Louise and I got talking about the past and then the future. We've decided to buy a new desk for the flat and we talked about the fact that both of us, separately had fleetingly thought about it as being another thing tying us down. We like our life, we just don't want to live it for too long. For differing reasons. Louise very much wants a career as a cinematographer, a writer and/or a director and she's working two jobs to get herself out of debt. It's going to take a while, but not too long in the bigger scheme of things. Me I sometimes feel like I haven't really begun living yet, there's so much I haven't seen. The thought that I'm slowing down (I definitely am) is scary.

I do definitely enjoy my life and work and I have lots of great friends, but I'm restless sometimes. I've always been jealous of my friends who've spent long periods of time abroad and I'm very jealous of my sister and step-sister who are doing it right now. I still want to do it and I'm concious that I just might never get around to it. But doing it would mean leaving Louise for a long time, not something I really want to do. It makes us both very sad to be apart for even a week.

My experiences tell me that I should go, even if it means leaving her for a long time. Three or six months sounds like a long time, but in hindsight it's the blink of an eye. One of the best things I've done in the last few years is move to London. Before I did that it was big and scary and seemed so hard, now I feel I should have done it earlier.

It all seems so silly, it's definitely a hard choice: between the one you love and the life you want to lead. But that's not was it is beneath the surface. I'm starting to think more and more that I might spend the rest of my life with Louise. If I'm to spend all those years being happy, I have to face up to the things that I regret not doing now, rather than letting them bubble up into bigger regrets that could be more damaging. I've done that already, to a certain extent, it's time to grab myself by the throat and tell myself to stop thinking so much and to just get on with life.

Sounds easy doesn't it.

Very bad customisation. I wanted the page to look like part of my application, WorldPay wanted me to use their design service! I'm pretty good at HTML, but they gave me no tools to perform the required alterations. The result is ugly. Plus their documentation is out of date, so it didn't tell me that their advanced Java product wasn't supported on Tomcat. Grrr. Their support is pretty good though, but it's nothing to write home about.

When I create an application, consistency is vital. In future I will recommend to my clients that they go the full nine yards and get SSL hosting or a cert for their server and collect CC details themselves. I know some consider this a mugs game, but I wouldn't store those details. I would transmit them (via SSL again, of course) to the payment provider from my backend rather than with the client's frontend. I wrote something similar once, there was no payment provider however, and sending the details on involved GPG them and emailing them. I was careful to make sure nothing leaked out on to the server. As long as nothing unencrypted goes to disk or stays in RAM too long, I'm happy.

I just wrote a Java native function that discovers the MAC address of the first network interface. It wasn't too bad, could have been easier. I would have liked to pass back an array of shorts, but that seemed to cause issues and I already had a working String implementation so I stuck with it. Overall, it was OK, but I'm not sure I'd like to make too much of a habit of it.

Also we took the Christmas tree down today. We have a big gap in the front room at the moment. However, we're soon going to embark on a huge furniture moving session, which will involve getting rid of the high table and buying a long desk of some kind for Louise and I to share, hopefully solving both our current desk woes.

The little desk I sit at is OK, but it has drawers under the top, these get in the way of my legs and mean I'm always stretching wierdly in one way or another. This has lead to some nasty muscle pain at the base of my spine and around my hips recently. The chair I sit on is also becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk so it's worth spending some money to make sure the ergonomics are good. At the moment it's a bit of a disaster.

Michael Howard can keep his empty rhetoric.

His advert in the Times states what he believes and what he doesn't believe, they even compliment it with a front page article, practically advertorial IMHO. By issuing statements about what he does and doesn't believe, he implies (quite effectively) that Labour share none of his values. The truth of course is that his statements are so vague and meaningless as to be well in the court of any politician. Indeed, they are the timeless milestones of public speaking of all colours and they've long since lost all real meaning.

An example of this that's always irked me would be the conservative (small c intentional) classic, small government. The government should as big as it needs to be to do it's job, no bigger, no smaller. Everybody agrees on that. Cutting the size of the institutions as a specific goal is ludicrous. Institution size is not the priority and it's nothing but a way of masking the desire to cut government assistance. But everybody admits that's what conservatism is all about anyway, so why bother masking it?

I went and sat and read the XSLT cookbook again. This time I read a bit about SVG but also the introduction to the chapter on code generation. The gist of it was that by encoding project knowledge in XML (or something similar) and using XSLT (or similar) to generate implementation files (of any form) you can adapt to changes in that source knowledge easily.

For example, I'm asked to build a website and as part of the design we decide to put tabs across the top of the page to link to the main areas of the site. When we begin the project we agree on six areas, but as I build the site I notice that two areas could be merged into one. Instead of having to change every page I've made so far (by hand or by Perl), I just tweak my knowledge file and set my stylesheets loose on it again.

I was discussing code generation with Miles recently and he raised the points that edge cases easily throw big spanners into the process and fixing these situations after the generation puts you at risk of regression errors. The knowledge encoding should be flexible enough to allow the author to identify edge cases (by some kind of pattern recognition most likely) and provide additional information that allows the transformation process to avoid making errors. Even if that is as simple as being able to include Ant tasks that use Perl or other external software to hack the implementation outputs.

I did try something similar once. WEBWAX was a system where you created a knowledge file for a website, that would be converted into the output site by XSLT. It worked quite well, but it was a bit inelegant. Having learned much more about XSLT since then and also having become familiar with Ant, I know I could write a much better system.

XML and XSLT are a great system for encoding knowledge and generating outputs because they have powerful friends. A knowledge file might be transformed into an Ant build file and a set of other XML documents. The Ant build process can perform a lot of work, moving files, running programs or even performing further transformations. Or the stylesheet could generate SVG so that you can create diagrams and graphics for documentation purposes. A website map could be generated easily in this way, as could ERDs for an application. XSLT can output any kind of text as well, plain text ain't going out of fashion and it's a route into many many systems.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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