December 29, 2003
Here is small HOWTO on exposing comments to MovableType-running blogs to RSS readers.Note: Target MT versions are 2.64 and 2.65, I'm not sure about other ones. Intro The goals of exposing comments are: enabling for arbitrary RSS reader application to see comments made to blog items and to post new
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I've been attending Microsoft conference on Biztalk 2004 in Tel-Aviv today. Well, probably the only worth doing outcome is a mug with Biztalk logo. Beside that only one presentation by Cobby Cohen was at least substantially interesting to some degree, all other talks were pure blah-blah-copy-n-paste-from-biztalk-overview. By the way we've
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December 28, 2003
Apparently there is no CommentAPI implementation or plugin for MovableType blogging engine. At leats I'm unable to find any. And the last thing I want to do is to code in Perl today. Well, proxy ASPX page should be just fine then.
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Moving the blog I relaized it's kinda layered by dust from architectural point of view. So I upgraded MovableType engine up to the latest version (2.65), added RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds and implemented wfw:commentRss in RSS 2.0 feed. Also I abandoned RSS 0.91 and 1.0 feeds. Implementing wfw:commentRss
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December 27, 2003
Done. I moved from Linux-based Java-featured hosting to Windows-based .NET-featured one. No problem at all, even with MovableType database. It just works, all I needed to do is to add DB_File perl module as described in MT install guide.
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December 24, 2003
Finally I'm moving to the new hosting. I'm going to make it during x-mas holidays, probably the site and email won't work couple of days. If you need me, reach me via IM (I'm oleg@tkachenko.com there).
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December 21, 2003
Just for your fun - I've found the song in usenet archives. Here it is: From: jenglish@crl.com (Joe English) Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml Subject: A Song Date: 24 Oct 1994 19:05:27 -0700 Organization: Helpless people on subway trains Lines: 51 Message-ID: <38hp57$1r6@crl.crl.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: crl.com [ Allegro, with vigor ] Well, if you
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Reading last Aaron Skonnard's installment in MSDN Mag I cannot resist to note that his explanation of whitespace handling in XSLT is not actually true. Or to put it this way - it's true only for Microsoft's XSLT implementations in default mode. Here is what Aaron says: Before an XSLT
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"Say No to QNames in Content" by Joshua Allen.
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December 18, 2003
The length of a spec is directly proportional to the size of the
committee that produced it, multiplied by the number of years spent on
the effort (which also increases with the size of the committee).
Michael Kay
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First working draft of XSL 1.1 has been published.Version 1.1 updates the XSL 1.0 Recommendation for change marks, indexes, multiple flows, and bookmarks, and extends support for graphics scaling, markers, and page numbers. For those unfamiliar, that's XSL-FO spec, XML vocabulary for expression formatting semantics for high-quality paginated presentation. I've
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December 17, 2003
This site was down yesterday for who-knows-how-much hours because some troubles with Apache httpd of my hoster. What's the most annoying I didn't managed to get in touch any customer service. Plain silence. I'm keep getting randomly scary and mysterious "Quota exceeded while writing "/var/spool/mail/oleg"" messages, mysterious because I've got
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Chris Lovett's internal Microsoft presentation of X# language project (Oct 2002) has leaked - download it here (via jayson knight). Well, the project is dead. Probably that's good, because it really sounds like monstrous deadly mix of XSD/XSLT/XQuery/SQL and C#. But still really interesting and I strongly believe it's based
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December 16, 2003
And here is another beast for XML bestiary I've created a year ago, but forgot to publish. I'm not sure may be someone did that already, the idea and implementation are really trivial. It's XmlNodeNavigator, which is XPathNavigator over XmlNode (as a subtree) in XmlDocument. It allows to navigate over
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December 14, 2003
Well, here is a small basic example how to generate WordprocessingML documents basing on templates. Saying "template" I don't mean regular *.dot Word templates, but just WordprocessingML XML document with predefined document/paragraph/run level properties and styles. Having such template document basically all needs to be done is to fill it
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December 11, 2003
First they have closed blogs. Now Dare's moved RSS Bandit project to SourceForge. Hmmm...
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Well, I'm getting tired of my current hosting. I'm ready for change, can anybody recommend unexpensive ASP.NET hosting, 100Mb/2Gb?
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Today I felt the Uroboros snake breathing just in my cubicle when I realized XSLT is able to write output to the input tree. Funny, huh? XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.Load("input.xml"); XslTransform xslt = new XslTransform(); xslt.Load("test.xsl"); XmlNodeWriter nw = new XmlNodeWriter(doc.DocumentElement, false); xslt.Transform(doc, null, nw); nw.Close(); This transformation
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Here is another beast for XML bestiary I've created yesterday just for fun to encapsulate commonly used functionality in an efficient way. It's XmlTransformingReader class. The idea is extremelly simple: XmlTransformingReader is XmlReader implementation, which encapsulates arbitrary XSL Transformation of input XML stream. Or to put it in another way
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XML Information Set, second edition became Proposed Rec. Mostly the Infoset is updated to reflect the fact it's going to be not only 1.0 version of XML in the near future. So major changes look like "XML 1.0". Plus emerging Namespaces in XML 1.1 adds namespace undeclaring to the infoset.
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December 5, 2003
The day brought new toys - these for me:
And this one for Ju-ju:
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December 3, 2003
Everybody knows grouping in XSLT is kinda advanced topic. Muenchian method is just a nightmare for XSLT newbies and XSLT-related newsgroups are full of help-me-to-group-in-xsl postings. Well, and I and fellows do answer such questions day afer day. Should admit that's a way booooring. Now I wonder why we don't
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December 1, 2003
Mike Gunderloy has been programming computers for over 25 years now, and still manages to keep up somehow. When he's not writing software or writing about software, he's living a life of near-hermitude in the hills of eastern Washington state, raising children, chickens, and garlic. From "An Interview with author
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Just discovered that WordML to XSL-FO stylesheet does exist already. Well, I was talking about it since May, so no surprise somebody more effective than me just made it done. It's Antenna House guys, developers of the best XSL-FO formatter in the market. Check out this page. Sounds reasonable, they
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Well, seems like images are one of the WordprocessingML trickiest parts, at least for me. Here are humble results of my investigations and experiments in embedding images into XSLT-generated WordprocessingML documents. Images in WordprocessingML are represented by w:pict element, which holds both VML and binary data (obviously Base64 encoded). VML
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