Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   90-10 rule of effective research and development
Tuesday, July 10 2007
The last baby Phoebe was still alive this morning but it had lost the strength to lift its head and eat, so I moved its bucket outside and hung it from a shady hemlock so it could die in a quiet place. Later I buried it and its nest, which still teamed with mites, in the yard near the garden. I then thoroughly hosed down the five gallon bucket I'd used to hold the nest.


I spent most of the day working on a project that would parse apart a treelike XML structure and store most of its data in a treelike MySQL database. By "treelike," I mean that rows in a table have foreign key relationships with other rows in that same table. I wasn't too impressed with PHP's XML parsing capabilities, which work under an event-driven scanning paradigm. The XML is scanned sequentially and as open tags, close tags, and enclosed text are encountered they fire handler functions. Perhaps it was the limitation of my imagination, but I couldn't see how this was going to provide for anything more than the ability to format or style the XML for presentation. What I needed was a way to look through the XML for certain things and then act on them as found. I have a lot of experience with such a paradigm because it's the one I use for all my pseudo-AJAX HTML-parsing Javascript tricks. To do this Javascript you use its support for the Document-Object Model (DOM), an object-based framework for describing the XML structures of an HTML page. It turns out that PHP also has a DOM library that can be used for parsing any kind of XML (not just HTML), and this is what I ended up using. Finding that this was what I needed (and not the PHP XML parsing capabilities) was 90% of today's work. Actually implementing the PHP DOM was only 10%. It's a manifestation of the 90-10 rule of effective research and development.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?070710

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