Scotty's Engineering Log
Scott Hudson's blog on XML, DocBook, Sci-Fi and Storm Chasing
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20040722 Thursday July 22, 2004

One Giant Leap For Mankind: 35 years later

Unfortunately, I was born too late. Too late to be involved in the historic Apollo program. Too late to even remember seeing any of the final missions on TV...

There is a great feature on the Apollo 11 program at: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/apollo11_35th.html.

You can also check out this cool site: http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html Which features digital pictures:

a result of recent work by Johnson Space Center to digitally scan original Apollo film. The process involves removing each original film roll from a double-freezer, allowing it to thaw, then digitally scanning each frame using an Oxberry adapted HR-500 long roll film scanner.

I've been to Kennedy Space Center twice now, and it chokes me up every time I go there.

I still hope to work for NASA some day. I think the xml.nasa.gov project would be a great fit!

(2004-07-22 12:02:21.0) Permalink See also:

Accelerate your transforms

If you do frequent or repetetive transfoms of XML content, you should look into translets.

I've noticed dramatic performance improvements using translets for some forms of content (haven't collected exact metrics, though). The DocBook XSL stylesheets, along with a complex document are the best way to stress test translet performance vs. your favorite XSLT parser. (I like Saxon for most of my transforms).

Details on XSLTC translets can be found at: http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/xsltc_usage.html

As an alternative, Jacek Ambroziak has written an XSL transformation accelerator called Gregor. Information on Gregor can be found at: http://www.ambrosoft.com/gregor.html

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has tried either of these on complex documents, and your opinion on their performance!

(2004-07-22 10:28:48.0) Permalink See also: