was all that I was after.
Actually, having just read some of the entries for this year, some of the accounts would make just about anybody feel warm and soft inside. Not the sort of accounts of aspiring novelists who have completed even more novels that will never be published in less time than previously, but the accounts from people with dyslexia, MS, or deafness for whom the dictation software really is making a difference.
Someone in Nuance marketing presumably has read about viral marketing. The difference this year is the extra category, and biggest prizes, for accounts posted on personal blogs, as reviews on sites such as Amazon, on Facebook, etc., or on YouTube. So the nice things that people are saying in the hope of winning a prize are now (or so the Nuance marketing team must be hoping) being spread around the web without any indications that at least some of them were put there because of a competition. Perhaps it’s a shade better than Nuance paying influential bloggers or a viral marketing company to spread the warm and soft feelings about the software (and it’s probably a lot cheaper), but I really would prefer if the positive reviews that I read on the web are put there because the software (or whatever) is genuinely good, not because of the dangling carrot of winning a video game.
This is a blog entry about Dragon Naturally Speaking. If I entered, do you think I could win?
Entmoot of markup
Balisage is the Entmoot of markup. The 2008 schedule is available at http://www.balisage.net/At-A-Glance.html.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (2nd Ed.)
For the second time in four months, I went to Boston and come away with a 900-page book. The second visit was a W3C XSL FO subgroup meeting, and the second book was Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment (2nd Ed.) (ISBN 0-201-43307-9).
The book is exceptional, and it has already been useful on one of my client projects. The only possible downside is that delving into this 900-page book further delays my completion of the other 900-page book.
When Ant is subsidiary to <oXygen/>
The <oXygen/> documentation has an “Testing XSLT” tutorial at XTech 2008. Continue reading “When Ant is subsidiary to <oXygen/>”
“Could not find a valid processor version implementation” with Ant junitreport task
Running some JUnit tests with Ant 1.6.5 gave this error when the <junitreport> task ran:
build.xml:160: The following error occurred while executing this line: build.xml:367: Could not find a valid processor version implementation from net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl
I know of two possible solutions:
- Upgrade to using Ant 1.7.0, or
- Set ANT_OPTS thus:
declare -x \\ ANT_OPTS=-Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerFactoryImpl
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (ISBN 0-262-22069-5) is a big book at 900+ pages, and it covers a lot of ground. I expect it will take about two years to get through it, depending on how many of its exercises I do and how many other books I read at the same time.
It is natural to compare this book to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) (ISBN 0-262-51087-1). That is the book that I still wish I’d first read in 1981 rather than in 2001. This book is not giving the same aha! moments (maybe just because I have read SICP). This book may in the end be of more practical use than the mind-expansion induced by SICP, if only because this book covers constraint programming, which I will find useful for xmlroff.
Now, the programming concepts book that I really want would be the successor to Lisp in Small Pieces (ISBN 0-521-56247-3), but AFAICT, it hasn’t been finished.
Testing XSLT at XTech 2008
I have been selected to present my “Testing XSLT” tutorial at XTech 2008 in Dublin in May.