XML Libraries

Well... I think Acrterex breathed on me or something as I am now coming down with something. My throat is sore, my nose is stuffy and I just want to go back to bed. I am sucking back enough orange juice and vicks cough drops in an attempt to fend whatever this is before it gets to any real stage of development.

Speaking of bugs and development, this weekend I overhauled my Windows version of ipchains to read and store particular information in XML. When trying to source a good implementation like JDOM was for Java... I found Microsoft's MSXML sucks donky b*lls. It's an ugly COM object model written in C which just has NO clean result paths if you are writing stuff in a C/C++ hybrid. That and the amount of code needed just to write clean failure code paths on return codes is pathetic and ugly. So I went on a quest and found Xerces C++ Parser which does the trick quite nicely. It's cross platform portable, and also comes in flavours for C, Perl and Java. In the end, it seems to be pretty good. I still like JDOM better, but this implimentation is clean and pretty fast. Only draw back is that I have to distribute a 2M dll for the damn thing. The guys over at the Apache group have been working on this, and when I have time I will sift through the source and see if I can strip that down and get it to something alittle more to my liking.... like a few 100K.

My house still hasn't sold. :( The market is booming right now and we have a LOT of interest, but I am guessing the people looking for places right now find mine a bit big. We found a few little places to move to when its time, but we aren't going to fret about it until this place is sold. We can't afford to move before this is sold. We did that last time and I lost a bundle of money I didn't have then. The Monte Carlo is running pretty good now.... after shelling out over $700 to get the plugs fixed *sigh*. Ends up this car is a "high performance Dale Ernhardt pace car" which everyone seemed to neglect in telling me. So normal things.. like spark plugs which cost normal people a few dollars costs me over $15 a piece. And the plugs wiring harness... which is around $70 for normal people is over $300 on mine. And being that its a V6.... the labour to get to the back plugs is intense (over 2 hours just to GET to them as they are on the back near the fire wall of the engine) this adds up quickly. I am told though that this SHOULD (cross fingers) be it until the fall.... lets hope. I can't take and more hits like that when I am not expecting it.

I heard today that Salon is appealing to the community to save them from closing down shop. Apparently they have blown through $80 million dollars, and now need to DOUBLE their subscription revenue to BREAK EVEN. Now, the Internet bubble has burst a while back, I can't fathem WHY they haven't went "skinny" sooner and conserve their cash. Of course, none of us know what REALLY is going on over there to be able to make any kind of intelligent comment on how they run their business, but it will be sad if they just shut down. They should reconsider things and simply skinny down. Atleast then some of the content could still get published. They say they can't as it will hurt their business.... and closing down doesn't? Get with it.

Of course, I'm not one to want to pay for online content like the Salon (nor do I typically agree or even READ what they send out), but I am sure someone out there must like them. They have like 50,000 subscribers paying $20 to have electrons fired at them. If you are one of them... maybe you should renew yer subscription.