Tamara from Mark Robertson’s Plumbing did a good job for me sorting out a leak this morning. She did a good job and didn’t overcharge like my last one, so here’s an unsolicited plug. No, they don’t have a web site, but you can look them up in the Yellow Pages.

Dan Bricklin points to a new generation of applications that will utilize a new mode of interaction with the computer, beyond mice and menus.
In a podcast with Scott Hanselman, Dan also said that it will also affect the way programs are written, similar to the transition from text/console programs to event-driven ones [not his exact [...]

An Australian company is working on a AusIndustry grant on rapid application modelling.
I’d love to interview these guys on the blog just for some insights they gained from the process.

The traceback module has utility functions for printing the currently running stack, not just tracebacks.

import traceback
import logging

# somewhere in your buggy code
logging.log(1, "".join(traceback.format_stack())

I was looking around for projects that a MicroISV can build on top of Microsoft Sharepoint, and thought I’d share a few resources I’ve come across.

Michael Sampson has written up a gap analysis for Sharepoint. A table of contents is available for download on his site. He was actually nice enough to call, all the [...]

Bill Gates bought and put Feynman’s physics lectures on line. Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch it using Chrome (which has outstanding stability compared to IE8). However, once in a while, I’m prepared to pay the Microsoft Tax, fire up MS IE and watch:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
Update: It appears that the site is down at the moment.

Escaping escapes can be a near impossible task with XSLT.
Here is the standard form of testing whether a string matches

<xsl:if
test=”countryName=’USA’” >
Name matches
</xsl:if>

What happens if the country name is People’s Republic of China instead?

You can’t use the apostrophe because the single quote is already used to delimit the string.
You can’t use double quotes [...]