Monthly Archives: December 2003

Recrap

Back in town, here’s the recap:

Arrived to a torrential downpour, but overall weather was good – even got 50’s one day.

Christmas Eve festivites commenced at the lovely Middleville estate of Blacken magnate Moist Pigeon, where myself, Felix Tibs, and Le Creeper joined the entire Nau clan for a spirited round of holiday cheer and much cocktails. Moist himself was dressed at the height of homeless Vietnam-vet chic in duct-taped pantaloons, and coined the phrase ‘filthy blogger’, which is sure to endure for many years to come.

Festivities continued at the notorious Club G (Gunther’s Tap Room, Jack Kerouac‘s old hangout), where 5 generations of Northport High alums filled the scene. Class of 94′ attendance was nil except for Rich Li**old, who was, and presumably still is, a dick. Same haircut for ten freakin years. J Crew rollneck sweaters and completely improper running shoe / ballcap attire was out in typical display.

Christmas Day arrived with much Manicotti and typical crankiness. Yours truly dodged the madness with some high-intensity napping. Grandmas on the scene included maternal and paternal, health status: good.

Friday night myself and the wife hit up NYC. Thanks to Priceline we scored a 4-star room at the Intercontinental on 48th between Madison and Lex. Macy’s Herald square looked like a bomb had gone off, but the NYC public library always kicks ass. We plushed out with an utterly civilized meal at Chin Chin, including a greet by namesake Jimmy Chin. 75 bucks for 2 + drinks & tip – not shabby for midtown NYC. Attempts were made for a screening of LOTR – ROTK, but alas, sold out. Heineken and traipsing about NYC were a fine replacement.

Returning to the isle, more napping ensued. Inter-nerd and all-around mad scientist Xanix rolled into the Casa Lee for some pizzas and a rousing game of HeroQuest. Corral Lane gangsta Dan Cregan was all up in that piece. LOTR was screened soon after.

In typical LI fashion, ridiculous sleep schedules were the norm. Felix Tibs took top honors for being asleep nearly 20 hours a day. Apparently he was awake at some point as well. We even got to meet Le Creeperette who was sporting sassy Mucklucks.

After unknown amounts of food gorging, Sopranos re-runs, and occasional drunkenness, we returned to SD yesterday. As always the return is depressing to me, as SD seems like the most po-dunk place in the world after a few days in the land of high population densities.

XSL is Sucks

I had the opportunity to learn some XSL this week, and was quite excited to dive on in to this hot technology.

2 days later, I was all ready to write a full piece on XSL and how much of a stinking turd it is. But after some Googling, I realized I didn’t have to, because other people already wrote that article, 4 years ago:

XSLT, Perl, Haskell, & a word on language design [kuro5hin]
XSL Considered Harmful [xml.com]

So I’ll be brief:
* XSL is a programming language, despite what you may have been told.

* XSL Stinks. Stinks Bad. Really Bad. It’s hard to use. Really hard. It’s hard to read, too.

* XSL makes easy stuff hard, and hard stuff damn-near impossible. Try munging a string or date with XSL.

* XSL exists in the weird vacuum world where XML is the be-all, end-all problem solver. This world is called ‘The World where XML is something more than text files’

* XSL is a product of the “Markup Geeks”, who seem to think that programming in a markup language is a good thing. ‘It’s Turing complete!’ Right. That’s what matters to a programmer on a crunch deadline, Turing completeness.

* XSL is a W3C spec – more proof that the W3C has gone completely bonkers.

* Pick a programming language – any programming language – and accomplish the same task in 5 minutes, in 5 lines, as a whole gob of XSL does.

I predict the quiet and unceremoneous death of XSL in the near future. Look at ASP.NET, Smarty, JSTL, CFML, Mason, Freemarker, or any simple template class to see why.*

* Hint: You can transform XML in damn-near any programming language – Javascript, Flash, PHP, etc…

Shutters

A sad note today is the demise of not one, but two San Diego skate shops, Hanger Eighteen and Overload.

Both struggled with bad locations and new competition from the mall shops. They’re both having liquidation sales- so cruise down and stock up while you can.

Peahen

I finally got it together and learned the Java web stuff. It took a long time for me to get things working, but now I’ve finally figured it out.

I battled a lot with Tomcat – some tweaks to the startup script and a lot of Google digging helped in a huge way. Don’t forget to uncomment the invoker servlet!

Once I had written some servlets and started running them, it dawned on me how ‘close to the protocol’ you can get with this tech.

Next step was to start checking out frameworks. Of course MVC is all the rage, so I made sure to check out Struts

Struts is an interesting beast. Once you’ve built web apps for a while, you tend to start re-solving a lot of old problems. The frameworks usually offer a structured way to handle sessions, user auth, and data input validation in a consistent way.

There are some elements of Struts which look appealing, but I can’t say I like the look of the JSP view templates – perhaps I should check out Velocity or Freemarker instead.

All this flexibility comes with a moderate complexity tradeoff. Unlike ASP.NET, which offers you ‘The Right Way’ to do things, the possibilities are quite open on the Java side of things.

Anyway, here’s my tips for a budding Java web guy:

1: Get familiar with the servlet container. You will see all sorts of examples on how to write a servlet, but very few on how to run em’. Read those docs. You’re gonna play admin anyway.

2: Master setting Environment variables on your system. You will need to set these constantly unless you get it straight.

3: Learn the ‘manual way’ before letting tools do it for you. Before you whip out Eclipse and Ant it helps to understand how it’s SUPPOSED to work 😉