The Blog of Lucien Stals

It’s good to see Microsoft being confidant about the future release of Vista.

We already have a term, “vapor ware”, to describe software that never makes it to market. Perhaps we should just call such programs “vista ware” from now on.

In light of some of the chatter on Marks blog involving Ubuntu, I thought this article was timely.

I love the idea that Ubuntu could go main stream

I’m also still loving TextMate. I just realised that the “wrap text in link” tag also manages to copy any URL currently on the clipboard as the wrapped link. Very neat

I just love this article in The Australian.

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I want to use Rail to prototype the project I’m working on. Why? Because everything I’ve read about it says it’s perfect for the gratuitous use of TLA’s and buzzwords.

For example:

Being Agile means I can use RAD.

But before I can get started, I need to install Rails. I have found several resources which describe the proccess (notably Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger and How to install Ruby and Gems and Rails on Linux for non-root & non-expert users:)

The issue I have is that the server I’m using is running CentOS 3 (this is outside of my control), and I need to install everything as the local user, not at a system level.

This post is a walk through of how I do the install…

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Still experimenting with posting from Textmate.

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OMG!

I just found the Screencast of the new Bundle for TextMate, the blogging bundle!

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The Following from a transcript of a recent Ockham’s Razor broadcast on Radio National:

… the outcome of an extensive study which shows that fully a third of us are strongly visual-spatial learners, or not auditory. Only a quarter of us do learn best by listening. Of the remainder, more than half are somewhat visual-spatial in their processing. What this adds up to is that the prevailing teaching methods, still predominantly chalk and talk, do not suit two-thirds of the class.

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I just found the following line on a web site.

XML Schema is a rather complex schema language, partly because of its inherent complexity…

It made my day.

Hmm, I haven’t posted in 7 days, and I only fell to 5th place. Things must be slow around here

I’m working on a Java program that reads in a text file and spits out XML. It’s taken me a while to get it to the point where the complete XML file is being generated and I knew there were plenty of places it could go wrong so I ran the resulting XML through a parser to test if it was well formed (I don’t have a DTD to test validity against).

Running the test is easy. I have an Ant script which is doing al the building etc for me, so I just added an xmlvalidate task…

<target name=“formed” description=“tests the resulting xml output for well-formedness”>
  <xmlvalidate file=“out.xml” lenient=“yes”>
    <attribute name=“http://apache.org/xml/features/validation/schema”  value=“false”/>
   </xmlvalidate>
</target>

The lenient=”yes” option skips validation against a DTD and just test that the doc is well formed.

What I didn’t expect is that the parser couldn’t even read the file.

In the end it look like the problem is some quirk of how Java constructs PrintWriter objects by default. I found some references online to a Byte Order Mask (BOM) which some programs and OS’s (notably Windows) use, but which Java ignores. This adds a couple of bits to the start of the file indicating the Byte Order. This can cause Java to mis-interpret the first few bits of the file and cause errors reading the rest.

The way to solve it, in my case, was to explicitly construct a new OutputStreamWriter and set it’s encoding…

FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(“filename.xml”);
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, “UFT-8″);
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(osw);

It took me half a day to work this out. Less than a minute to fix. Now I can test my output

In an earlier post or two, I talked about the problems I was having with a new Linksys WAG54g wireless modem/router.

Well, that saga appears to have final come to a happy ending. After many unsatisfactory tech calls, Linksys finally agreed that the modem was probably faulty and they woudl have a look at it. I got it back this week. Or rather, I was given a new one.

I plugged it in and after configuring the network settings that I was previously able to divine from the system (because Optus wouldn’t tell me what they were), it all worked perfectly. It’s been over 48 hours now and not a single dropped connection

I am *finally* a happy camper.

Of course I still have to confgure the wireless network…