Spending most of my time working on our ITC307 project, and doing assignments due early next term.
Being able to find a bit of time now, i have been keeping up with reading, came across phpinsider.com, which has a dedicated Smarty forum. Spent a while looking to see if anyone else has been using smarty for generating SQL queries. There were a few mentions, but as far as i could tell, nothing on the scale of what we were using.
Have had gaim connected to irc.au.freenode.net for the last few days, to the tapestry, debian, and smarty channels, just watching whats going on, thought i might learn something, but nothing major yet, only a few small things.

Installed beagle and got it working. Have been interested in the idea ever since i read about a concept of dashboard. To be really useful i need to set it to index all the data on my server and other HDD, rather than just my home folder.

Well, long time. Finished assignments, and end of term.
Spent a few days working with tapestry, trying to write a library. Seeing as there's little documentation it was more or less trial and error, but got it working in the end. have an eclipse environment set up for developing it. Also wrote a tapestry filter to log requests to a file. Should implement it soon, as not all pages are being logged since the installation of new things such as this blog.
Have installed Debian on my main machine, got it dual booting with windows (no hassle), what has been a hassle is getting gaim 1.5, and newer versions of thunderbird and firefox. added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

I manually installed thunderbird from their website, and after changing sources.list thunderbird broke. updated thunderbird from synaptic, and worked fine.

Spent hours trying to get thunderbird working in the first place. I have a thunderbird profile of about 1Gb, which i didn't want to loose. Ended up having to manually editing prefs.js to update all the paths from my windows setup. After that, and upgrading thunderbird it seems to be working fine, except the fact i am unable to access postoffice.csu.edu.au from this IP address. Its getting rather annoying.

Been going back through the histories music-wise. Found a stack of albums at leading edge, Gene Pitney, Hank Williams, Bee Gees, Carpenters, and Beach Boys. Also found a very nice album from Sydney musician Lior. Very impressed with Gene Pitney, and was already fans of Carpenters and Bee Gees. Also got my hands on Motown Remixed, which I saw advertised in Sain magazine (for Sanity Music). Eleanor and her father are big fans of motown artists, and although i know some of the songs on the album, i don't know them well enough to compare them to the originals. Also finally got a Jackson 5 album (only took me 2 years), and loving it.

Well, thats all i have time for. What have i learned?

It was good to implement DTDs. I have used them before, but always working from templates. Never having to add the tags for internal or external DTDs. My XML book (XML for Dummies) does cover writing DTDs. Although i've read it, and believe i understand it, I've never had to write one. Now knowing the structure, and extact tags to be included in the XML and DTD file, i should be able to figure out how to write DTDs from scratch quickly in the future.

I was dissapointed with the apparent lack of docs for processing XML in python. I'd always found plenty of information available for python, although its a few years since i've looked. You would think though there would be more available now.

I actually had practial exposure to XSL a few days before starting the workshop. I used it in adding a feature to BashPodder to save files in a folder according to channel name (from RSS) rather than a folder named with the current date.

I will most certainly be using XML again. It has become one of the foundation open standards in modern IT. I have no immediate cause to use XML at a higher level than i do currently, although i'm sure i will be able to learn whatever may be required with minimum hassle when i have cause to.

Completed Assignment 3 here.

Didn't quite follow what some of this workshop was asking, spent some time writing a pulldom and minidom parser for the xml files, to print a similar output to the provided sax parser (only prints lines though).

I found it suprisingly hard to find good examples for XML handling in python. The manual only seems to give an overview of the objects, but doesn't go into detail about methods etc. Maybe i'm looking in the wrong places, its a long time since i've had to look up information on python, but i remember the online manual being a very valuable resource. I thought google would have been more help, but failed me this time round. My python "bible" (James R. Curran, Notes for Building a Python Search Engine) does not mension xml, its a few years old (2002), and is not intended to cover such material.

Worked on an XSL. Its minimalistic, but its nice and easy to see how different parts of it work.

Got both the internal and external DTDs to parse. Took a while to get the external one working, realising that the DOCTYPE tag:

<!DOCTYPE airports [
>

need not be included for external DTDs.

Second one done. Had white space being inserted in my output for the SAX parser for native_plants.xml. Found that characters() handless all white space in the XML file. This could be fixed by setting flags in startElement and endElement, but need to find a better solution.

Gone through the first workshop, already had python insatlled on my debain box. Cant find an equivilant to Idle, but this is no problem. I have Eclipse with a php editor installed, a very nice IDE to work in. Example program runs fine.