Now this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. The guy’s built a slick system that converts XML data into a visual ‘tree structure’ representation of the data by using XSL to transform the XML into SVG. (believe me, I tried to think of another acronym to stuff in there but couldn’t). Anyway take a look, you need adobe’s SVG plugin for your browser and you need a browser that handles javascript adeptly. I’ve tested it on the pc and it works fine, it failed in ns 4 on a mac though so proceed accordingly.

It’s totally applicable to some projects we have underway at work so if I’m lucky we’ll actually be using some form of this in the future on our adaptive learning project and possibly in conjunction with a database of marine organisms some of the staff are working on.

So does this work?

My ibook’s cd drive has broken twice in the last week. The drive simply didn’t work – stick a disc into it and nothing happened, whether I am used OS 9 or OS X. The first time it broke I called Apple and they spent maybe 30-40 minutes on the phone with me zapping the pram and resetting the power manager and so on. It worked after we reset the power manager so I figured ‘problem solved.’ But 24 hours later the same thing happened and I spent an hour repeatedly trying all the tricks the Apple support person had taught me to no avail. I was bummed. For the past 4-5 days, no cd drive, and I have been dreading having to turn it in to Apple. Then inspiration struck and I pulled the equivalent of a ‘Fonzie’ and took a screwdriver to the drive, forcing the armature the laser is mounted on to move up and down its tracks. Ta da, problem solved. Of course now I have a known problem with the drive (it sticks) that I can’t prove to the Apple folks, so I can’t decide whether I should hope for it to happen soon so I can get it fixed under warranty, or simply hope for it to never happen again.

Yet another in a long line of tests, this one intended to see if the update from redhat 7.1 to 7.2 works. It seems to have gone well.

To paraphrase Azimov, a ‘significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
The germans have just created magic. I spend a significant amount of time tooling around usenet grabbing music, software, books and more off of the binary newsgroups. One of the most frustrating aspects of this is the missing parts. You see, when files are posted they’re broken into chunks. An audiobook for example might consist of 50 pieces. Despite subscribing to what is probably the best commercial usenet provider, I run into the problem of missing pieces on an almost daily basis. You can’t actually use the material you’re downloading until you have all the pieces. Roy and I spend a lot of time trading missing pieces back and forth and hunting them down. Now some awesome programmers in Germany have invented a new file format that allows you to recreate from scratch the missing pieces, without ever having the actual pieces themselves. On the surface it seems like magic. Of course in the end it boils down to sophisticated math I guess, but damn is it cool. No more usenet ‘needle in a haystack’ file hunts for me 😉

If like me you have a home office full of computer equipment, including servers that are on 24×7, you might find these devices useful. Think ‘nightlight.’ The glowire stuff is pretty cool too.

Check this thing out. It lets you broadcast mp3’s from say your laptop or your portable mp3 player to your car stereo using the FM radio band. And it’s only $15. Someone is getting one of these for xmas, and no, it’s not you Jesse 😉

Man do I wish I knew how to program better. I’ve been playing around with ways to publish a sort of daily ‘stream of conciousness’ page where I could instantly publish phrases, thoughts, links and so on in one contiguous stream. So I started block diagraming how I would go about doing it, kicking around various techniques and so on and it occured to me that the coolest thing would be to have it be possible to post via an instant messenger client, which in this case would have to be Jabber. The problem is getting it running would require my getting a number of things installed onto the server, including xerces and Xalan and so on, and put simply, I suck at getting things installed on linux, and even once I had everything installed I would still have to figure out how to parse the incoming xml from Jabber and…..and…and a lot of stuff I don’t know how to do. Still, I’m going to dig into this further, I really like the idea.

I’ve spent the day trying to better understand how the CSS box model* works. While doing so I came across this paragraph:

Vertically adjacent margins of elements in the normal document flow are collapsed. In other words, if two margins are vertically adjacent to each other, then the actual distance between the two element borders is the maximum of the adjacent margins. In the case of negative margins, the absolute maxmimum of the negative adjacent margins is subtracted from the maximum of the postive adjacent margins. The vertically adjacent margins of elements which have been floated or positioned do not collapse.

Riiiiiiiight. Got that? The next paragraph is even worse.
*(cascading style sheets – the lingua franca of web aesthetics….the box model refers to using CSS to position elements on the page)