ink page 22 - Dave's Blog

Vegas and New Year

2008 Jan 2, 8:57

Two and half weeks ago Sarah and I went to Las Vegas where I got to see Jesse, Pat, Chris, and (briefly because he's some kind of big shot too busy for his friends now etc) Grib from college. They're mostly in San Jose and I hadn't seen them for a while so it was a lot of fun to hang out. We all stayed at the MGM which is a nice hotel with some good restaurants. In other Vegas related links, Sarah added Sarah's Las Vegas restaurant reviews to her reviews and Jesse has Jesse's Vegas photos up too.

Sarah and I saw the Blue Man Group (video from a concert) and the Price is Right Live Show. The Blue Man Group was very cool although the music was all rock with a heavy drum focus (not depicted in the videos I linked) which I got a little tired of. But despite that I really enjoyed the show, very funny and I totally recommend it. The Price is Right Live Show is like the regular show on TV except the recording is not televised and its not hosted by Bob Barker or Drew Carey. So folks from the audience are still called up to play the same games and really win prizes. It was advertised as hosted by Todd Newton, B-list game show host, but was instead hosted by JD Roberto who hosted such things as "Reality Remix" and the show "Are You Hot? The Search for America's Sexiest People". The showcase showdown included the 2008 version of my car and thankfully I wasn't picked to compete for that because, well I don't know where they bought the car, but I would have gotten the price very wrong. We sat right next to the stage for that show and had a good time.

For New Years Eve Sarah and I stayed in and watched the glitched Seattle Space Needle fireworks show from a safe distance. On New Years we went to a pot-luck at Todd's house and had a fun time. Todd's place is on the top of a hill and has a lovely view of Washington's snow-capped mountains.

newyear vegas lasvegas personal bluemangroup

Zune Software Update

2007 Nov 19, 3:47I really appreciate that the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.

The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what Last.FM has, via a Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it separates the Zune Card view, written in flash from the User Card data which is in XML. I hope they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.microsoft technical music zune social

Brief Miscellany

2007 Oct 29, 7:07Two brief updates to previous posts:

1. I noted that I had a new entry on the IE blog. Some comments on the IE blog have recently been rude in their request for information on future versions of IE. For example see the first two comments responding to my post. Feeling bad about that I looked at my posts entry on delicious and saw the following:

   "This is the first blog from the IE team that I have found rigorous and informative. I skipped to the bottom to find it was written by one of the TA's from my first class at Cal Poly."

   That made me feel a bit better and I was able to catch up with someone from college. Thanks Kris!
   
   
2. I previously had my GPS set with an Australian accent. When it encountered 'WA', as in the abbreviation for Washington in freeway exits, it pronounced it 'Western Australia'. Now I've got it with a British accent and WA is just 'W.A.' but when I tell it to drive to 'MS', the name of my saved location for work, it pronounces it 'Manuscript'.

microsoft blog gps personal nontechnical

FoaF on my Homepage

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

XSL Identity Transfom

2007 Oct 12, 4:08As noted in the XSL Transformations spec you can create the identity transform using the xsl:copy element. With the MSXML implementation of xsl:copy the example the spec gives produces slightly ugly elements. For instance given it produces . In order to ensure empty elements turn out pretty I've modified the example as follows:

This got me thinking about inverting XSLTs. Clearly in general an XSLT isn't invertible since an XSLT can completely ignore the input XML and produce something else entirely but then the above is an example of an XSLT that is invertible. So there is a subset of XSLTs that are invertible, how might you produce the inverse of an XSLT, and would this ever be useful?xml msxml inverse xlst xsl