… and there was a power cut, so I spent most of the day sitting about trying to work out how to get anything useful done without computer or network.

I fell over a couple of times on the way in—it is strangely treacherous snow, different from what I am used to from fresh-fallen snow—before deciding to change my route to follow main roads (gritted and swept) rather than avoiding them as I usually do. During the afternoon my knee has started hurting, so I am being extra careful with it and trying to avoid situations that require dodging.

When someone at work arranges a lunch date via Microsoft Outlook, I get an email with the date of the rendezvous presented as follows:

When: 19 December 2006 12:00-13:00 (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London.

It is an 'interesting' design decision that it tells me which parts of the world are subject to the GMT time zone, which I happen to know already, but neglects to mention something I would have found more immediately useful, which is the day of the week of the meeting. Luckily I own a dektop calculating device called a calendar which tells me the meeting is schedulded for a Tuesday.

Here's a screenshot of a page from Reddit which I thought amusing. See! not only has the mob given the article 42 points, it was 21st on the list of new items, and posted 21 hours ago (and 21 + 21 = 42). How cosmically significant is that?

The .Net class library has a class XmlElement for creating an XML infoset in memory; the resulting infoset can be spurted out in to a text file to make an XML document.

Sometimes you want to have an attribute named xml:lang in your output. This includes XHTML documents and (in our case) Xliff, a format used by translators to translate text for our software. So how do you do this? Can we use the following?

elt = doc.CreateElement("source", XLIFF_NS);
elt.SetAttribute("xml:lang", "en-GB");

Nope, this results in <source lang="en-GB">.

How about this?

elt = doc.CreateElement("source", XLIFF_NS);
XmlAttribute att = doc.CreateAttribute("xml:lang");
att.Value = "en-GB";
elt.Attributes.Append(att);

The documentation specifically mentions that special XML namespace prefixs are taken care of; surely that means that the 'xml:' prefix wil be recognized? Nope.

What does work is the following:

elt = doc.CreateElement("source", XLIFF_NS);
XmlAttribute att = doc.CreateAttribute("xml", "lang",
        "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace");
att.Value = "en-GB";
elt.SetAttributeNode(att);

Wow. So did I find the magic value http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace? Is it mentioned in XML recommendation? Nope. It is buried in XML Namespaces, because namespaces did not exist when the XML spec was written. It's just as well I am an XML afficionmado of many years' experience, or I would never have found it.

Shouldn't there be an easier way to accomplish this tiny task?

jEdit has a SpellCheck module that depends on GNU Aspell. So I need to install Aspell, right?

The Apsell page has a link to Windows binaries—for the 0.50 version, dated 2002. For version 0.60, you need to build your own, using the Visual C++ version of the code (since that is how one compiles software on Windows). This is available as a Zip file, containing a discouraging README file that says that it is full of changes not approved of by the Apsell author or something. It also does not compile on Visual Studio .Net 2003 because it wants std::vector to have a member size_type which apparently it does not. This is odd, considering that size_type not only is in the STL specs, it is also in the source code of the vector class. What gives?

You know what I wish? I wish that Microsoft Windows had a built-in spell-checking service the way Mac OS X does.

We discover a man alone in a meeting room. He is typing away at his laptop. There are two motivational Oggz next to the keyboard, and papers piled up around him.

He works quietly and intently for some hours.

Enter two more men, clutching a sheaf of papers and a notebook. They see the first man and pause. They cross over to him and watch him work for a few minutes.

SECOND MAN. Did you come here because you wanted to work undisturbed?

Pause.

FIRST MAN. Yes.