Copia

Was in the Bay Area Thursday and Friday to do some work at Sun's Menlo Park campus, and rented a car for the flings from SFO to hotel to Sun. Wound up in an Oldsmobile Alero from Hertz car rentals. I'm not sure whether I've ever driven an Olds before, but this one is palpable evidence for why that whole division got the sack. The car is crap. The last car to come off an Oldsmobile plant in 2004 was an Alero. They should have just closed with a washing machine instead.

It feels bigger on the outside than my 1994 Hobda Civic (now that's a great car), but it's way smaller on the inside. I felt like I was being fitted for my funerary pine box, or something. It handles like a blimp, and the convenience controls such as the central locking seem to have a mind of their own. It was the first rental car I remember getting with more than 10,000 miles (it had 14,000) and my guess is that Hertz wasn't able to off-load it to any gullible dealer.

On the other end of the spectrum, when it's time to finally give up the Civic (maybe this year; we'll see), I think I'm fiending for that Toyota Prius. My Dad has one. It's a great car. Knocks it out of the park in gas mileage and emissions, has a sterling reputation for quality, and drives smoothly as sweet cream butter (much like my Civic does even now).

[Uche Ogbuji]

Ils reviendront, ces Dieux que tu pleures toujours!
Le temps va ramener l'ordre des anciens jours;
La terre a tressailli d'un souffle prophétique...

Cependant la sibylle au visage latin
Est endormie encor sous l'arc de Constantin
--Et rien n'a dérangé le sévère portique.

--Gérard de Nerval--from "Delfica"

My translation to English verse:

They shall return, these Gods you always mourn!
Time shall to ancient days order return;
The ground has shuddered with prophetic blow...

Meanwhile the Sibyl with the Latin face
Under Constantine's arc still sleeps in place
And naught has molested the strict portico.

My first foray into French poetry for plaisir (as opposed to slogging through Hugo in fifth form French class) was to get properly at the Symbolistes, revered by my hero Ezra Pound. I started, as all Symboliste studies do, with Nerval. But rather than seeing him as a bump on the road to the greats--Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud--I was captured by his lunatic vision.

"Delfica" has always been a favorite poem in mine, and it has come to my mind often during this papal interregnum. The heavy marble of Catholic order doesn't exactly recall Delfica's arboreal pagan shrine (from the earlier part of the poem I didn't quote), but in the thread of latin-tongued prophecy, Constantine triumphant, and severity of mission I do find resonance with the somber, perfunctionary pageant constantly being reported from The Vatican.

Not that it stirs any sort of devotion in me. My Catholicism is even more dormant than Nerval's Sibyl. If anything, I read Delfica's two prophetic final stanzas as a window beyond the apotheosis of some odd bureaucrat cardinal, looking beyond the evident crumbling of empire-church. Even in the case (middling likelihood) that the new Pope is fellow Igbo Cardinal Arinze, I'd probably be more stirred by sense of nationalism than religion (and nationalism is very weak in me).

What paganism gets right about religion over Christianity is mystery of the local. No. Protenstantism didn't get this right either. They claimed to be rebelling against the tyranny of Catholic dogma, but they are still chained to the Bible. Paganism derives power not from some dusty logos, but rather from the magic of particular time and place. I think that local mystery is enhanced rather than abated by global communication, and I can imagine a near end to all these crepuscular, ecclesiastical institutions that now seem to dominate our lives.

I see the church as Petronius's Cumaean Sibyl (famous from Eliot's quotation in The Wasteland). She says "apothanein thelo". Yes thelo. Every immortal Sibyl dies, succeeded by symbol, which becomes Sibyl. Et rien n'a dérangé le sévère portique.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Sanjay Velamparambil's message

The best part of building 4Suite has always been the community. That goes way back to when Mike Olson and I were chuffed to hear from folks who'd stumbled across our inchoate DOM implementation (about 6 generations of the code ago), or our initial stabs at XPath and XSLT (about 4 generations in that case). Now the 4Suite community is a loud, thriving bazaar (100 messages to the user's list in a slow month), with all timbres of voices and all sorts of agendas. it's always pleasing to me as a developer to hear a voice ring out from the noise clearly appreciating the value of the work we've done. Thanks, Sanjay, for a very nice note.

[Uche Ogbuji]

As I've mentioned I added friendlier mutation API to Amara. Deletion didn't come up in the original discussion, but I just got around to addressing that as well. Now checked in are enhancements that support the following use cases:

Use case 10:

Source doc: spameggs
Code: del doc.a.b
Result: doc mutated to eggs

Use case 11:

Source doc: spameggs
Code: del doc.a.b[0]
Result: doc mutated to eggs

Use case 12:

Source doc: spameggs
Code: del doc.a.b[1]
Result: doc mutated to spam

Use case 13:

Source doc: spameggs
Code: del doc.a.b[2]
Result: IndexError

Use case 14:

Source doc: spam
Code: del doc.a.b
Result: doc mutated to spam

Of course there are oddities to go with the new convenience. Check out the following:

>>> from amara import binderytools
>>> doc = binderytools.bind_string("spamspam")
>>> unicode(doc.a.b)
u'spam'
>>> doc.a.b
<amara.bindery.b object at 0x685b2c>
>>> del doc.a.b
>>> unicode(doc.a.b)
u'spam'
>>> #Eh?  Still there, are ye?
...
>>> doc.a.b
<amara.bindery.b object at 0x685b8c>

Perfectly consistent with what the users seem to be saying, I think, but I'll be amazed if this doesn't trip up the odd fellow.

[Uche Ogbuji]

So the title of my last entry was "Holy trésor retrouvé!". Well, that's how you find yet another bug in xmlrpc_metaweblog.py. My first clue something was amiss when I clicked the "Post Entry" button in BloGTK was that I didn't get the usual, annoying pop-up to tell me the entry had been posted. I looked at the console from which I'd launched BloGTK and I saw:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "/usr/bin/BloGTK", line 664, in prepPost
    post.getPostInfo(self.url, self.user, self.passwd, self.system, blogID, catID, title, body, checkPublish, self.mainGlade, self.useUTF, extended, excerpt, keywords, trackbackURLS, breaks, commentsAllow, pingsAllow)
  File "/usr/lib/blogtk/post.py", line 90, in getPostInfo
    metaweblogPost(url, user, passwd, blogID, title, body, publish, mainGlade, excerpt, extended, keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/blogtk/post.py", line 167, in metaweblogPost
    confirmPost(post, mainGlade)
  File "/usr/lib/blogtk/post.py", line 184, in confirmPost
    postLabel = gtk.Label("Entry Posted. ID = " + post)
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'bool' objects

Which usually means xmlrpc_metaweblog.py got confused and reported its confusion with an XML-RPC response of 1. I checked the Copia site and found that the result was an empty file for the entry. I didn't find any useful tracebacks server-side, and I'm out of steam for the night, so no further debugging. I just pasted the entry into vi over ssh and all was well again.

P.S. Same problem with this entry when I tried to post it. WTF? xmlrpc_metaweblog.py should be stateless, so the presumed non-ASCII in title bug shouldn't have affected further posting, should it?

[Uche Ogbuji]

Via SlashDot: "Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world"

Living on the edges of the Classics world as I do, I've heard of the Oxyrhynchus, but I must say I'd never really appreciated its magnitude. Maybe people despaired of deciphering the papyri, and thus never raised their excitement about it. But this is really amazing news.

I do think that the "second Renaissance" bit is hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. The Dark Age Europeans might have needed the Irish-preserved classics for their own flowering, but we are well past that point. We'll learn a great deal if the corpus lives up to the promise, and I'll be as eager as any to learn from it, but let's not start talking rubbish in our excitement.

[Uche Ogbuji]

In the previous entry I discussed changes to Amara's mutation API. In the original discussion one of the things that came up was the old element/attribute conundrum. Take the following document:

y

Users like to be able to access both elements and attributes using friendly Python idiom, but here we have a name clash on the resulting a object.Right now Amara exposes the attribute as a.b and the element as a.b_, using name mangling to disambiguate.

The important thing to remember, however, is that such clashes are quite rare in practice, even when you throw in namespaces, so such mangling is rarely necessary, and I personally think Amara's current behavior makes sense. But I may just have a blind spot, so I've been paying attention to suggestions from others.

Jeremy Kloth suggested just always using different idioms. a.[u"b"] for the attribute and a.b for the element. This is not a bad idea, but I feel that given that clashes are rare, that it complicates the common case just to aid the rare case.

