Archive for January, 2004

XML II?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004

There is a lot of debate about if XML parsers should try and recover from non-wellformed ness at the moment. The argument generally goes that if you’re parsing XML, that noone is going to parse non-wellformed XML the same way twice so who knows what you would end up with vs you should at least attempt to do something.

Now, My thoughts are that if you made it so that well formed XML had no obvious meaning people would be less inclined to try and correct it. For instance, XML has tag> tags at the end of a block, but if the tag was then it’s ambigious which tag it’s closing unless the document is well formed. As anyone who’s spent time trying to find out which } is missing in a C/C++/Java/etc program will tell you, it’s nearly impossible to do if you’re a human, let alone write a program to do anything sane with it.

The next thing is to make sure that attributes have closing “’s, well, noone really knows what an XML attribute is anyway, so get rid of ‘em. So we have instead:



And well, thats kinda messy, so lets replace < a>b with (a b) and uh, wee! sexp’s!

				


				
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my RFC index

				Wednesday, January 21st, 2004

				

					
Every time I look up an RFC, I want to find out more about it (which are the useful RFC’s that update this one? What other RFC’s are there on this topic?) So I wrote my own RFC index program.  For a given RFC number, it provides links to:

    

  •  the HTML version of an RFC (it’s easier on the eyes) 
    • 

  •  RFC’s published at about the same time 
    • 

  •  RFC’s by the same author 
    • 

  •  all the RFC’s that update this one 
    • 

  •  RFC’s updated by this RFC 
    • 

  •  RFC’s that obsolete this RFC 
    • 

  •  RFC’s that this RFC obsoletes 
    • 

  •  RFC’s that reference this RFC 
    • 

  •  RFC’s that this RFC references 
    • 



  I hope you find this vaguely useful.


				


				
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Big Fractal Tangle: irc street corners

				Sunday, January 18th, 2004

				

					
Big Fractal Tangle: irc street corners The most interesting bots on IRC I think are the infobots, or the infobot alikes. What they do is sit in a channel and look for lines of the form “a is b”, when they see a line like this they save it into a database somewhere. Then, later, you can ask “what is a?” and the bot will reply “a is b”. By leaving it sitting quietly on a channel it can quickly learn a lot of valuable common information that the channel has, and can become a virtual wiki like system itself where anyone can add an “answer” to a question. I’ve been wondering (but never got around to trying), implementing an infobot that import/export’s to RDF. For instance asking “what is Timothy’s email address” the bot could look it up in a FOAF file and return the answer.


				


				
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Bugs and stuff

				Thursday, January 15th, 2004

				

					
Today I fixed two bugs in WordPress, the first one was my incorrect HTML with & in it, and the second one was my incorrect date format with the month number instead of the day month. So, it turns out that I suck and Wordpress is better than I. Now I just need to come up with a nicer template.


				


				
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XML

				Wednesday, January 14th, 2004

				

					
Today’s rant is brought to you by XML. In theory XML is a very smart idea. You can extend it, and the rules are so blindingly trivial you can’t set a foot wrong. Everyone can hack up an XML parser in 10 minutes (but why would you want to? theres parsers falling off tree’s) and everyone knows exactly whats going on.

 Except, Every single XML file I’ve tried to grab off the ‘net isn’t well formed. People forget to escape &’s in attributes, people use namespaces that they’ve not declared, or sometimes just don’t bother with the whole “closing a tag” thing. C’mon, people HOW DIFFICULT IS THIS?! Sheesh. 

				


				
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XChat

				Sunday, January 4th, 2004

				

					
Bletch, Last night I decided I wanted to reorganise the display of /who output and /stats l in xchat to be more readable.  A simple task yes?  Well, no.  Xchat allows for hooking the numerics directly before xchat gets it’s sticky paws on them, however when you do that, Xchat won’t recieve them and then it won’t update it’s nicklist for things like /away status.  Sigh, ok, so how are things displayed?  It uses the event “Server Text”, however “Server Text” doesn’t tell you what kind of server text you are seeing so you can’t hook just /who output.  So I wrote a patch to XChat that made numerics be sent using a “Server Numeric” event, which provides which numeric it is.  Still, it’s not very pretty, but it works.


				


				
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Content is Not King

				Sunday, January 4th, 2004

				

					
Content is Not King Content has never been king, it is not king now, and is unlikely to ever be king. The Internet has done quite well without content, and can continue to flourish without it
 This essay talks about the Internet, and how the believe that content is king is flawed, and in fact you can make a lot more money of social interactions. A case for IRC perhaps?


				


				
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