With the recent debacle over whether or not the ASF license is compatible with the GPL license, Leo Simmons discusses the arrogance of the FSF and concludes with:
So I might as well stick to the MIT license. But the arrogance of the FSF makes me feel very much like giving them the finger and just going with the ASL.
Well I learnt something new today. All this time that I’ve been doing some extremely funky stuff with XSLT (and I do mean funky), I never actually had the idea of the context node quite right. I discovered this because of a bug I ran into with our updating of XPath expressions that use position(). Essentially in the XML editor I’m developing, we pick out the XPath expressions in the XSLT used to lay out the data for editing so that as their input values change we can update the result like it was a spreadsheet. When the input values change we identify which XPath expressions need to be recalculated and rerun them (using Jaxen) by passing in the context node from the document we’ve been editing. The trouble hit when we started using position() because it always evaluated to 0. As it turns out the position() function counts the position of the current node in the current context, not necessarily it’s position in it’s parent node. So where I’d been passing in a single node as the context, I should have been passing in a set of all the child nodes from the parent and pointing to the appropriate node in the list as the “current” one we’re processing. As it is, it’s still not actually implemented correctly because we always use the parent nodes children as the context but the actual context may have been different. For instance given the template:
Weeeeeee! Eclipse is finally usable on my powerbook. M7 hit the streets a few days ago (or that’s when I noticed it anyway) and the performance improvements are quite nice, particularly on OS X. My plans for getting debian installed on my laptop can now take a bit of a back seat as I don’t need a Linux or Windows box to run Eclipse on anymore. This is actually a major relief since my PC has died recently and the state of Java on Linux for PPC is absolutely abysmal. I can’t seem to find a fully complete version of 1.3 let alone 1.4 – in this context fully complete requires a functional JIT. Maybe people should stop winging about Apple taking too long to release new Java updates.
David Starkoff writes:
What I�m getting at is that the primary audience of judgments is not the general public. The general public couldn�t care less. Further, I wonder whether the primary audience�at least at the appellate levels�should be the general public. I think for the most part, they are decisions argued by lawyers intended for lawyers. There is no doubt that the law is becoming more accessible to the general public. The Internet has seen to that, and the Australian judiciaries have embraced it. AustLII is a great resource and media-neutral citations are fantastic. But does it mean that judges should tailor their writing to the general public? I�m less than convinced.
At long last, HttpClient 2.0 has been released. It’s been a lot of hard work from a few almost completely distinct teams of developers (with only small contributions from myself if you’re wondering). I was originally hoping that HttpClient 2.0 would make it out in time to be used in EditLive! for Java 2.0 we actually released EditLive! for Java 3.0 a couple of weeks ago and it’s too late even to make it into the upcoming EditLive! for XML release. On the plus side, the CVS snapshot version we’ve been using for the past year or so has been running perfectly without any customers running into problems. There is to be a toast raised to HttpClient 2.0 at the Nelson in Zurich and at P J O’Briens in Brisbane Australia. Company at the Australian toast is particularly required since I believe I’m the only HttpClient developer from Brisbane.
I haven’t had much time to write lately, but thought I’d point out a few things that caught my eye recently. First up, a little something from Eric S Raymond. Apart from being a particularly poorly worded letter (hint: try being nice to people when you want them to give you millions of dollars worth of source code), it’s full of some really odd comments.
So I need a new laptop. My current, battle-worn, tried and true PowerBook G4 400Mhz has developed a large crack down own side and while it’s still running fine, it can only be a matter of time before that crack gets bigger and eventually the LCD falls off, possibly taking half the ports on the back of the computer with it.
There’s been a lot of discussion about Microsoft’s shiny new patent on putting multiple scripts into one XML file – all of it saying how ridiculous the patent is. This however, gets my vote as best retort. My view: it’s crap, but most patents are. Time to make people go back to having competition I say.
Gregor J. Rothfuss asks:
what will be deployed 100% first, IPv6, the metric system or Unicode? My answer: the metric system, it’s got a massive head start. They all require America to pull it’s head out of the sand and play nice with the rest of the world though so probably none of them will ever happen. Sigh. On the subject of Unicode – what is with defining a universal character encoding that has so many different forms??? UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-BE unmarked, UTF16-LE unmarked, collapsed accents, expanded accents. Gah!
Well, I thought I’d download Firefox and try it out for a while (this entry is being written using it). The first thing I notice is it doesn’t look right. Read on if you don’t mind hearing criticisms of Firefox.
Dave Hyatt finally got around to posting to his weblog about the release of Safari 1.2. Some really good stuff has gone into it and congratulations are in order for all involved. Sadly, my most anticipated feature, LiveConnect, appears to be broken. I’ve seen it work when going from JavaScript to Java, but never managed to get JSObject working to communicate from Java to JavaScript. Dave’s blog is actually the first place that I’ve ever seen that actually mentions going both ways, or at least that what I assume he means by:
At last, a simple to use playwright tool! Not at all documented admittedly and looking very incomplete but it seems to work okay. Plywood is a python script that works with latex to format a simple text file and turn it into a PDF laid out according to the Samuel French style. It’s horribly incomplete but it’s a great idea and it seems to work. It also includes emacs bindings to make it even easier, but I’m using SubEthaEdit for now and I already know vi so learning emacs seems like to much work now. An example script would be something like: title: Example Script author: Adrian Sutton characters: Adrian Sutton (AJ) – A very excited new user of plywood. newact: setting: AJ’s office. AJ – [jumping up from his computer] Woooooooo! I found a playwright tool that’s not ridiculously complex. (AJ jumps up and down in excitement then runs off to find a beer to celebrate.) The actual package contains an example that’s even worse than that….