Sunday September 26, 2004

Markup as protest

Michael Sperberg-McQueen used to say that all markup is interpretation. And some markup is demonstration: </Bush>. I suppose I don't need to point out that the Bush element isn't well formed. Or that maybe it should be empty. (2004-09-26 18:46:45.0) Permalink

Actually

Thanks to Gary Trudeau, I now know what "actually" means: Doonesbury. (2004-09-26 18:21:19.0) Permalink

Monday September 20, 2004

Twice baked

Sometimes a word describing a technique can take on localized forms, which effectively describe local variations in the technique. Take biscuit. The word comes to us from Latin via French, and means, literally, "twice baked". Baked goods were passed a second time through the oven to ensure their longevity. At the English table, it refers generally to savories; at the French, to sweets. Italy has given us a sweet variant, often with anise, that we have imported along with the Italian name for the technique: biscotto. And from Germany, that ultimate in crackers for teething babies, zwieback. These are baked once as bread, and then toasted. (2004-09-20 16:52:26.0) Permalink

Friday September 17, 2004

A list of things to do

If you're like me - a busy tech worker with more commitments than time - you probably keep a list of things to do. Back in the day, a "to do" list, like all important scientific discoveries, had the terse prestige of a Latin sobriquet. The word agenda comes from the gerund of agere, the Latin verb meaning "to do". It's an ellipsis, of sorts. Used in an expression such as mihi agenda sunt ("things which are to be done by me"), the gerund is used to express need or obligation. There are others still kicking around. Our memo is a truncation of memorandum, that which must be remembered. A referendum is a decision which a government must refer to the people for their consideration.

Technically, agenda is a plural. If you are lucky enough to have only a lunch date with Cicero on your schedule, then you have an agendum. I can't find any references to the singular in the OED, except as agend, which doesn't seem to have survived the Age of Napoleon. In modern English we rely on the expression agenda items to evoke the individual components of a meeting's schedule. I like that expression, because "item" reinforces the notion that a meeting ought to progress, from start to finish, in an iterative manner. Too many meetings seem more like hallucinanda.

I suspect that the more recent action item was motivated by similarity of form to agenda item (and not by their common etymology, "action" deriving from the past participle of agere). We use agenda item to refer to the points we cover in discussion at a meeting, and action item to refer to the things that we have agreed to do after the meeting has ended. I'm not sure why we can't just call them actions. After all, we want to do things, and not just talk about them at meetings.

If anyone hasn't seen it yet, action item has inspired a singleton comic strip, chock full of ludicrous corporate jargon. (2004-09-17 21:12:40.0) Permalink

Thursday September 16, 2004

Google has sniffed me

I started this blog just before lunch on Sept. 14, and for this first time late this afternoon, it appears as the result of a Google search for the term isopaleocopria. That's about 48 hours. I'm impressed.

Several people have asked me what my blog's rubric means. I made it up. It's pseudo-Greek. I wanted to coin something akin to a hapax legomenon, in this case, a word used by only one writer. When you have a common name, like I do, and you aren't famous, like I'm not, it makes "googling" yourself easier. The term's translation is the sum of its parts:

	iso	"same"
	paleo	"old"
	copria	"sh*t"

So far, it hasn't gotten me into any trouble. (2004-09-16 17:44:28.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday September 14, 2004

TRAX: Passing parameters to a "pull" transformer

The TRAX API for performing XSL transformations includes a factory extension, SAXTransformerFactory, which can return a transformer hidden behind a SAX XML Filter. This allows multiple transformations to be easily chained together, as per the Filter design pattern. Moreover, it allows filters backed by transformations to be intermixed with other types of filter implementations, which can simplify the code for iterative XML processing.

Unfortunately, returning the transformer as a class that implements only XMLFilter effectively hides the methods defined by javax.xml.transform.Transformer, including those used to pass global parameters to the transformation process. This is unfortunate.

I think a better solution would have been to return an interface that extends both XMLFilter and Transformer, allowing the caller to set up the filter chain, and then pass parameters to some or all of the filters before processing. This is one of the things that I liked about James Clark's XT: his XSLProcessor class extended XMLParser (the SAX 1.0 predecessor of XMLReader), so they could be made easily into filters. Of course, having to wrap processors in XMLReaderAdapators (to allow the SAX 1.0 parser to read from a SAX 2.0 reader) makes for its own headaches. (2004-09-14 17:29:06.0) Permalink

de gregorio Licet in principio aliquot dicere de auctore, Gregorio. Natus sum xxvi augusti MCMLXV, novo eboraco. Titulum gradumque philosophiae doctoris in scientia linguarum romanicarum datum mihi ab praeses Universitatis Princetoniensis, anno domine MCMXCV. Hodie machinator, apud Heliomicrosystemata. Placet mihi saltare, libris colligere, coquere tam quam cenare. Et res latinas! (2004-09-14 11:52:52.0) Permalink Comments [2]