When making hash browns xkcd style, there are at least 14 ways it could go badly.

1. That’s not a potato, it’s a misshapen rock.
2. Unexpectedly flammable tennis racket.
3. Sparks landing on gas can.
4. Food poisoning via undercooked hash browns due to limited flame contact time.
5. Broken plate fragments.
6. Dripping, flaming gasoline.
7. Swing and a miss; balance lost.
8. Flaming potato fragments in the eye socket.
9. Diving catch ends badly.
10. Spontaneous combustion.
11. Tennis elbow.
12. Repetitive stress injury.
13. Fork misfire.
14. Heat death of the universe.

(17 if that fork is a dangerous crossbreed) -m

You are awesome. Just sayin’. -m

If you want to get anything done, give it to a busy person…

In my life, I’ve started four novels, completed my goals on three, gotten to “The End” on two, and completely flamed out on one.

The first was in 2001. I hadn’t written much since high school. Something clicked in my head that made me realize that writing wasn’t some kind of black art (as one particular teacher had drilled into his credulous students). It was doable. You take pencil and paper and write one word after another. Voilà. I was so taken with this simple idea that every single thing I ever learned about writing went out the window. I had Swifties, danglers, tell-vs-show, you name it. There’s enough material in there for several Bulwer-Lytton contests. By the time I had 70 hand-written pages, the thing collapsed under it’s own weight and the story reached an abrupt, borderline-surrealistic “ending” to abuse the term. I have evidence that I even typed it all in and pressed on for a 2nd draft.

By 2003 my non-fiction book was published–my writing career was under way! Part of the elaborate book proposal dance involved me writing some online articles, including one piece of fiction that was well-received in the tiny circle that was its intended audience. At this stage I adopted electronic writing, and ditched my crashy Windows laptop for a Mac, a vast improvement.

In 2005 I discovered NaNoWriMo, and though I thought it would be a lost cause, I signed up. No way it could be as bad as the previous attempt. I had a new job, and was able to skip a few lunches to write, not to mention intense evenings and weekends. The end goal is 50,000 words during the 30 days of November, that’s 1,666 and two-thirds words per day. All of the prior month I spent outlining, making maps, creating my universe. I used the simplest of tools, my text editor and one file per chapter. I learned that the command wc *.txt could easily give me a combined word count. To my surprise, it worked. I reemerged into daylight with a completed a full story arc loosely based on the earlier story, and ended up with just over 50,000 words. The text itself was very rough, but I read the whole thing out loud in a podcast to edit it. In terms of improvement, it was huge, but still far from publishable.

2006 and another NaNoWriMo rolled around, and I took off on a more ambitious storyline with far fewer notes going into it. The story itself involved the same general characters of the previous two episodes, but with a deeper, more mature feeling to it. In short, I finally wrote a piece of fiction to be proud about afterwards, though when I hit 50,000 words I felt really burned out; hit “save” and left the story arc unfinished.

The pull to dig in to an intensive 2nd draft of the story was immense, but just too many things were going on, including a new arrival in the family and a new set of job responsibilities. I never got more than a few dozen pages into the rewrite. When NaNoWriMo 2007 came upon me, I had a tough choice…do I write something fresh, or try to rework the previous novel? Fresh. A completely new story line, new characters, new setting, new everything. As of a few days ago, I finished the draft, compressing parts of the story as needed to meet both the 50 kiloword goal and the complete story arc. In preparation, I read a number of books, but as far as written outlines, maps, etc. go, almost nothing happened before November 1. I saved enough of the “fun stuff” that a second revision of this story will be a joy. Overall, another improvement year-over-year.

There’s only one kink to the “if you want to get something done…” idea: my slides for the XML Conference talk I have in a few days are still unfinished… -m

Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books?
There’s some public domain books to be found, but none are free. Take, for example, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a book (in paper form) sitting just out of arm’s reach as I write this, waiting to be read. If I had it on a device, particularly one with a good screen, I’d be more inclined to keep it, and dozens others, on hand in my backback and be ready to read at a moment’s notice. But no.

