Wednesday 13 January 2010

Occams Razor

We are amused:




Doubt Occam (a monk!) would have appreciated this use, though it is a perfectly good application of the idea.

Sunday 10 January 2010

If I had a garden this is what I'd grow - 2010-01-09 at 11-28-51

This photo seems to be getting a rather staggering amount of attention on Flickr. Once again I suspect that the key to getting Flickr hits is SEO not the photographs inate qualities.

Last time I got this much attention was for a picture that had Fedora and Thinkpad in it's comments. This time around I think it's Lisp and Emacs that are driving the hits.

HTML5 and all that

So..

Firstly a quick update re: clojure. I'm still using it, productively and occasionally frustraitedly. Most frustration comes from my lack of available time and the relative newness of the language. Now Clojure is 2 years old there are often libraries are available to do things in a way idiomatic to Clojure rather than just using Java libraries directly, however there's no a great deal of documentation of examples for these libraries. I suspect these frustrations will only disapear with time. XML parsing and processing in particular seems a little trickier than it should be given the good built in support and the given that XML is almost a LISP datastructure to start with. Ho hum..

Anyhow, right now I am taking some time to make myself familiar with HTML5. So far so good - it seems a sensible, pragmatic and useful upgrade to the the markup and API standards, with several intreging operunities to move away from annoying plugin technology (Flash and Google Gears spring to mind). I come more from the XHTML camp than the HTML 4 camp (though I have been writing HTML since the mid 1990s) so I am a little disappointed that HTML5 seems to move us to a situation where HTML as valid XML is seen a backwards compatibility issue (please let me know if that's a false impression!).

Naturally when looking into these things I am working on small example files, and by extension that means I am using nxml mode in Emacs. That means I need to get a relax-ng setup for HTML5, I started doing this hit a bump in the first few seconds and in the first google search I hit a ready made solution. Edward O'Connor has put together html5-el for which I am extremely grateful. Thanks Edward!