test please delete

[NickFitz]

Did some shopping. On the way back, the pips went on Radio 4, and I looked out at the darkness and thought "Surely it isn't nine already?" But no, it was only eight, and already the tail-end of twilight

[NickFitz]

Ah, so it wasn't working because I'd made a cretinous mistake. Yes, that would explain it

On the bright side, while digging through documentation that was not, in fact, related to the source of the problem, but seemed like it might be at the time, I discovered a technique to considerably improve the code for the sake of about two minutes of effort. Overall, I'm going to chalk it up as a win

[zeitghost]

In the dim & now very distant past, when I worked shifts in 3M, one could tell that the nights were drawing in & autumn was advancing when it was dark outside for the 8 p.m. tea break.

Yet another empty factory now.

[mudskipper]

Ah, so it wasn't working because I'd made a cretinous mistake. Yes, that would explain it

On the bright side, while digging through documentation that was not, in fact, related to the source of the problem, but seemed like it might be at the time, I discovered a technique to considerably improve the code for the sake of about two minutes of effort. Overall, I'm going to chalk it up as a win

I got my brackets wrong today. Or more that I didn't have brackets where I should have. Took me a while to spot though.

[mudskipper]

I got my brackets wrong today. Or more that I didn't have brackets where I should have. Took me a while to spot though.

Syntax was:

z = x == null ? 0 : x
+ y == null ? 0 : y;

Which looked logical without brackets but when x and y both had values, z = y. Presumably because x + y == null was false. I don't think BODMAS covered syntax like this.

[NickFitz]

I got my brackets wrong today. Or more that I didn't have brackets where I should have. Took me a while to spot though.

I was parsing a streaming XML file, using lxml in Python. The problem, of which I was well aware, was that a certain element contained, as a child, another element of the same name. The idea is that, once an element has been parsed, one grabs what data one needs from it, then deletes it so as to avoid consuming too much memory - these files can easily be 50MB as raw text, so would consume loads of memory as an object tree.

I was using delegates from the top-level event handler to deal with the different elements I was acting on. I'd carefully written my code to identify when the element we've just finished parsing is the inner element with the same name, as obviously we don't want to delete things then. My code was correctly identifying that, but when the outer element was completely parsed, my XPath expressions were returning nothing for various things

I spent quite a bit of time going through the docs for the XPath implementation, ensuring I was handling namespaces correctly, and so forth.

In the end, it turned out that the higher-level code which sets up and invokes the delegate functions had a line in it that deleted the element, after calling the delegate, that was left over from when I was getting the bare bones of this stuff working at about 4 this morning, which I'd completely forgotten about

Once I took that out, it all worked exactly as intended. Still, I'd learned a way to precompile the XPath matchers along the way which has drastically improved performance so, as my mother likes to say, it must have happened for a reason

I am now in a position to inform you that England's highways have 3,424 Variable Message Signs, and an impressive 11,199 Matrix Signs

[NickFitz]

Syntax was:

z = x == null ? 0 : x
+ y == null ? 0 : y;

Which looked logical without brackets but when x and y both had values, z = y. Presumably because x + y == null was false. I don't think BODMAS covered syntax like this.

Tricky beggars, those ternary operators. They catch me out every now and again

[Bunk]

Morning all

[norrahe]

Morning

[Alias]