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I'm working on an XML parser in REALbasic. I need for it to be drop-dead simple so that I can explain it. I've actually got it running, but it lacks a major feature: no support for character data. I'm thinking of leaving it that way. XML consists of markup and character data. The markup is tags and the character data goes between the tags. But tags can have attributes and for that reason, anything you can do in character data you can do as attributes to tags. There is, apparently, quite a debate over which is the better way to represent data in XML. Here's a good summary of the debate that comes down squarely on the attributes side. I agree. Fortunately. It makes my parser so much easier.
11:28:02 PM #
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 Day 15 of TheBeard™:
11:24:37 PM #
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I'm working on an XML parser in REALbasic. I need for it to be drop-dead simple so that I can explain it. I've actually got it running, but it lacks a major feature: no support for character data. I'm thinking of leaving it that way. XML consists of markup and character data. The markup is tags and the character data goes between the tags. But tags can have attributes and for that reason, anything you can do in character data you can do as attributes to tags. There is, apparently, quite a debate over which is the better way to represent data in XML. Here's a good summary of the debate that comes down squarely on the attributes side. I agree. Fortunately. It makes my parser so much easier.
9:51:58 PM #
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I can't wait to find out what Dave is teasing us about. OPML is basically a way to capture an outline in XML. It's really a lot more than that, but that's it in a nutshell. There's even a spec, of course.
9:39:24 PM #
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I find myself with nothing to say. I probably should just shut up then. But not writing at all feels so strange. Perhaps I could say a few words about Bob Knight. I spent my undergraduate years at Indiana University... Wait. I'll get back to that in a minute. First. Have I mentioned that I went to college for 13 years. That's longer than I went to "grade school". What the heck was I doing. Well. Let's see. I spent 6 years as an undergraduate at Indiana University studying Computer Science and East Asian Studies (Japanese, really). I spent one year in Japan and one year as an intern at Naval Avionics in Indianapolis, Indiana. Boy, those were two totally different experiences :) So that accounts for 6 years. Four years is the usual amount of time it takes to get a degree. Plus two extra years for Japan and Naval Avionics. Then I decided to go to graduate school in linguistics. I went to Ohio State University and instead of entering the linguistics department I entered the East Asian Languages and Literatures department. Still studying Japanese. I was going for a Master's degree. EALL didn't offer a Ph.D. Yet. They do now, but I was gone by then. Anyway, while I was at OSU I again went to Japan. For two years this time. I came back and finished my Master's. But I wasn't through yet. I decided to study linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego. I was primarily interested in neural nets. UCSD is into neural net research in a big way. So I spent 5 years at UCSD working toward my Ph.D. in linguistics and cognitive science. And I quit. I was ABD and I'd managed to position myself right where I didn't want to be with respect to my research proposal for my dissertation. So I quit. College is a blast. I loved every minute and sometimes I wish I were back there now. Who knows. Maybe I will go back some day.
9:28:48 PM #
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I'm really getting dissed for my so-called beard in my comments. It's light. I'll grant you that. But in a few years (decades) it should be growing in nicely. I hope. Maybe?
5:35:52 PM #
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New Feature: Titles and Links in Radio-generated RSS. [Scripting News]
Hey. That's my idea. Well, I'm sure Dave already thought of it. He doesn't need me for ideas, of course. But I did suggest it in a comment on Jonathon Delacour's weblog. I'm morally opposed to the idea, as it encourages RSS. But I've got it turned on right now to see how it works. Apparently, Dave isn't happy with it, so he's going to work on it. The problem is you don't have good control over the look of the title in your post.
3:15:07 PM #
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Burningbird asks:
"Well, now. Do you think that Dave is talking about the recent RSS posts from myself, Jonathon Delacour, and Jon Udell when he writes the following under the title of Meta-Blogging:
Aggregation: Is goodness. Think of it as a way of upping the bandwidth of people whose minds are sponges and want to learn as much as possible. In time of crisis think of it as the Web's Emergency Broadcast System."
Yes. I thought that's what he was referring to when I saw it on Scripting News. I think sometimes Dave speaks directly to the weblog community and if you aren't reading weblogs you won't always get what he's talking about.
11:55:57 AM #
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Things are really getting out of hand. My page is now at 26 on the rankings by page-reads top 100. Clearly, I now own the "Sony Barari" search at Google. What gives? Oh. I get it. Every time I put that name in another post, I'm adding fuel to the fire.
11:42:19 AM #
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Looks like REALbasic could really use a plugin that does UDP. On the user's group mailing list there's a discussion about writing internet games with RB. RB's socket doesn't do UDP and TCP isn't fast enough. There are some alternatives, but none that are very attractive. I wonder if I could do it?
10:28:51 AM #
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BoingBoing: Asimov died of AIDS. From a blood transfusion. [Scripting News]
Wow. By the way, I got that link from Scripting News, which got the info from Boing Boing, which got it from Charlie's Diary, which, of course, got it from Asimov's widow's diary.
Asimov was and is one of my favorite authors. He really turned me on to both science fiction and science. He wrote a fabulous book on the human brain that I just loved.
What amazes me about Asimov is the amount he wrote. Apparently, he wrote every waking minute of his life. He claims to have had two typewriters so that he could write two, or more, things at the same time. He supposedly wrote over 400 books. And that doesn't include all of the magazine articles and such that he also wrote. Prolific doesn't come close to describing his writing output.
10:11:02 AM #
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Jonathon Delacour has an excellent summary of an RSS discussion that occurred across weblogs and in his comments yesterday. He has a quote Burningbird that I forgot to mention in my previous post on her piece: hyperlinking is the best technology yet invented for webloggers to create community. Much better than RSS and meaningless statistics.
9:56:08 AM #
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OK. Who the heck is this "Sony Barari" person. I just clicked on my referers link to find many Ranking by Page-Reads top 100. It is, of course, a meaningless statistic. And after a few days things will quiet down and I'm sure I'll fall of the list. But it's kinda weird.
9:37:35 AM #
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OK. I admit it. I played games with the Ranking by Page-Reads. At midnight all of the referers stats for a Radio site are cleared and the Rankings page is cleared as well. So there are, like, three pages on the list. And mine is number two! Woohoo. Well, not quite. I, he says sheepishly, clicked on my own links enough times to get there. Ok. I'm sorry I did it. It's just, well, I'll never be number two on that list. I just wanted to see what it was like. I won't do it again. I promise. And this is right after reading Burningbird's great piece on why statistics like that probably aren't such a great thing. Or maybe I'm proving her point. Yeah. That's it. It's like performance art. I was "making a point".
12:19:05 AM #
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 Day 14 of TheBeard™:
12:08:01 AM #
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© Copyright
2002
Will Leshner.
Last update:
3/11/02; 12:08:01 AM.
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