News

7 December 2008 - Some XSLT tricks

EXSLT

First of all, if you need to work with an XSLT 1.0 processor (such as xsltproc/libxslt), EXSLT defines some non standard extensions to XSLT for string and date manipulation, user-defined functions, and more.

Mappings

Stolen from http://kpumuk.info/xslt/sorting-rss-feed-by-date-using-xslt/:

<map>
  <item key="a" value="1" />
  <item key="b" value="2" />
  <!-- ... -->
</map>

<xsl:variable name="myMap" select="document('')/*/map"/>
<xsl:value-of select="$myMap/*[@key='b']/@value" />

Allows storing arbitrary mappings inside an XML/XSLT document.

4 December 2008 - Markdown

I probably should bite the bullet and open a true blog somewhere else, but since it only takes a bit of code and at the moment my priority is to be able to edit the whole site while being offline, I added support for Markdown markup syntax for editing news entries.

The nice side effect is that I can still use Git to keep the revision history for all the contents.

22 November 2008 - Lost youth

Dedicated to Syntax Error.

Today I found the very first CD I mastered (actually, Gioppino mastered it for me using La Fenice). Apart from various demos, modules, the technical manual of the 386 (plain text, with ASCII-art graphs!) and assorted stuff, it contains the very first C/C++/Assembly programs I wrote back in '96-'97.

So here it is the one I was most proud of: 255 bytes displaying an animation of the Julia set. It ran pretty smooth back then, under DOS, on my Pentium 100, and by the miracles on emulation it still runs pretty smooth as a boot sector binary inside a VMWare.

17 November 2008 - Got sick of Typo 3

Not that Typo 3 is bad, but using it for this site is like killing a fly with a nuclear bomb... As a first step now the site is built using XML + XSLT; maybe I will add support for Wiki markup (or reStructuredText, or Markdown, ...) later.

18 September 2008 - IPW 2008

You can find slides and example code on the wxPerl web site