jontukontar

After about 4 months of periodic work, I’ve nearly finished cataloging my stuff. I have 238+ books, 139 movies, 72 video games, and 5 CD’s (really need to get a few more).

My books are the most interesting parts of my collection, they are a fairly eclectic bunch. I have books on: Religion, XML, Politics, RPGs, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Divination. Considering the cataloging I’ve done, I decided to run the numbers on my collection and found some interesting things.

Anyone want to guess how many RPG books I have?

( Click to see the numbers... )

Today, I cleaned up my canoe and will get it licensed for travel on public water.

PS. No XML stuff today.

Well, my books have finally arrived and I save $40 USD off cover price (total). Right now, I’m skimming through XML Primer Plus to see if there is anything of particular note before going back through it in more detail. Thus far, I have seen that there are a couple of things that I’ve learned: you can have “conditional” statements in a DTD, it is not possible with XPath 1.0 to create your own functions, and that there is a “Native XML Database” (aka NXD) called Xindice (it’s pronounced in a very odd fashion). BTW: This book is huge and much better than the Microsoft Press one that preceded it.

My books are currently in “Elsewhere” which is a tad annoying. I have been trying to get information on them for the past week but the usual sales representative is gone. Not only that but now the warehouse says that there are no copies available. I’m hoping that by next week we can at least get a shipping confirmation.

I’ve been writing some more XML for use in Anathema. As part of this process, I came to discover that the DTD that I’ve been including in with my plug-ins is getting used by Xerces (the XML parsing engine). It uses the DTD to supply the “default” values for a given element or attribute. You can test this if you have the DTD and then create an XML document, now forget to provide the cost attribute to the essence element. Two things that you’ll see is that Anathema doesn’t crash on you and you have an essence cost of 1.

In line with this, I’ve also been updating my XSL document to more accurately reflect the charm format that you see in the book. Which is turning out pretty well but the code is a mess of conditional statements. I’ve also begun to incorporate some more advanced XPath functionality into the XSL, which allows it to more accurately reflect the book and gives you some interesting details about a charm tree.

For instance:

* Using count() to enumerate the the <charm> elements. e.g. <value-of select=”count(charm)”/> You can also use simple math operators to get even more data (e.g. charm + genericCharm).
* Using boolean() to force a true/false judgement on a given piece of data. e.g. <xsl:if test="boolean(number(cost/temporary/essence/@cost))='true'"></xsl:if>
* Using concat() to string together several bits of data into a given string. (Admittedly, this has no real use in HTML but it is interesting nonetheless).

I think that I've found some books that might be useful when working on some of my Anathema related projects.  I've noticed that authors of XML books tend to be verbose (a good thing) but, given the page count, the price is fairly high.

XML Primer Plus
ISBN: 0672324229
Retail: $49.99 USD
Pages:  800
Link:  Amazon

Definitive XML Schema¹
ISBN: 0130655678
Retail: $52.99
Pages:  528
Link:  Amazon

XML: Language Mechanics and Applications
ISBN: 0201771683
Retail: $75.20
Pages:  656
Link:  Amazon

Looking at new copies from vendors that I trust puts the price at $144.  If I trusted eBay, I might be able to take $34 off that total.  Now to figure out how to pay for all this and not end up on the street...

1.  Apparently, Ms. Priscilla Walmsley has a website setup for this book at:  Definitive XML Schema Examples.  They have an example chapter, that I will have to look at.