XML Library Benchmark

If you are still not sure which XML parser to use, here is a nice benchmark result.  While benchmark results are not always trustworthy, these results matches my experiences with expat, libxml, and Xerces parsers.  The parser I recommend is libxml for providing excellent performance with reasonable footprint and resource consumption.  For XSLT, I recommend libxslt which provides much of the same for XSLT transformation.

Unfortunately, Berkeley DB XML uses Xerces which falls way behind libxml.  Also, I thought Berkeley DB XML stored XML in preparsed format, but the doc say XML is stored as in UTF-8.  It might be interesting to build a native XML database using libxml on top of SQLLite that stores canonicalized XML documents as well as binary versions of those documents…  If I had the time that is.

FYI, Expat is small and fast for simple tasks but offers only a fraction of libxml features and Expat third-party libraries I have looked at are no where near what libxml delivers.

Red Hat Drop

Red Hat is dropping support for non-Enterprise versions of its Linux distribution.  Drop date for Red Hat 7 and 8 is end of the year.  For Red Hat 9, which I am grumpily using, the date is end of April 2004.  So now I am running unsupported OS on my server.  I am half tempted to replace it with Windows 2003 Server at this point.  Last thing on my mind is upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise.

Class Action Lawsuit Rant

Once in a while, I receive a mail asking me to claim my share of a class action lawsuit settlement.  Amount involved is usually tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars.  The problem is that I have to fill-out long forms and provide evidences.  I am certainly not inclined to waste my time filling out those forms nor search for whatever proof they are asking for and I suspect many feels the same way or are as lazy/focused as I am.  So I am wondering where all the unclaimed millions are going to.

If they have enough information about me to ask me to file a claim, why can't they just send me my share of the claim?  For example, I have bought and registered many Windows and Office products so all the information and proof should be in Microsoft databases.  Why can't they make use of it instead of burdening me with chores to claim a lousy hundred bucks?  If that is impossible, why not use the money to reduce price on Microsoft products across the board?

I don't particularly care where the difficulties are other than that they are passing their difficulties to me.

No News is Good News

In case you are wondering, I am still here and recovering from a recent debugging binge.  What was the toughest bug you had to fix?  For me, it usually involves odd multi-threading behaviors of the containers.  Of course, one time there was this fantastic piece of self-modifying code that was a real 'joy' to debug.  To put it simply, graphics data got converted into self-modifying code so it can be rendered fast without having to access slow page-flipping memory.  Fun to code but not fun to debug.

Feeling Sorry for a Rat

Two weeks ago, I was watering the garden when my wife screamed that there was a dead rat by the water faucet next to our garage.  Feeling happy to have the opportunity to be manly, I calmly told my wife to get me a bag and a pair of used chopsticks.  With disposal equipment in hand, I walked over to the rat and discovered that it was not dead at all.

The rat was actually the size of a mouse and its has rolled itself into a ball with its head between its crotch.  When I poked it, it started crawling slowly and erratically toward our garage.  It was obviously sick, probably from eating something bad.  The rat's heroic (?) attempt to reach the safety looked just like those melodramatic movie scenes and I started feeling sorry for the rat.

Only when my wife screamed at me to save our garage from the obviously dying rat, I started guiding the crawling rat away from our garage and toward the road.  After nearly 30 minutes of gentle nudging and foot stomping, the rat finally made it safely (?) cross the road.  Later that night, I got worried about the rat so I went to check and found it gone, a happy ending of sort.

Burningbird's post about grey squirrels reminded me of the rat tonight.  I guess I am soft at heart.  It's a good thing I have a hard shell.

Adobe Software Developer Mailing List?

I looked around for a mailing list for Adobe software developers but couldn't find any.  There is com.text.pdf newsgroup for PDF users/developers, but I think there is a need for Adobe developer-only mailing list.  Yes, I do have access to ASN, but there ain't much peer-to-peer activities going on there and ASN knowledge bases leaves a lot to be desired.  If you know of one, please let me know.

Update – Via Google, I found product specific newsgroups for developers at http://www.adobeforums.com.  Nevermind.

JDK Installer Trash

I was running out of space on my laptop's system drive so I started deleting trash left over by programs long gone.  When I looked inside my user account folder within the idiotically named "Documents and Settings" folder, I was surprised to find several complete copies of JDK and JRE installer files (MSI).  I am not sure why they were there but wiping them out saved me quite a lot of space.  If you installed JDK or JRE on your system, take a look inside:

> %SystemDrive%
    Documents and Settings
      %USERDOMAIN%.%USERNAME%
        Local Settings
          Application Data

Folders containing the copies have OLE GUID names like {ABCD-1234-ABCD-1234}.

Smoker’s Day in LA

Notice the odd wind direction?  It's the Santa Ana wind, high deserts' middlefinger to Pacific Ocean.  A simply amazing sight.  I am so glad I don't live in LA.  There must be armies of firefighters down there.  I hope all of them live through this hell.  Did I mention that my older brother is a Fire Chief?


From NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

If the landscape is unfamiliar to you, Mexican border is about at the middle of the picture and Santa Barbara is about one-third down from the top.  You can also see the Monterey Bay near the top.

Roller Weblogger

I played with Roller Weblogger yesterday.  Urgh.  It seems to be using jars from every open source Java projects out there.  WEB-INF/lib contains 50 jars, many of them betas or release candidate versions.  What is the chance of all 50 of them being free of memory leaks?  It also creates a pool of background threads and is memory hungry.  Adding Roller webapp to Tomcat increases memory consumption by 30 meg even before the first request is made.

This is ridiculous considering that JSPWiki adds only 1 meg to total Tomcat footprint which takes up 22 meg with default set of webapps.  SnipSnap which comes with Jetty web server embedded uses only 14 meg total.  Roller Weblogger will become a hallmark example of how not to write a Java web application unless the Roller team isolate non-essential features and options into add-on packages and refactor the remainder.