2007 Oct 15, 1:13My friends Daniil and Val have a new baby girl. |Katherine Rose Magdalin
katherine-rose-magdalin blog frioldend baby 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage 2007 Oct 9, 4:41Notes on using XSLT on FOAF XML files. Apparently its not super simple due to the various equivalent ways of representing the same RDF in XML.
xml foaf xslt xsl reference rdf semanticweb 2007 Oct 7, 4:12In a
previous post I mentioned an xsltproc like js file I made. As noted in that post, on Windows you can write console script files in
JavaScript, name them foo.js, and execute them from the command prompt. I later found that
MSDN has an XSLT javascript sample
which looks similar to mine, but I like mine better for the XSLT parameter support and having a non-ridiculous way of interpreting filenames. The code for my xsltproc.js follows. The script is very
simple and demonstrates the ease with which you can manipulate these system objects and all it takes is opening up notepad.
var createNewXMLObj = function() {
var result = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument");
result.validateOnParse = false;
result.async = false;
return result;
}
var args = WScript.arguments;
var ofs = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var xslParams = [];
var xmlStyle = null;
var xmlInput = null;
var inputFile = null;
var outputFile = null;
var error = false;
for (var idx = 0; idx < args.length && !error; ++idx)
if (args.item(idx) == "-o") {
if (idx + 1 < args.length) {
outputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx + 1));
++idx;
}
else
error = true;
}
else if (args.item(idx) == "--param" || args.item(idx) == "-param") {
if (idx + 2 < args.length) {
xslParams[args.item(idx + 1)] = args.item(idx + 2);
idx += 2;
}
else
error = true;
}
else if (xmlStyle == null) {
xmlStyle = createNewXMLObj();
xmlStyle.load(ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx)));
}
else if (xmlInput == null) {
inputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx));
xmlInput = createNewXMLObj();
xmlInput.load(inputFile);
}
if (xmlStyle == null || xmlInput == null || error) {
WScript.Echo('Usage:\n\t"xsltproc" xsl-stylesheet input-file\n\t\t["-o" output-file] *["--param" name value]');
}
else {
var xslt = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XSLTemplate.3.0");
xslt.stylesheet = xmlStyle;
var xslProc = xslt.createProcessor();
xslProc.input = xmlInput;
for (var keyVar in xslParams)
xslProc.addParameter(keyVar, xslParams[keyVar]);
xslProc.transform();
if (outputFile == null)
WScript.Echo(xslProc.output);
else {
var xmlOutput = createNewXMLObj();
xmlOutput.loadXML(xslProc.output);
xmlOutput.save(outputFile);
}
}
js xml jscript windows xslt technical xsltproc wscript xsl javascript 2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links
aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:
"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)
Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values.
Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that
those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.
It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is
of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one
2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00
On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more
recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them
chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out
the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be
sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.
date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss 2007 Sep 1, 4:32
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video 2007 Aug 23, 6:17From the HTML standard, what to do if you find a URI with a non-US-ASCII character.
uri standard reference unicode utf8 encoding ascii iri 2007 Aug 13, 3:35
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I've been told that family members after reading my webpage which contains some technical related material would turn to my cousins webpage. So, in an effort to not drive away
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video 2007 Aug 9, 5:41To satisfy my hands which have already learned to type *nix commands I like to install
Win32 versions of common GNU utilities. Unfortunately, the
which command is a rather literal port and requires you to enter the entire name of the command for which you're looking. That is '
which which' won't find itself but
'
which which.exe' will. This makes this almost useless for me so I thought to write my own as a batch file. I had learned about a few goodies available in cmd.exe that I thought would
make this an easy task. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in ( `"echo %PATH:;=& echo %"` ) do (
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%b in ( `"echo %PATHEXT:;=& echo %"` ) do (
if exist "%%a"\%1%%b (
for %%c in ( "%%a"\%1%%b ) do (
echo %%~fc
)
)
)
)
The environment variables
PATH and
PATHEXT hold the list of paths to search through to find commands, and the extensions of files that should be run as
commands respectively. The '
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (...) do (...)' runs the '
do' portion with
%%a sequentially taking on the value of every line in
the '
in' portion. That's nice, but
PATH and
PATHEXT don't have their elements on different lines and I don't know of a way to escape a newline character to
appear in a batch file. In order to get the
PATH and
PATHEXT's elements onto different lines I used the
%ENV:a=b% syntax which replaces occurrences of a with b
in the value of ENV. I replaced the '
;' delimiter with the text '
& echo ' which means
%PATHEXT:;=& echo% evaluates to something like "
echo
.COM& echo .EXE& echo .BAT& ...". I have to put the whole expression in double quotes in order to escape the '&' for appearing in the batch file. The
usebackq and
the backwards quotes means that the backquoted string should be replaced with the output of the execution of its content. So in that fashion I'm able to get each element of the env. variable onto new
lines. The rest is pretty straight forward.
Also, it supports wildcards:
C:\Users\davris>which.cmd *hi*
C:\Windows\System32\GRAPHICS.COM
C:\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe
D:\bin\which.exe
D:\bin\which.cmd
which cmd technical batch for 2007 Aug 6, 3:43Miladin told me about the Visual Studio compiler's promising option
Wp64 that finds 64bit portability issues when compiling
in 32bit. If, for instance, you cast from a
(long*) to a
(long) you get a W4 warning. However, the #defines are still set for 32bit builds. This means that other parts of
the code can make assumptions based on the #defines that are valid on 32bit but generate 64bit errors or warnings.