Luis Miguel Morillas had an idea I consider almost the opposite. Rather than completely separate element/attribute idioms, Luis suggests embracing how Amara has unified them. Right now Amara rolls up multiple elements of the same name in a convenient way:

yz

Works such that a.b or a.b[0] yields the element with y and a.b[1] yields the element with z. Luis thinks that the following case should just be an extension of this:

yz

And then a.b or a.b[0] would yields the attribute value (u"x"), a.b[1] would yield the element with y, and a.b[2] would yield the element with z. I kinda think of this idea as "so crazy it almost makes perfect sense", but it's way too big a change to introduce before Amara 1.0. I'd be curious to hear what others think of it. Luis actually brings it up in the context of mutation--see his original post (scroll to the bottom)--but I figure that the mutation API will follow naturally from the access API, so I'm focusing my thoughts a bit.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Tom Lazar asked for a friendlier idiom for mutating elements in Amara. I was reluctant at first because the simpler-on-the-surface idioms he wanted would require rather untidy idioms in the code. I relented to the argument that user convenience comes even before clean code. I finally got around to making and committing the changes today. I'd planned to release Amara 1.0b2 as soon as I'd made these changes, and the timing seems perfect since we've just released 4Suite 1.0b1, but the changes are intrusive enough that I think I'll give folks a chance to try things out from CVS and first see whether it craters for anyone. Please give it a go and give me feedback here or on the mailing list. Thanks.

Here are use cases illustrating the new idioms for Amara. I have added them to the test file mutation.py:

Use case 1:

Source doc: spam
Code: doc.a.b = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to eggs

Use case 2:

Source doc: spam
Code: doc.a.b[0] = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to eggs

Use case 3:

Source doc:
Code: doc.a.b = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to

Use case 4:

Source doc: spamspam
Code: doc.a.b = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to eggsspam

Use case 5:

Source doc: spamspam
Code: doc.a.b[0] = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to eggsspam

Use case 5:

Source doc: spamspam
Code: doc.a.b[1] = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to spameggs

Use case 6:

Source doc: spamspam
Code: doc.a.b[2] = u"eggs"
Result: IndexError

Use case 7:

Source doc: spam
Code: doc.a.b = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to spam

Note: attributes take precedence over same name elements in binding. See next use case.

Use case 8:

Source doc: spam
Code: doc.a.b_ = u"eggs"
Result: doc mutated to eggs

In a follow-up entry I'll talk about some other suggestions I've received on this matter.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Managing XML data: A look ahead

IBM developerWorks has done well to corral Elliotte Rusty Harold for a column, Managing XML data, on tools and techniques for working with large collections of XML documents. The first article prepares the overall topic, summarizing likely subtopics and examining some history.

It's as good an opening as any for me to plug my own developerWorks article "Manage XML collections with XAPI". XAPI is a simple but well-considered community spec for XML database collection API.

Elliotte is one of the best writers for explaining XML technologies, right up there with Jeni Tennison. I think developerWorks is a greatly overlooked source of great materials on XML and other technologies. Maybe I'm biased because I write a great deal for them, but they also feature a lot of other very good writers and I you'd do well to check the site regularly, especially the XML zone, run very diligently by John Swanson.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Update: How could I have forgotten --enable-unicode=ucs4 in the Python build instructions?

Just gathering up some details on how to install 4Suite as non-root (i.e. in a user's home directory). This is based on experience installing on Red Hat and Fedora Core, but should work for most POSIX environments.

If you don't have Python installed (or want your own copy):

Grab Python-2.3.x.tgz or Python-2.4.x.tgz and unpack:

tar zxvf ~/dl/Python-2.3.5.tgz
cd Python-2.3.5/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/lib --enable-unicode=ucs4

Pick whatever prefix works for you. --enable-unicode=ucs4 is essential IMO if you're doing XML processing.

make && make install
ln -s $HOME/lib/bin/python $HOME/bin

The last step is to put the Python exe you just built into your $PATH, presumably before any other Python exe in the system.

Now for 4Suite

Grab 4Suite 1.0b1

cd $DOWNLOADS
tar zxvf 4Suite-1.0b1.tar.gz
cd 4Suite-1.0b1
python setup.py config --prefix=$HOME/lib
python setup.py install

Notice the extra "setup.py config" step. This is the key to the whole thing. The "setup.py config" sets the location for all the files installed by 4Suite except for the Python library files, which are installed to the location determined by the Python executable used to invoke the setup script. For more on where 4Suite puts things, see Mike Brown's excellent document "4Suite Installation Locations".

There is also a --home option to setup.py config, but do not use this unless you really know what you're doing. Stick to --prefix.

Finally you may want to make a link for all the 4suite commands to your home's bin directory

ln -s $HOME/lib/bin/4* $HOME/bin

Now you can run the tests.

cd $HOME/lib/lib/4Suite

Remember that this is beta software, and some test failures are to be expected (heck, I'd be amazed if there weren't some test failures with the full 1.0 release).

[Uche Ogbuji]