Clowns In My Coffee » Uncategorized

w3c.recommend(xproc)

adam — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:13:33 +0000

As an unabashed fan of the angle brackety type things, I’m chuffed to learn, via Norman Walsh, that XProc is now a W3C recommendation. Congratulations to all the people who put in all the work to get it there. Take a look at if if you need to run your XML documents through a bunch of steps and produce a bunch of results (and do other things along the way).

I’ve used XProc in a limited way to run a sort of enhanced XSLT process, and it was slow to get started, but once I wrapped my head around the central concepts, the rest went like butter. Given that the specification provides for making HTTP requests, I’d think it could serve as an especially useful component in a RESTful document publishing architecture. But then, I would say that.

On Bankers

adam — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:28:48 +0000

Here’s some unsolicited advice for performing long-distance one-off transactions with financial institutions: if your transaction is at all unusual and requires that documentation of some sort or another be passed around and notarized and suchlike — get the procedure documented. That person you’re talking to on the phone, unless you’re really lucky, doesn’t know that the dark, cold hands of Institutional Policy are poised to strangle any vestiges of trust you have in corporate behavior if you follow the seemingly simple procedure. The bureaucracy always wants a Very Serious Document prepared, and it’s quite easy to blow you off, because what are you but some disembodied, highly compressed voice coming out over a Very Small Speaker?

Of course, if banks weren’t somewhat risk averse, we wouldn’t put our money into them. Know, however, that the risk aversion is about you (the customer) not so much or not at all, and almost entirely about the Organization. And the rules and regulations governing this stuff are Very Complex indeed, and typically aren’t the sorts of things that are known by the type of employee who has to (eurk!) take phone calls from the public. If they knew that, they’d be too busy in meetings deciding what the next set of rules are to take the time to deal with your piddly little problems.

The beauty of this whole setup is that it takes no active or deliberate malice on any individual’s part, and you, dear friend, will have to seek and pay for the advice of a lawyer. Ain’t modern life grand? Philly Joe Remarkable is not the only one looking on in disbelief.

In Which I Become a Food Blogger

adam — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:28:51 +0000

Some time ago, a friend pointed me to this magical stuff that turns fats into powders. T’other day, I finally got my hands on some of this tapioca maltodextrin, as it’s called; it’s a starch, and there’s really not much more to turning a really fatty thing into a powder than mixing the two things together.

The starch is close enough to flavourless, but any statements you may have encountered to the effect that you put the powdered (olive oil/peanut butter/hazelnut-and-chocolate-spread) into your mouth and voilà! it’s the original stuff again! are not really operative. There’s a noticeable effect on the texture, and you’ve got a bunch of starch that wasn’t there before.

Still, it’s amazing to work with and it’s truly a surprise for your taste buds.

Adding Shift-select with jQuery

adam — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:48:07 +0000

I’ve been using jQuery a bit here and there to add some (I hope) usability enhancements and for light AJAJ work. Today I encountered a situation where I thought adding the “shift-select” feature on a longish list of checkboxes would be a good thing. This sort of feature pops up in webmail interfaces, where you tick off one box, scroll down through 750 spam messages, and then, while holding down shift on the 751st piece of spam in a row, click its checkbox to select all of the rows in between. It turns out that adding this with jQuery is pretty elegant, so here’s the code. I don’t for a moment think this is the best implementation of this idea, but I was struck by how concise the result was, while supporting — via a straightforward use of a closure, multiple instances on the same page. For giggles, I added a feature that allows you to de-select a range, although I’m not convinced it works in an intuitive way.

To use this, you’ll need jQuery (tested against 1.2.3) in your page, and a CSS selector that matches the checkboxes you want to enable shift-select on. Then call $(selector).shiftSelect(); and you’re done.

 jQuery.fn.shiftSelect = function() {
    var checkboxes = this;
    var lastSelected;
    jQuery(this).click( function(event) {

        if ( !lastSelected ) {
            lastSelected = this;
            return;
        }

        if ( event.shiftKey ) {
            var selIndex = checkboxes.index(this);
            var lastIndex = checkboxes.index(lastSelected);
            /*
             * if you find the "select/unselect" behavior unseemly,
             * remove this assignment and replace 'checkValue'
             * with 'true' below.
             */
            var checkValue = lastSelected.checked;
            if ( selIndex == lastIndex ) {
                return true;
            }

            var end = Math.max(selIndex,lastIndex);
            var start = Math.min(selIndex,lastIndex);
            for(i=start;i<=end;i++) {
                checkboxes[i].checked = checkValue;
            }
        }
        lastSelected = this;
    });
}