Eddie Welker.com

Last Monday through last Wednesday I attended Mulberry Technologies’ XSLT course. I had a fun time, and learned a bunch.

To prepare, I looked through a few books. I looked through Jeni Tennison’s Beginning XSLT 2.0 book, but it wasn’t for me. I didn’t like how wordy it was… I got lost in the dialogue, and it distracted me from the points and the examples. On the otherhand, Doug Tidwell‘s book, XSLT-Mastering XML Tranformations was precisely what I was looking for. It was concise and organized very methodically. PLUS, it only cost me $7 with shipping from Amazon.  Heh, gotta love that!

[note: because we only use 1.0 on the job, older books were better, as I didn’t have to figure out what was a 2.0 feature and what was a 1.0 feature… and again, the books were cheaper]

Fun stuff aside, XSLT is a pretty cool language.  I’m too new to it to debate if it is a functional programming language or simply based on those attributes, but I’m happy to get to play with its functional aspects.  I am kinda thrilled to dust off my recursive-function-writing skills.  I hope to use it early and often, so I can get a good amount of practice in.

The class was useful because it showed me things I didn’t pick up from the books.  First was the concept that the root node is placed above what I called the XML root node.  The class called the XML root node the “document node.”  Solved one problem that I had been having. The other really enlightening aspect was the axes.  When I read the book and saw that there 13, I simply skimmed it.  It was good to sit down with , as the following:: and preceding:: axes were not what I thought.

Debbie Lapeyre and Wendell Piez, the instructors, were great and worked with us to answer all of our questions… even my weird set theory questions.  Wendell, in particular (because he led the third day) was helpful, showing me some of the common “hacks” people use to make 1.0 do things it wasn’t intended to do [despite my incredibly poorly phrased question!].  Now that I can understand XPath a little better, I can break down the pieces of the hacks… so things like the Muenchian method actually make sense now.

Hopefully I will get to keep working with XSLT’s, I’m definitely not an expert from three days.  But since they’re core to the portal system I work with, I expect to get a lot more practice in.  If I get good enough, I’d love to post some information that may be useful to others.  Stay tuned!

From the views that you will see on all of the replays, you will see Kenny Lofton’s hand getting to the bag before Pedroia’s tag touches him. That I will give you. However, from my view point, the point at which the Indians left fielder was out was AFTER that… when his hands both came up off the bag, and I could see no part of him touching second base. His hands shot over the base, and because he doesn’t weigh 300 pounds, his chest was not touching the bag.

I would like to see another view, and will be the first to admit that I may be biased. I tried watching it on Sportscenter, but they cut away before you could see his hands leave the bag. Objectively, however, I believe that the umpire could have seen this, and that would be the basis of the call. His hand was in there first, but did he stay on the base? I think not.

Regardless, it was a teriffic play by Manny.  Despite stupid Tim McCarver’s near constant (and just plain wrong) assertions that Manny may as well be playing without a glove, he made yet another great play off the wall because of his expert knowledge (and regular practice!) on the wall in left.  I am thrilled that they are going to the series. Leave it to me to travel up there to see the one game they lose at home. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I’ve got a concert tongiht. Check out the Columbia Orchestra site for details. Tchaikovsky 4, along with Strauss’ first Horn Concerto, and a Brandenburg. Should be pretty good, especially since I’ve practiced a fair amount for this.

I don’t expect anyone I know to come, as there is also something going on in Boston tonight. Some sort of baseball game?

So yea, come and see me torn. Don’t expect me to hang around after the concert for any more than a second though.

I am finished my XSLT class, and learned some very interesting things.  Very cool the way some of the features of the language fit within the context of Scheme (and Lisp, for that matter).   More to come.

Tonight I am packing for Boston.  Red Sox ALCS game 2 is tomorrow evening, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.  I was looking forward to visiting my friend Kacy, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with her yet.  Kristen, my other Boston cello-playing girl has been in touch, and we’re probably going to hang out while I am up there.

