The Palistinians running out of steam?

They can't keep killing themselves while maintaining high morale forever. Real interesting post on lgf. I just want people to realize that there will never be long term peace. I wonder what has to happen for most people to concede that.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1724

23:26 (utc-5)
edited: 2002-03-28 00:29 (utc-5)

 

Invalid characters in XML tags?

If anyone knows the answer to this please tell me. What characters are illegal in XML tags? In my XML parser (which I now plan on finishing again thanks to PYX), for simplicity I want to have a tag be directly available in a data structure, as in $xml["tag"], and have any attributes of the "tag" tag be available as something like $xml["tag:attribute"]. The problem is ":" isn't illegal... well, technically it's illegal in a tag because it's the namespace separator.

In any case, I won't be able to separate tags and attributes by a colon. How's a semicolon? Or is anything wrong with just using a space?

Permalink | 3 Comments | id 1723

03:13 (utc-5)

 

My brother told me that it's common practice to prepend the http:// in a "website" field if the user enters a URL without it... so I added the feature. This entry is for testing.

Permalink | 7 Comments | id 1722

03:02 (utc-5)

 

Pre-processing (or composition of functions)

This is sort of a theoretical question. How do we know if it is easier to perform an operation on some data by splitting it into two simpler operations that do the same thing as the original operation you wanted to perform? So when f(x) = (g o h)(x), how do we know when we can benefit by using (g o h)(x) instead of f(x)?

As a perfect example, it's less expensive computationally to sort and then search an unsorted list than it is to search the original unsorted list.

The reason I ask is, I'm looking again at the Pyxie XML processing library (which I've looked at before) (also see this followup to the XML.com article). I'm wondering if it's simpler to convert XML to PYX and then process it than it is to process the raw XML in the first place. It's probably simpler to program a parser in these two steps, but is it also simpler in a theoretical sense? Will it take less time computationally?

The reason I'm asking the question is a mundane one, but I'm mostly interested in the theoretical aspects of this. How can we study this phenomenon? How do we look for it?

I'm going to cross-post this on LtU. I finally created an account there. Ok, here it is.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1721

02:17 (utc-5)
edited: 02:55 (utc-5)

 

The Generosity of Sun

CPAN runs on new boxes, generously donated from Sun. They gave about a $16,000 box. That's awesome.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1720

00:31 (utc-5)

 

Mark Pilgrim has an awesome Apple IIe stylesheet. I'd want to change the colors a little to match the green monitor I always had but that's awesome.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1719

00:22 (utc-5)

 

Conspiracy Theory
Afghan quake was US nuclear bomb.

It's funny, this was exactly my thought when I first heard it. Obviously it's impossible, but it's funny others were thinking the same thing.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1718

00:20 (utc-5)