Eddie Welker.com

I love reading programming books, especially to learn a new programming language.  Learning XSLT, I read a large number of books, as there are quite a few available.  The quality of the XSLT books struck me as particularly all over the place, some were quite good while others weren’t even worth the time to skim.  [...]

Recursion is one of the core concepts in programming. It’s valuable not only as a technique for writing programs, but as a general concept for solving problems. XSLT provides many useful elements such as for-each (and apply-templates), but occasionally you will run into a problem which must be solved with recursion. Let’s [...]

Using XSLT to copy elements is extremely common when you’re transforming a source document of a certain type (XML, HTML, etc.) to the same type. Often, you need an exact copy of an element verbatim, but other times you need to selectively choose certain elements to copy and others to discard. XSLT makes [...]

Working with more than a few new-hires over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that new XSLT developers often write pull-style XSLTs by default. However, this tends to defy XSLT’s functional heritage, and is not as useful as the opposite form, push-style XSLTs.
Pull-style XSLTs reach into the source document and pull out the data [...]

They just keep popping up.
I just scrolled down my own blog, and saw a post titled “Down to three bugs.”  Funny enough, three months later, we’re still trying to push the website out. (Wow, those were some really big bugs!!!  Haha, jk…)  In fact, I’ve been pressing for the last 2 days, trying to expedite [...]

I just finished writing a not-so-simple, not-so-complex PHP script.  First, lemme say that I had a good time with it, since it isn’t either XSLT or Portal (my workplace’s homebrew) code.  It’s kinda refreshing to look outside of my multi-month project.  Exciting, in fact… despite how insignificant (in the grand scheme of things) it is.
I’ve [...]

In an effort to inspire me to write something else, I am throwing a few thoughts out from the last month.
My orchestra, The Columbia Orchestra, is playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for our next concert. The orchestra is trying to make at least a small cultural event out of it. There is a website (embracingthemillions.com) [...]

Last Monday through last Wednesday I attended Mulberry Technologies’ XSLT course. I had a fun time, and learned a bunch.
To prepare, I looked through a few books. I looked through Jeni Tennison’s Beginning XSLT 2.0 book, but it wasn’t for me. I didn’t like how wordy it was… I got lost in [...]

I am finished my XSLT class, and learned some very interesting things.  Very cool the way some of the features of the language fit within the context of Scheme (and Lisp, for that matter).   More to come.

This is my appropriately named “catching up” post.  As most know, I’ve moved over the last month.  Despite my early action, I still had to do a lot of work at the end of the month.  C’est la vie, that’s what moving is.  Aside that, I’ve also been focused on various work related things (css, [...]