Author: Peter

Breaking down the door

I’ve been listening to Steven Page on CBC Radio’s Stranded

We interrupt this post to ridicule the CBC’s radio guide page. I wanted to link to Stranded, so I went to the site and clicked the title link… which moved me back to the top of the page, as most poorly-written open-in-a-new-window JavaScript links do because I’ve disabled window opening in Mozilla. So I went to the source to find out what page was actually being pointed to–often embedded verbatim in a JavaScript function–and found the following:

<a class=”lgblackbold” href=”#”>Stranded</a><br>This Saturday on Stranded, host Jane Hawtin welcomes Steven Paige of the Barenaked Ladies. Find out which book, movie, munchie and – most of all – music – he’d like to be stranded with – and where! That’s Stranded, Saturday morning at 11 (11:30 NT) on CBC Radio One.

What’s wrong with this? You can’t get there from here, because there is no target. In fact, according to the list of programs, not only is there no page for the program, but it doesn’t even exist.

(And I’ll be kind and refrain from pointing out that they’ve misspelled the guest’s name.) (Um, yeah, whatever.)

Ahem.

As I was saying, I’ve been listening to Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies on Stranded, a program hosted by Jane Hawtin where her guests discuss their stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-only selections. While discussing his food of choice, and whether he’d want something he likes or something sustaining, he mentioned that he’s Jewish. And I realized that a) I didn’t know that, and b) it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t know what religion most public figures belong to–other than the ones who are known for their faith, like, say, the Pope–and I don’t particularly care to. I’m slightly more interested to discover that someone’s an atheist, but as a trivia buff, any religious affiliation (or lack of same) is just another fact.

Continue reading Breaking down the door

Still here

Not much to say recently (obviously). Two updates on the banking front and a conclusion of sorts to the competitive trivia thread are on the way in the near future.

A recent discussion prompts me to remind people that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Further deponent saith not.

What I did on my day off

Slept in until 9.

Read my online comics page. Put off working out until afternoon.

Read the dead-tree newspaper.

Started cleaning my condo. Checked e-mail while cleaning office. Got sucked in to reading blogs and other sites.

Started sorting paper in my office. Got sucked in to updating records in financial software.

Checked e-mail at work. Discussed new buzzword-enhanced open source company with coworker. Suggested using CSS instead of writing printer-friendly code to another coworker.

Looked for XML software. Wrote weblog entry about XML software. Put off working out until later.

Realized I forgot some blogs earlier. Read them.

Checked web logs (er, web site logs). Nimda sucks. Decided to artificially mention Ashcroft, Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, Hussein and Ashcroft just to inflate numbers on the Index of Evil (71 scans and counting, with no respite available.) (Updated–go away already: ipchains -I input -s 66.111.194.10/32 -j DENY)

Wrote weblog entry about my day off. Put off working out until tomorrow.

My kingdom for an XML validator

So all I want to find is an XML validator that will read the various documents I’ve written and check them against the various schemas and DTDs referred to by the namespaces within. I don’t want an editor or a tree browser or a schema builder or anything fancy, just a tool that I can use to check a bunch of files (find . -name *.xml | xargs validate). Something like that shouldn’t be that hard to find, should it?

Maybe there’s something inside Xerces2, but the README isn’t clear (or I’m just too dense to understand it).

As soon as I’ve finished writing one, of course, there will be twenty-seven better versions out there. So maybe that’s the solution to my predicament–if you build it, they will come, in an odd way.

Teachers

Both of my parents are teachers. My brother has been a teaching assistant at university. Many of my friends, or their SOs, are teachers. Heck, at one point I wanted to be a teacher… until most of the teachers I knew, including my parents, told me not to. (And, for the record, they were all right–I would have been a lousy teacher!)

Being a teacher is a tough job because it’s one that matters.

Teacher: Year One is a record of Jeanne Thelwell’s experiences as a new teacher in the New York City public school system. I’d always had a certain impression of NYC schools, and her journal reinforces it, but I’ve come to realize that they’re not that much different from Ontario schools, particularly in the past few years. Budgets are slashed, programs are cut or redefined seemingly at random, and school boards and government agencies disclaim any and all responsibility when the inevitable results appear; teachers unions are run by some of the most argumentative, thin-skinned people it’s possible to find, and they’re constantly at odds with boards and government over the slightest issue; and it’s teachers who receive the blame and students who suffer.

I have no doubt that there are poor teachers out there, but I also don’t believe for a second that I was simply fortunate enough to have missed them all through elementary and secondary school. I believe my teachers were almost as influential in my life as my parents: I can credit many of them, going as far back as grade 4, with particular contributions to who I am today. To a person they inspired me, challenged me, opened my mind and shaped the way I think. In short, they taught me.

I can’t think of a better gift. Thank you to all of them.

If I see this in your messages, I will take points off

More on l33t, usage and grammar:

  • To their dismay, teachers say that papers are being written with shortened words, improper capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $ and @. (Jennifer 8. [sic] Lee in the New York Times, via Slashdot)
  • Obviously, grammatical expertise wastes time and money. (99% of Proper Grammar is Obsolete, via Dive Into Mark)
  • Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (M. J. Shields in The Economist, via Google)

I’m listening…

It’s funny how many posts (on Slashdot, Usenet newsgroups, etc.) that criticize English usage in other messages consistently misspell and misuse the word grammar. Grammer is the surname of the actor who plays Frasier Crane on television; grammar is a set of rules that reflect how a language is actually used (Richard Lederer, Conan the Grammarian).

If citing Lederer doesn’t satisfy, the OED is a more well-recognized authoritative source:

…many questions of correctness in language were recognized as outside the province of grammar: e.g. the use of a word in a wrong sense, or a bad pronunciation or spelling, would not have been called a grammatical mistake. At the same time, it was and is customary, on grounds of convenience, for books professedly treating of grammar to include more or less information on points not strictly belonging to the subject.

The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition

Grammar/grammer goes in my list of language peeves, right after slash/backslash (hint: slash is used in fractions and URLs, and backslash is near backspace on most QWERTY keyboards).