The problem is the the “we take care of the wireless delivery” part, called Whispernet(tm). It’s not really free, nor bundled in the service price. It’s bundled in to the cost of every media access. Is it fair to pay $9.99 for a New York Times bestseller? Sure. But it sucks to pay $1 for an A-list blog that’s free everywhere else, or to get literally nickeled and dimed for the privelege of “converting” and delivering your own content to your own device.

By the way, who gets the money paid for accessing, say, a CreativeCommons non-commercial licensed blog via the Kindle? Somebody should look into that.

I applaud Amazon for pushing to innovate in a space that badly needs it, but the financial model behind the wireless access encourages the wrong kind of things. Exceptions, like unlimited Wikipedia access (be still my heart!) still need to be hand approved by the gatekeeper. Information wants to be free, it doesn’t want to be a service, though that’s hard to see when the dollar signs get in your eyes.

Many folks are comparing this to the original iPod launch–remember, the huge klunky one with a tiny capacity, black and white screen, and a mechanical click-wheel? There’s some strong points of similarity, but stronger differences. For one, anyone with an iPod can easily rip their existing CDs, not to mention obtain MP3s from other methods (so I hear). There’s nothing like that yet for books.
Where’s the documentation for the new, proprietary ebook format? I don’t care about the DRM crap. I care about being able to create new content, or repackage existing content for which I have the rights, and for that, I’m having trouble coming up with a rationale for an entire new format. I would love to do some cool things with this platform. Perhaps I will some day, though my enthusiasm is somewhat lessened by the difficulties I would face getting anything cool onto the devices. -m

As one who, in the all-too-near future, will be hammering out the visuals to go with my talk at XML 2007, this made my day. (be sure to check out the deeper pages too) -m

What is the difference between placing instanceof=”prefix:val” vs. rel=”prefix:val” on something? How do I decide between the two?

In the example of hEvent data, why is it better/more accurate to use instanceof=”cal:Vevent” instead of a blank node via rel=”cal:Vevent”?

-m

The more I look at RDFa, the more I like it. But still it doesn’t help with the pain-point of namespaces, specifically of unmemorable URLs all over the place and qnames (or CURIEs) in content.

Does GRDDL offer a way out? Could, for instance, the namespace name for Dublin Core metadata be assigned to the prefix “dc:” in an external file, linked via transformation to the document in question? Then it would be simpler, from a producer or consumer viewpoint, to simply use names like “dc:title” with no problems or ambiguity.

This could be especially useful not that discussions are reopening around XML in HTML.

As usual, comments welcome. -m

It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “.

The proper way is to look at individual tokens in the attribute value. On first glance, this might require a call to EXSLT or some complex tokenization routine, but there’s a simpler way. I first discovered this on the microformats wiki, and only cleaned up the technique a tiny bit.

The solution involves three XPath 1.0 functions, contains(), concat() to join together string fragments, and normalize-space() to strip off leading and trailing spaces and convert any other sequences of whitespace into a single space.

In english, you

• normalize the class attribute value, then
• concatenate spaces front and back, then
• test whether the resulting string contains your searched-for value with spaces concatenated front and back (e.g. ” vcard “

Or {contains(concat(’ ‘,normalize-space(@class),’ ‘),’ vcard ‘)} A moment’s thought shows that this works well on all the different examples shown above, and is perhaps even less involved than resorting to extension functions that return nodes that require further processing/looping. It would be interesting to compare performance as well…

So next time you need to match class or rel values, give it a shot. Let me know how it works for you, or if you have any further improvements. -m

My Copious Free Time(tm) has been filled lately by two different evaluation projects. One is the 2nd Annual Writing Show Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest, for which the first round of judging is just winding up. The main benefit for contest entrants is that every submission gets a professional critique of at least 750 words. But additionally, each submisison gets a score on a 50-point scale, based on:

• 10 points for Story. Is it a compelling read with a great hook? Are we engaged?
• 10 points for Style. Is the writing smooth and tight, without awkward constructions, extraneous verbiage, and redundancies?
• 10 points for Dialog. Is the dialog natural and does it move the story along?
• 10 points for Character. Are the characters interesting? Do we care about them?
• 10 points for Mechanics. Are grammar, spelling, and punctuation correct?