For instance, in winuser.h the public published Windows header file there's the following:
...
#ifdef _WIN64
...
WINUSERAPI
LONG_PTR
WINAPI
SetWindowLongPtrA(
__in HWND hWnd,
__in int nIndex,
__in LONG_PTR dwNewLong);
...
#else /* _WIN64 */
...
#define SetWindowLongPtrA SetWindowLongA
...
#endif /* _WIN64 */
...
In 64bit everything's normal but in 32bit SetWindowLongPtrA is #defined to SetWindowLongA which takes a LONG rather than a LONG_PTR. So take the following code snippet:
...
LONG_PTR inputValue = 0;
LONG_PTR error = SetWindowLongPtrA(hWnd, nIndex, inputValue);
...
This looks fine but generates warnings with the Wp64 flag.
In 64 bit, p is cast to (LONG_PTR) and that's great because we're actually calling SetWindowLongPtrA which takes a LONG_PTR. In 32 bit, p is cast to (LONG_PTR) which is then implicitly cast to (LONG)
because we're actually calling SetWindowLongA. LONG and LONG_PTR are the same size in 32bit which is fine but if you turn on the Wp64 flag there's a W4 warning because of the implicit cast from a
larger size to a smaller size if you were to compile for 64bit. So even though doing a 32bit or 64bit compile would have worked just fine, if you turn on the Wp64 flag for 32bit you'd get an error
here.
It looks like I'm the most recent in a
list of people to notice this issue. Well I
investigated this so... I'm blogging about it too!
wp64 technical 64bit compiler c++ visual-studio setwindowlongptra 2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog
hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his
Second
Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this
blog post I became aware of the
llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests.
I decided that I too could do something cool with this.
Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner
modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator
hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to
Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.
Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults
to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through
experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I
found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to
interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my
PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non
US-ASCII character input worked.
In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation.
Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.
personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest 2007 Jun 15, 3:44Info on the format of the MIME type that contains data from an HTML form submission of enctype multipart/form-data.
form html mime multipart encoding rfc reference internet ietf 2007 May 17, 5:16Previously I created some
resource tools and then I used them to
overwrite msxml3's
XML source view. In this update I've added support for the XPointer Framework.
This time around I've started to add support for the
XPointer Framework to my
XML source view and
I've added
installation instructions. The framework consists of a series of pointer segments each of which has a scheme name followed
by data in parenthesis. For example 'scheme1(data1)scheme2(data2)scheme3(data3)'. A pointer segment resolves to a portion of the XML document based on the data and the scheme name. The whole pointer
resolves to the first segment that successfully resolves. That is, from the example, if scheme1 resolves to nothing and scheme2 resolves to something then that's used and scheme3 is ignored. In
addition to the framework I've added support for the
xmlns scheme which binds namespace prefixes to a namespace URI and the
element scheme which is a simple way to resolve to particular elements in an XML. I also have limited support for the
xpointer scheme the content of which is resolved as an
XPath with some extra functions (which I don't support --
hence the limited). I've also thrown in schemes for the two
SelectionLanguage values supported by msxml3.
Next time I might try to support the xpointer functions that aren't in xpath using
msxml script. But I think I'm losing steam on
this project... we'll see.
resource technical xml xpointer res xpath xslt 2007 May 15, 8:38
Last Saturday Sarah and I went to the
Sculpture Garden in Seattle. Its laid out with
exhibits all outside running down to the water.
Sarah and I followed the trail of sculptures down to the shore and took some more photos on the sand and rocks on the mini beach. There's also a green house
but it was closed the day we were there. The glass of the green house is tinted green and the long walls of the house slope down in the back giving a forced perspective to the viewer on one
end.
The sculptures aren't roped off rather they mingle with the normal urban artifacts. There are little signs around that politely ask viewers not to touch the
art for fear of damage that reminded me of the show Arrested Development.
sculpture washington personal art seattle nontechnical 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack 2007 Apr 12, 2:04A programming language expressed and evaluated with prime numbers.
math prime programming language algorithm turing 2007 Mar 13, 8:16Over the weekend I went with Jon and Sarah to see
Zach Galifianakis perform at
The Moore who was awesome of
course. I hadn't been to The Moore before but it was very cool. The space is very vertical with two levels of balconies making it seem small in the other dimensions. We were on the middle level so
when Zach climbed off the stage to talk to the audience we couldn't see him.
Before the show we ate at
The Steelhead Diner. I enjoyed my chicken sandwhich but the place seemed a little full of itself with salt and pepper that had
been infused with this and that. At any rate it had a nice atmosphere and good food which I suppose is the point.
The opening act for Zach was another comedian whose name I don't recall. He was pretty funny but seemed to do just a tad too much pandering to the Seattle audience. "The administration should do
something different than what they're doing currently!" *Audience Cheers* is sort of equivalent to "Its great to be here in... Seattle!" *Audience Cheers*.
personal seattle nontechnical 2007 Mar 6, 12:38Online cookbook of medieval recipes.
food history reference recipes medieval cooking neat-fp 2007 Jan 30, 2:41I was unaware of it but there's a standard for CSV files and it defines how to encode quotes, commas, and newlines inside of records.
csv specification rfc standards ietf mime comma-separated-value excel encoding
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