@ndw@mastodon.social
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ndw

@ndw@mastodon.social

By way of #introduction, I'm an inveterate hacker of markup (XML, HTML, SGML, TeX, JSON, DocBook, RELAX NG, XML Schema, Schematron) and wrangler of bits (XProc, XSLT, XQuery, Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript, C#). Author. Photographer. Occasional cook. Frequent bottle washer. Employed by Saxonica. Resident of Wales. Website tinkerer, https://norm.tovey-walsh.com/

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ndw, to emacs
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The story so far: 29 supports tree-sitter. Tree-sitter enables good syntax highlighting. So I've tried to create a tree-sitter parser for Invisible XML. (It's grammars all the way down!) Comments, etc. most welcome: https://github.com/nineml/tree-sitter-ixml/

https://so.nwalsh.com/2023/08/20/175050

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

We just watched B5, for our first and only time, last winter, and I seriously enjoyed reading this.

https://www.tor.com/2023/08/09/babylon-5-is-a-perfect-terrible-series/

ndw,
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@timbray @linguacelta and I rewatched a couple of years ago. I thought it mostly held up, except for the last season which is just unwatchable.

publicvoit, to random
@publicvoit@graz.social avatar

Enjoying my DIY #Cola with a decent rum after finalizing the new batch. 😎

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@publicvoit Rum and cola isn't my favorite libation, but I enjoyed making ginger beer years ago (and real beer too). What's it like to make cola?

timbray, to random
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I gave up trying to explain to normal people why, when we interchange documents, the names of the files I send back to them never have any spaces in them.

ndw,
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@publicvoit @timbray for $f in *.ext; do something $f | somethingelse > … mother [expletive] space [expletive] you.

mathling, to genart
@mathling@mastodon.social avatar

#GenerativeArt interlude

Jewels of the sea

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

ndw,
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@mathling OMG! That is gorgeous!

ndw, to emacs
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

Random question, anyone know the magic incantation necessary to get erc-mode to connect to irc.w3.org? I'm consistently getting some "failed to determine network" error and I haven't been able to make sense of it.

evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Today is my 20,000th day on Earth. I wrote a blog post about it.

https://evanp.me/2023/07/18/20000-days/

ndw,
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@evan Congratulations! I'm a year and a bit ahead of you (says the XPath expression I used to work it out) but I missed the occasion. Fingers crossed, I'll make it to 30,000 days.

ndw,
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@evan With great pleasure!

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Do you use the self-serve checkout or go to the human cashier?

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@evan I make a point of using human cashiers because the self-service ones are clearly just a way to lay off more people. But god damn, they’ve made the lines at human cashiers so long, I sometimes submit.

evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

I had a poll up yesterday with a content warning.

Despite the warning, a lot of strangers clicked through, and then sent me angry messages about how I was a bad person for asking about such a taboo subject.

I touch on a lot of difficult topics in my polls. I ask questions because they're things I'm wondering about. It's a way for me to interrogate my own ideas. I try to CW everything that could cause harm in all my posts.

ndw,
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@evan @almad Do whatever makes you feel safer and more comfortable, obviously, but I find your polls interesting. Even the ones I decline to answer.

ndw, to photography
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We have a small family of juvenile crows hopping about behind the house. A little too far away to photograph well, but a lot of fun to watch. Hop. Hop. Hop. Pick up stick. Why isn't this food? Hop. Hop. Hop. Pick up the same stick again. Why is this still not food?

https://so.nwalsh.com/2023/06/08/083648

ndw, to random
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The cooperative.computer site seems like a good/interesting idea. But I have no idea if keycloak, nextcloud, or matrix are reasonable or reliable services. I've no reason to doubt it, but if anyone with more experience wants to help a I'd appreciate it.

kfury, to random
@kfury@mstdn.social avatar

Out of general curiosity, how often does your phone’s screen get cracked or broken?

