I've been killing three birds with one stone in the past 12 hours. I've been pretty irritated by the general lack of functions in XSLT. No support for dates & times, no regex support and even simple aggregation functions like min()/max() are missing. So after work yesterday, I decided to implement the EXSLT functions for the .NET Framework. So far I've done all the date functions plus some extra from XQuery.

So now I get three things; XSLT functions I've been craving for months, fodder for a future Extreme XML column, and better tools for creating the expected results for my day job testing the XQuery F & O

More below on Penn & Teller's new show, political humor, blogs as journalism and thoughts on Joe Gregorio's recentposts on Regex-able XML.

Just reread localroger's Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect after seeing a review on Slashdot. It was quite thought provoking and well written although it did seem that some of the sex and violence was a tad gratuitious [even though it did affect the plot]. The story definitely got me interested in reading more about Singularity and Artificial Intelligence. By the way, did anyone notice that K5 stood up to the Slashdotting like a champ? Nice.

Clicked on my Slashdot user info page for the first time in a while and noticed I have 104 fans and 27 freaks (haters). That's surprising given that I don't post to Slashdot with much regularity any more. It almost makes me want to start posting regularly to Slashdot again. Almost.

More below on Spring Break, Nigerian scam letter blogs, and software patents.

French laws are weird. On the one hand they pretend to be liberal and progressive by not making prostitution illegal on the other hand they propose banning "passive soliciting" such as dressing or acting provocatively. So prostitution is legal but being sexy isn't? Ha. Then there's the fact that producers of pr0n are taxed a hefty 66% of profits which they plan to jack up to 93%. Weird shit.

Thoughts on people getting confused by the Creative Commons licence below.

Is it just me or does the trailer for Dark Blue make it look like Training Day 2? Ahhh, looks like I'm not the only one that thinks so. More below on how languages limit ones expressiveness and my current writing queue with a call for suggestions.

Last night some coworkers and I went to see Shangai Knights and Daredevil. Thoughts on both movies follow. WARNING: POTENTIAL DAREDEVIL SPOILERS.

By the way is http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22inverse+these+two+coefficients%22 the best Google Bomb ever or what?

Poll: What Movie Are You Most Looking Foward To This Year?

Flash Mind Reader. Speculation below.

Yesterday was my first anniversary working in the Belly of the Beast. As is traditional I brought in a pound of weed M & Ms for my coworkers. Digging around the K5 archives I found my first day of work diary from last year which brings back memories.

More below on the results of my last poll, scalable APIs, tester jokes, cool fellow B0rg retiring, and processing semantic HTML.

Poll: Favorite Open Source Licence?

In yesterday's K5 diary I mentioned a site that aggregates 'Microsoft blogs' and described it as unnerving. Today the site author asks if I want to be taken off the list. Well, since I'm not on the list I can't ask to be taken off can I?

More importantly my Corrolla is almost paid off and I'll soon be turning twenty five. Time to buy the phat whip. Any suggestions folks?

Poll: What car should I get?

A little while ago Joshua Allen started keeping a list of bloggers who work at MSFT. I always thought it was a grand joke and highlighted the kind of GroupThink^tm you see at B0rg Central since you don't see lists of IBM bloggers, AOL bloggers or AT&T bloggers on various other personal weblogs do you?

This grand joke is now a joke on me. There are now [alleged] news sites that eagerly track the weekly brain farts posted to the InterWeb by myself and other B0rg. This is not to disparage my fellow B0rg employees but really 90% of the stuff in blogs [mine included] is brain fart material that is only of interest to yourself, some friends and the overly voyeuristic. I'm not sure which unnerves me more; reporters who are reading B0rg blogs hoping that some poor slob leaks some confidential shit or people who create websites to aggregate all the B0rg blogs.

More rant below.

The only thing more chilling to expressing yourself in your online journal than the thought that your co-workers and manager may be reading your brain farts posted to the InterWeb is when Ziff Davis websites have links to your online journal on their front page. The previous link doesn't point to the front page which at the current time doesn't have a link but did this time yesterday. The front page currently does have a plea for people to send them more links to blogs by MSFT folks.

What an irritating way to start the morning.

More below on the source of Christ's healing power, the hundred worst things about 2002, getting Slashdotted, and the fact that Michael Jackson has lost his marbles.

Poll: Worst Thing About 2002?

Recent discussions at work have gotten me thinking about abstractions and how they sometimes help or hinder our understanding of how certain mechanical or electronic processes work. Virtual Memory, the Relational Model and the XML Infoset are examples of abstractions that have been useful to me while working on software. On the other hand certain abstractions [described below] have caused more problems than they have solved.

Below are my thoughts on both kinds of abstractions with examples.

Poll: Favorite Kind of Meat?

Yesterday I added a couple of features to RSS Bandit. The one I am happiest with is that hitting the space bar now jumps you to the next unread item. This is such a neat feature, thanks to Joe Beda for repeatedly asking me to add it. I'll upload the latest installer when I get to work which means it'll be a day or two before it is updated on GotDotNet. For those who missed it last week RSSBandit is available for download here.

As an old hand at K5 I am unsurprised that there is a K5 story moderation meta-article that got out of voting. What surprises me is that we there was a time K5 got them once every 3 months and this one took longer than usual to show up. Either K5 has hit its growth peak or the last tweaks to the story moderation system were very good. On an unrelated note I am quite unhappy that K5 has no records of my stories or my comments that go back past a year. This bothers me a lot because I used to like being able to Google for old diaries and posts or point people at my old diaries. There were one or two that I'd like to keep for posterity, I better grab them from the Google Cache before they expire.

Comments below on comments by Clemens Vasters on the XML Infoset and a response by James Strachan.

MSDN is going to give people the impression that I do no work except write articles. I currently have 3 articles ( one, two, three) described as being written by me and published in January. Of course, closer investigation shows the latter two are reprints of my XML.com articles and not new work. I really want to write about something besides XML in the next few months or I'll go bonkers.

Thoughts on the Über-browser, referrer log abuse, Keith Ballinger's quote "XSD is the type system handed down from God", a link to yet another Apple Switch Ad parody and a brief update on RSS Bandit.

Poll: What were you doing when the Columbia crashed?