Alas, because of my (stupid) XSLT class Monday morning, I have to leave on Sunday evening, so I don’t really get to see much.  This is upsetting, as I haven’t been to Boston in YEARS.  The part that makes it especially upsetting is that I still remember most of what I did the last time I was there.

Goal for today: figure out why Firefox for Mac is displaying drastically smaller font-sizes than Firefox for Windows.

Why this may be difficult: I don’t have a Mac to use at work.

I am a big fan of Sage, the RSS newsreader plugin for Firefox.  In my move, I have tried a few other apps that I thought would be a little better at handling the on-again, off-again nature of me checking my favorite feeds.

I tried Vienna for mac, as it was free, and it worked on my laptop (since I had already packed up the other computers).  I liked it fair enough.  One of my problems was the keystrokes required to mark all the posts in one feed read, but… aside from that, I had no real problem.  (I learned a trick though, the listed keystroke is apple-shift-k, but really, all you have to press is k by itself!  Useful, but still on the right hand side… not ergonomic enough.)

Since the PC was the first computer unpacked other than the laptop, I thought that I would give a windows reader a try.  I settled on FeedDemon.  I like the stuff it does on its own… the type of display, the checking, and the default behavior of folders.  The thing I can not stand is the poor usability of the application.  The keystroke for marking all feeds in a folder as read is fairly similar to the browser reload… it’s control-shift-r.  My brain defaults to that occasionally.  The real problem is that it has a separate keystroke for marking all posts in one feed as read, which is control-shift-a.  Well, as my brain is hardwired for r, I have pressed that on more than one occasion when trying to mark all posts in a feed as read.  What does this do?  Well, it marks all posts in the folder I am in as read… and since I imported an OPML feed, it marks all of my feeds as read!!!  I’ve already done that at least 5 times.  Yes, it is trivial in the grand scheme of life, death, and taxes, but not insignificant for me.

I think that I am likely to go back to Vienna for the moment, with SharpReader (oldie with no bells-or-whistles, but it works the way I would expect) at work.  If Vienna can’t convince me pretty soon, I may have to go back to Sage.  (Further stating what a great plugin it is).

This is my appropriately named “catching up” post.  As most know, I’ve moved over the last month.  Despite my early action, I still had to do a lot of work at the end of the month.  C’est la vie, that’s what moving is.  Aside that, I’ve also been focused on various work related things (css, xslt, and the “portal” system), as well as the end of baseball’s regular season and the beginning of the post season.

On my list of things to touch in full… 1) Advanced DOM Scripting.  I finished the book (a while ago) but haven’t had a chance to review it yet.  At the risk of ruining the surprise for my one (hopefully) reader, it was teriffic, and I highly recommend it.   I will do a full write-up later.  2) My comments on The Little Schemer.  This is simply an amazing book that’s opened up a number of paths in my brain.  I’m afraid that any review wouldn’t do it justice.  Maybe some thoughts on the book everyone should read. 3) Random thoughts on Bethesda, Kensington, Rockville (my new home!), riding my bike again, the Tchaikovsky concert coming up, my xslt class coming up, my recent css exploits… as you can see, I’ve got a lot of things that I am thinking about, but nothing to put down on paper… yet.  (Yes, I know, really, there is no paper… shut up!)

Contrast that with the time that I MUST spend with friends, and the potential Boston trip coming up… and I’ve got a lot to do!!  Better get started.  Washing my clothes now…

Alright, so I would be willing to admint that this is TBS’s first year covering the playoffs… but come on guys, can’t you do better than this??? You have cut out during first pitches, missed plays, repeated common Red Sox knowledge… and worst yet, you put Don Orsillio on the Rockies game. You’re on the clock guys.

The Red Sox start the playoffs tomorrow at Fenway against the Angels. I will be rooting for them (as always), but with added urgency since I have the chance to go to Game 2 of the ALCS, when they advance. 🙂

Getting tickets is rather unpleasant, but I managed them somehow.

Guess I’ll have to start planning a trip to Boston.