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@kfury Never. I’ve cracked a couple of tablet screen protectors and once a phone screen protector on a phone that fell off a table onto a corner (I guess).

lexiconista, to random

Good news: a ‘pre-proof’ version of my peer-reviewed article “Better than XML: Towards a lexicographic markup language”, soon to be published in ‘Knowledge and Data Engineering’, is now available on the Elsevier website. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2023.102196

ndw,
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@lexiconista That sounds really interesting. I'm not in academia so I've got no access to Elsevier, but I look forward to hearing more about it.

ndw,
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@lexiconista This seems like it would make a really good late-breaking paper for Balisage. Balisage is a wholly virtual, live event in August, balisage.net

neil, to random

I'm on the fence about this, particularly in terms of whether acronyms or initialisms are really any different from any other unusual or domain specific language, in terms of needing an explanation.

If a guide is about setting up an email client, does it help to know that "IMAP" is the "Internet Mail Access Protocol"?

When discussing, say, Handbrake, a "DVD" is a "Digital Versatile/Video Disc?"

Or how TCP/IP expands (but not what it means)?

ndw,
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@neil For a blog post, I tend to simply link from the acronym to the Wikipedia (or other appropriate reference) page for what the term means.

neil, to random

"Train wi-fi at risk as part of cost-cutting move"

Has anyone made (UK) train Wi-Fi work? I tend to use GWR, and it would be faster to send messages via avian carrier than using their Wi-Fi.

(I tend to use my own hotspot; the line to London is not perfect, coverage-wise, but it is still better than on-train Wi-Fi. Yes, I am lucky to have a data plan.)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65673622

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@neil It has sometimes worked for me, for short periods of time.

ndw, to photography
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

Butterfly orchid, sorta. #flowers #Photography

https://so.nwalsh.com/2023/05/21/180113

timbray, (edited ) to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Mac Dock:

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@timbray Just to add "and always autohide". I'd get rid of the damned thing entirely if I could.

patrick_h_lauke, to random
@patrick_h_lauke@mastodon.social avatar

the one thing that always gets me with london is the absolute throngs of desperate office workers drinking and standing around on the pavement outside all the pubs after 5pm. and the fact that this clearly shows the need for more proper outdoor seating, but that this will never fly.

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@patrick_h_lauke What gets me is that they make the outdoor spaces unusable by smoking in them. I don't even like walking past/through the throngs on the pavement. #BanSmokingInPublic

ndw, to random
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A quick search doesn't turn up any obvious results (hello, enshittified web of 2023), so I'll just ask. Is it easy/practical/possible to configure two different 2FA devices to generate the same codes? In particular, if a site only allows one user to be the owner of a resource and I don't want that to be a single point of failure, I'd like multiple users to be able to login. (Yes, sharing logins is bad, but I shouldn't be the only human capable of publishing a release at, say, npm.org)

ndw, to random
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Dear "Transport for London", thank you for reminding me that my payment card was soon to expire. And whatever the opposite of thank you is for the shitty form that won't recognize a credit card number if it's pasted, only if it's typed out by hand. FFS.

ndw, to random
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It's really weird to me that macOS is "click-to-focus" but scrolling applies to the app under the cursor, whether it has focus or not. I'm in the (apparent) minority who think click-to-focus is wrong, so maybe no one else notices. Or something.

ndw, to random
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So, I put some code in a private repository on GitHub. Then Microsoft slurps it up and shoves it into their steaming pile of whatever they call it. Later, someone asks a question and they get a (maybe useful) slug of my code without any credit or respect for my privacy. Is that about right?

ndw,
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@msokolov I had exactly that thought myself. What happens if I publish adversarial source code with malicious bugs? Then I decided that's probably largely indistinguishable from my projects anyway. :-)

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@eldamir And would you believe them if you found it? (I suppose that's the meaning of "credible" but still...) In any event, even if you found the statement "we'll never train on private repositories", it could only possibly be interpreted to mean "until the profit associated with doing so exceeds the fines that might be imposed if we were caught."

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