Saxon joy!

I've just moved to saxon from libxml for some XSLT stuff I'm doing, and I'm really loving it.

Not only does saxon run take much less memory, it also speaks XSLT 2.0.

kowhai flowers at waikanae

kowhai flowers at waikanae
Originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates

moving back to google reader from bloglines

A couple of months ago I migrated to bloglines from google reader, not because I was necessarily unhappy with google reader, but because I was interested in seeing what else was available and how it might differ. I've just moved back to google reader.

OMPL just worked. I was able to move my RSS "reading list" from google reader to bloglines and back again with no fuss, no hassle and no duplication.

The advantages of google reader over bloglines are:

1. AJAX - whereas bloglines marks all items on a page as read when you browse to it, google reader marks them as read when you scroll past them.
2. Ordering - google entwines items from all feeds in time order, bloglines presents items feed by feed
3. Better integration with other services

The advantages of bloglines over google reader are:

1. Fast scanning of voluminous feeds
2. Fast browsing (it seems _much_ faster when there are thousands of items)
3. Less integration with other services

You'll notice that better integration is both a positive and a negative.

The fact that I have several google accounts and and only one of them is tied to my RSS reading means that there are tasks I can't multi-task between, even at the coarsest of levels and also means that contacts from the google account almost never get forwarded articles I discover via RSS.

The fact that my blogger.com account and my google reader accounts magically know about each other is great, as is being able to sign in once to a whole suite of tools.

In the end the reason for changing back was ordering. I read too many RSS feeds that cover the same topic for reading them out of order to make sense.

I've also just culled some of my RSS feeds, with the a prime criterion being the quality of their RSS. A number of web comics require one to click a link to read the strip and I no longer read them, but I still read Unshelved, which has the strip (and an ad) in the RSS.

Decent editor for blogger.com?

Can someone recommend a decent replacement for the default editor for blogger.com?

Before it drives me insane...

KDE/Gnome Māori localisation on the rocks?

It looks like Maori localisation has been removed from the KDE 4.0 repository:

stuartyeates@stuartyeates:~/tmp/mi$ svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/l10n-kde4/mi/messages
svn: URL 'svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/l10n-kde4/mi/messages' doesn't exist
stuartyeates@stuartyeates:~/tmp/mi$ svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/l10n-kde4/mi/docmessages
svn: URL 'svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/l10n-kde4/mi/docmessages' doesn't exist
stuartyeates@stuartyeates:~/tmp/mi$ svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/stable/l10n-kde4/mi/messages
svn: URL 'svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/stable/l10n-kde4/mi/messages' doesn't exist

Things don't look good for the upcoming 4.* releases, with the stats for translation at 0%: http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/team/

Gnome Māori localisation is not much better: stable at 1%: http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/mi

In the medium/long term there is hope that much of this localisation can be bootstrapped by application-centric localisation that appears to be thriving, particularly with respect to firefox, thunderbird and OOo.

Leaving catalyst :( joining NZETC :)

Last week I gave notice at my current employer (Catalyst.net.nz) and accepted a job at Victoria University's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. The NZETC is primarily a TEI/XSLT/Cocoon-house which publishes digital versions of culturally significant works. It also runs a number of other digital services for the university library (into which it is currently being integrated). As such it's significantly closer to what I've been doing previously in terms of environment, content and technology.
Exciting things about the NZETC from my point of view:

• We Will Not Cease by Archibald Baxter, a first hand account of conscientious objection in the first world war by the father of New Zealand's greatest poet
• Works by John Cawte Beaglehole, including letters that mention him meeting my grandfather ("Jack Yeates") at Cambridge
• Work with Learning Media, (who I've previously published poetry with) on their publishing process
• Extensive use of the New Zealand Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-CA) license for works

The commute to work will be slightly longer, with me either getting off the bus one stop earlier and catching the cablecar up the hill, or getting off at my current stop and walking up. I'm hoping to do mainly the later.