englishteeth.co.uk

I’ve read numerous posts and articles on Vista and the majority of this seem to summarise that there is no compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

Since I first tried it out, I have been a fan XP Media Center Edition 2005. Despite it’s quirks, it delivers a simple and usable media interface to the living room. I don’t think I would care to go back to normal just TV and having looked at offerings such as Sky+ and Virgin Media Television, I still feel there are things I would rather not compromise. Vista Media Center too, seemed to offer little incentive and too many headache tales of incompatibility and woe.

Yet upgrade I have!

It went really smoothly too. I didn’t even have to take the disks distributed with the motherboard or graphics card out of their sleeves. I installed the TV tuner card drivers and the few bits of software I have on my media center and the job seems done.

I almost think I’ve missed something!

First impressions. I’m not sure I like it!

Vista itself seems OK, different enough to be disconcerting but nothing major.
(I’m surprised how long it has taken me to even see this OS)

The differences in VMC though, I’m not too sure…

• there is too much on the first screen
• too many menu options, for things I wouldn’t want to use, hanging around
• navigation is horizontal and vertical
• pictures are bundled in with video
• everything seems constrained to the strip across the middle of the screen
• I don’t know if my wife is going to like it!

But it’s late and it it’s done. I’ll live with it over the weekend and see where we are then.

The screen shot is not my own, its from flickr, because I’m tired and I really can’t be bothered to duplicate the effort.

I wanted to generate some sample XML from an XSD I was given and I was struck by the lack of resources outside of the over bloated Altova tools and their misguided clones much more heavy weight options that seem overkill for what I’m trying to do.

I was actually hoping to find a style sheet that could do the job, but I had no luck.

Along the way though, I did find Liquid XML Studio which in it’s freeware incarnation has some nice schema viewing, editing and generation features. There’s also an integrated web service browser



and although, I haven’t played with it much yet, there’s an XPath expression builder in there too.



My only disappointment is the lack of XSLT support, at least in the freeware version. I’m looking for a reasonable successor to MarrowSoft Xselerator which is no longer supported or being sold by TopXML. Xselerator is not compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, which I has not actually proved a problem for me yet, but it’s days must be numbered.

I’m not adverse to paying for software (Xselerator wasn’t free), but I must admit to being put off a little by hobbled versions. An issue covered much better than I could by Jeff Atwood, here.

My favourite Cyberlink love/hate thing comes to mind; Power DVD Ultra, Power DVD Deluxe, Power DVD Standard or Power DVD OEM. Mmm, now let me see… do any of them work reliably?

I can’t spell for toffee and rely on the in-line spell checker Firefox provides. So I find myself a bit frustrated and feeling vulnerable if it is not there.

For instance, after you inadvertently trash your profile and have to reinstall the browser, proxy information and all my add-ons…

Anyway, today this post on Firefox 2 Spelling Dictionary Hacks came in handy.


Funny that “Firefox” isn’t in the dictionary.

As ever, there is so much to read. The following are some links that I have spent some time looking at, though far less time than they deserve.

• Reasons why ESBs are considered bad here
• The next big thing in SOA here
• Rants about Java here
• Distracting blogs found here and here
• Also I came across a great example of code you can’t read in an article about something completely different here


-pl s!.!y$IVCXL426(-:$XLMCDIVX$dfor$$_.=5x$&*8%29628;$$$_=$_!egfor-4e3..y/iul-}/-$+ /%s''$';*_=eval


A Perl Golf Roman Numeral Calculator, Fantastic, isn’t it!?

I don’t mind admitting that despite it being pretty straight forward, I have been caught out by this more than once. So, in an attempt to prevent that Doh! moment again in the future…

The scenario revolves around an XSL Stylesheet that references another resource, be it an XML file for lookups, another stylesheet or whatever. Everything works a treat when processed locally, but blows up when invoked in its Java context. “Can not load requested doc:” or something similar.

This is where brain failure kicks in and I can’t think where the resource should be and waste time moving files around, changing references and trawling the web. In fact the reason the document cannot be found is simply because I haven’t told the transformer where, or more acurately how, to look for it!

The following is a simple reslover that looks on the class path for the missing file.

	public class ResourceResolver implements URIResolver {

		private static final String RESOURCE_PREFIX = "resource://"; 

		public Source resolve(String href, String base)
				throws TransformerException {
			if (!href.startsWith(RESOURCE_PREFIX))
				return null;
			try {
				if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
					log.debug("Resolving stylesheet resource: " + href);
				}
				String resource = href.substring(RESOURCE_PREFIX.length());
				ClassLoader loader = getClass().getClassLoader();
				InputStream is = loader.getResourceAsStream(resource);
				return new StreamSource(is, resource);
			} catch (Exception ex) {
				throw new TransformerException(ex);
			}
		}
	}