Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Cheeky Mouse

The boys had both been given a chocolate log and some sweets. Connor troughed his as normal and was watching CBeebies when Callum came to tell me about his day. We spotted Connor going for Callum's chocolate log in his bowl on the couch and told him to leave it. He grabbed it and did it in one with a chuckle!

Friday, April 20, 2007

Broken Pipes?

I have what I think is a reasonable use case for Pipes. This blog was started to talk about the kids, so that I didn't forget things about them as they were growing up. But then over time I've obviously started blogging about technical subjects as well, since that's very dear to me! (Blogging is evidently very egocentric at times!)

So my desire was to create a pipe that only contained posts about Jython-related topics, so that Jython developers wouldn't get all the noise about family. This would have seemed a fairly simple thing to do.

  1. Take an XML document.
  2. Apply an XPath filter to it (//item/category/term = 'jython').

Sadly, I haven't been able to get this to work, and posting to the Pipes support forum didn't elucidate any way of doing it. So I've fallen back to filtering based on the title of each post, which seems a bit crappy to me. Tag / Labels / Categories are meta-data about my post, and I should be able to use that meta-data. But this one can handle a post with only a single tag, but doesn't handle posts that have multiple categories. So that leaves me with the option to either always have certain text in the title of each post, or only tag posts with a single category, which kind of misses the point of categorising items. What am I missing?

Jython progress report

Not much really! I've moved jobs, so being busy on that meant my motivation to hack in the evening went a bit flat. But I'm settling in to the new thing now and have a shiny new dual core laptop for developing on. I set that up for Jython development last night, so I'm hopeful of picking it up. And for anyone that's interested, I've set up a pipe that will only have Jython-related posts in it, rather than all the family stuff that they might find slightly uninteresting if they don't know me!