I moved most of the large items this weekend. I still have a few odds and ends (less than one car-full) left at the house. One more trip, and then one trip to wash the carpets, and I should be fully vacated from the old location, and fully “in” the new. Of course, everything remains in boxes, and finding anything is near impossible (and dangerous if you’ve got to walk over things), but I’m workin’ on it.

I’m mostly just interested in getting back into a regular routine.

On the upside (and on a side-note), the Red Sox beat the A’s tonight, the Yankees lost, and Manny played his first game in the last 24 days. Papi hit a home run… hopefully the Sox are using these last few to secure the division, go for best record in the A.L., and win some “meaningful games” before the playoffs start. Get ready…

My thought for the day is this:

Everyone should keep usability in mind while performing their job. While creating something (especially like a website), some aspects end up being unrelated—graphic design to programmers, implementation details to designers, etc—however usability should be an part of every aspect of the creation process. There are an unending number of uses to design for, the least we can do is succeed for one or two.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Red Sox game all night on my computer. When I saw David Ortiz up in the 9th with a man on, and down by 1 run, I went running into the living room and turned on the TV. He fouled off one pitch, and then, just in time for the arrival of fall, Papi hits a walk-off home run into the newly cooled air.

I’ve been working on the same project for about 4 weeks now. 4 weeks straight. It’s the re-design of certain parts of a big site using CSS. Sounds like nothing, but the constraints of the re-design are that it must function almost exactly like the old. Therein lies the difficulty.

It is surprisingly hard to make the new act like the old. I am pretty good with my CSS, but when you have different parts that can expand to huge sizes, both horizontally and vertically, it is quite the challenge. Also, when certain expections have been set by use of tables, it is hard to design around them. There is only one widely supported html tag which can resize a collection of block-level elements similarly, and that would be a table. And yes, I have had to revert to a few tables (with some crazy CSS trickery on top).

I have found myself longing for Microsoft to catch up to other browsers, specifically regarding support of display: table* attributes, but I’m not really sure why I even looked.

Aside from the technical difficulties, my main problem as of late has been focus. I have focused so long and intensely on this one project, it is beginning to blur together. Today I was making mistakes in my code that I would have never normally made. And I had to think…for a rather long time about a conceptual problem concerning whether a certain piece of code should be put in an include, or in the calling source.

I guess I don’t really know how “long” is “long” to be working on a project. Something I will have to figure out gradually, I assume. I am glad to be able to recognize the problem, as I can now see if I can work on de-bluring my vision of the project. Maybe it simply requires a different perspective. That being said, one approach that I will take before anything else is to get a good long night’s sleep tonight.

If there is one thing that I’m a sucker for, it’s cheat sheets. I love letting my eyes fall upon a single page and navigate right to what I’m looking for. It takes the whole “open book, locate index, look up word, find page, find where on page” process out and beats it with a big stick.

So the other day I was working on some trivial CSS, and found myself having to look up the shorthand for ‘list-style’ for the millionth time. I don’t know what in my childhood prevents me from remembering it, but… it must have been traumatic. Anyway, I looked over at my CSS cheat sheet, and it was absent. So I searched the webbernet for a cheat sheet. I found Dustin Diaz’s guide, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. It was filled with information, however I know the values–I work with them constantly. I just wanted to figure out the order and defaults… and put them on the wall.

So here is my CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet.

This cheat sheet contains all of the cases (that I can think of) where a CSS property has a shorthand notation. I’ve even added the obscure and rarely implemented outline and outline variations, as well as the Aural pause and cue properties (respecting accessibility). I even threw in the color shortcut (#abc) in for good measure. 🙂

From a design perspective, there is obvious room for improvement. I haven’t really messed with InDesign since it was called Pagemaker, and I was doing my high-school newspaper. So that was interesting. I also wanted the design to look slightly disorganized… anyone who’s ever seen my yellow shoes will know why. There are saturated colors, but no heavy backgrounds. I wanted it to be printed, and I only have a grayscale laserjet printer. While on the subject, it looks somewhat faded when printed. I have to look into adjusting the colors for priting grayscale, but I’d prefer not to darken all of them.

Anyway, I hope that someone will find it helpful. I’m going to use it tomorrow.