I’m also attending some classes aiming toward becoming a Certified Beer Judge (details on Meadblog). This isn’t as fun as it sounds. (Well, OK, maybe it is…). The idea is to build up better sensory perception so that my personal brewing and cooking projects can benefit. But the upcoming test is 70% written essay questions like “Identify three distinctly different top-fermenting beer styles with a starting gravity of 1.070 or higher, and describe the similarities and differences between the styles”. 30% of the test is based on actual tasting and filling out a tasting sheet. Of interest, the scoring here is also based on a 50-point scale:

• 12 points for Aroma.
• 3 points for Appearance.
• 20 points for Taste.
• 5 points for Mouthfeel.
• 10 points for Overall Impression.

The interesting part is that there’s similarities between the two tasks. For both, I need to work off of physical paper, not in my head on on a computer screen. For both, I first “skim”, building an overall impression, then dig down into individual categories to assign a score for each one. Then I step back and look at my numbers, and check whether everything makes sense and accurately records my impressions. When I’m satisfied, I add everything up and am done.

Most day-to-day problems aren’t so well structured or normalized, but nonetheless, I find myself tackling all kinds of problems with a similar approach. There you have it. Writing and drinking beer make you a better person. :) -m

• Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Jean Bottéro
• Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn

Yeah, they’re related. -m

Go check it out. It even has a Tidy option to clean up the markup. But they missed an important feature: it should include an option to run Tidy on the markup first then validate. This is becoming the defacto bar for web page validity anyway… -m

If it’s been quiet on this front it’s because I’ve been engrossed in my continuing education. Andy Oram sent me a copy of Beautiful Code, a thoroughly enjoyable work from O’Reilly. If you like stretching your brain by reading code-intense essays from top-tier coders, I recommend this volume. In particular, I’m been digging into Douglas Crockford’s Top Down Operator Precedence chapter.

Other than that, some interesting BJCP classes, but I’m keeping that non-tech stuff over on meadblog. -m

I’ve always had a thing for text analysis.

• the 352
• and 250
• to 225
• of 188
• in 118
• a 108
• we 100
• is 76
• our 75
• that 72

Source. -m

A semi-random thought that occurred to me.

One marker of a well-designed markup language is that it looks to the future. This doesn’t mean it’s an amorphous blob of abstract indirections mapped to tags. It can (and arguably should) be concrete and solid, but designed in such a way that keeps bigger things in mind.

HTML and XHTML are, I suppose, canonical examples of this, giving birth to microformats and many other uses outside of a browser. -m

but there has never been a successful Java implementation of a commercial-grade web browser. (right?)

There exist lots of huge applications including IDEs, and editors of all sorts, but nobody’s been able to nail the whole XHTML+CSS+JavaScript thing in Java. (right?)

Take it a step further–no need to pick on Java–nobody has done this in any VM-based language (right)?

Coincidence or sign of greater forces in the universe? Feel free to post counter-examples in the comments.-m

On a PHP 4 project, I need to use XSLT, but the interfaces seem far more complicated than they should be. Check out this declaration for the function to run an XSLT:

mixed xslt_process ( resource xh, string xmlcontainer, string xslcontainer [, string resultcontainer [, array arguments [, array parameters]]] )

Wow, it returns a “mixed”, that’s some helpful documentation worth looking up. And all I have to do is pass in an “xmlcontainer” and “xslcontainer”. In practice, you end up with hard-to-read code like this:

$arguments = array('/_xml' => $xml, '/_xsl' => $xsl);
$xslproc = $xslt_create();
$result = xslt_process($xslproc, 'arg:/_xml', 'arg:/_xsl', NULL, $arguments);

Too bad I have already-parsed objects. And then there’s this:

Warning: As of PHP 4.0.6, this function no longer takes XML strings in xmlcontainer or xslcontainer. Passing a string containing XML to either of these parameters will result in a segmentation fault in Sablotron versions up to and including version 0.95.

Whatever. In fairness, this falls mainly to the XSLT engine and not the language and the PHP 5 interfaces are much different and much improved. But still.. -m