Want to know what annoying is?

This is annoying.

Delivery of version 1.0 next monday.
Loads of work to do, best JSP IDE available is Notepad.
Copy everything to USB Key, take home to keep on developing on a real IDE.
Get home, laptop runs out of battery, though the charger is connected.
Shake the charger and column of smoke comes out of it, after some frightening short-circuit-like sounds.

Now, that's annoying, isn't it?

Dilemas, dilemas, dilemas

Tudo é cíclico na vida. Não interessa como se fazem ou não as coisas, temos sempre a impressão de voltar ao mesmo ponto. Aquele ponto.

Viver longe de Portugal, numa sociedade que - mesmo após 10 anos - me continua a ser estranha, é um peso muito grande. Para mim, para a Zé e para a minha filha. Nenhum gosta de estar cá, mas não podemos sair daqui.

E nesta altura do ano, todos os anos, meço bem o que ando para aqui a fazer e qual a intenção disto tudo. E nesta altura do ano, todos os anos, chego à conclusão que não sei bem, mas a alternativa (voltar a Portugal) ainda não existe. Ou seja, vamos ficando por não poder voltar.

Este ano parece-me estar mais complicado, os alicerces sobre os quais se baseiam a nossa "aventura" pela Europa fora estão a tremer mais do que é costume. A situação económica do país onde vivemos não está nada famosa (recessão "oficial" desde a entrada no Euro), o poder de compra diminui a olhos vistos, a Zé (o grande alicerce disto tudo) está farta de trabalhar para idiotas que nem sequer sabem que é o Conselho de Ministros que lhes paga as contas (e não, como aquela besta pensa, a Comissão Europeia) e a Morgana, chegada que está à idade de ter vontade própria, começa a gostar - e muito - do que lhe é dado a ver da façon d'être portuguesa.

E eu, para não variar, estou a ficar farto destes tontos, que pensam ser liberais por terem legalizado o aborto e as drogas leves, mas não conseguem admitir os graves problemas sociais que têm por resolver há anos nem ver para além dos 100km que separam a capital dos países vizinhos. Em vez disso, seguem uma política que se assemelha em muito à cultura germânica de que nós é que somos bons, só aqui é que se trabalha bem, os povos do sul não sabem trabalhar, é tudo mañana, mañana.

Está na altura de me deixar de merdas e fazer alguma coisa. Voltar para Portugal para trabalhar outra vez para a IBM (ou outros do género) está fora de questão. Aqui podem ver porquê. Não me voltam a apanhar num "ministério" em que as promoções são atribuídas aos amigos e vizinhos, nunca aos que se esforçam - mesmo se um desses esforçados é responsável por 50% do cash flow (numa equipa de +/- 15 pessoas). A alternativa é então criar algo.

E já esteve mais longe, é tudo o que tenho a dizer por agora.

Minor issue...

I'm going mad. MAD. MAAAAAD!!!

Spent the whole day - and still trying - to debug a rather large transformation process through XSLT which uses about 35 different .xsl files, linked through xsl:includes and, in one type of transformation, all possible editors and parsers I've used give me the incredibly helpful and useful error message: resource cannot be located.

Which resource? On which file?

So, let's take a different approach: step-by-step debugging. And here lies the source to my madness...

XMLSpy can't do it because the [insert highly-insulting name here] that wrote the xsl's decided he should use msxsl:nodeset a bit all over the place. XMLSpy can run msxsl stuff, but can't debug it.

OxYgen (a very good XML/XSL tool) has exactly the same problem. And the native Java Parser it uses will cry foul at every chance it has, mostly with Windows-only file urls...

Stylus is just more of the same.

I'm now trying (or rather, hoping to get a chance to try) Visual XSLT, a Visual Studio plug-in that apparently supports msxsl and runs within the Visual Studio 2003 environment. But I'm already doubting it will work, as it will use MSXML .NET which is not 100% like MSXML 4.0...
And they don't send me the trial key, even after I signed off my mailbox for them to spam in a rather big form to allow me to test their tool...

MAAAADDD!! MMMMAAAADDDD!!!

Anyone knows a working MSXML-compliant XSL Debugger?

Update: exslt:node-set (Xalan) does exactly the same as msxlt:node-set, though it seems to be a bit more forgiving. I eventually got it to work, and the reason it was failing for was a wrong URL...

Rants about a short trip

Had to go to the Portuguese Consulate this morning to get a new passport for my daughter. Though, in itself, this is not a very complex task, it is also not as obvious as one might think.

First issue: address.

Finding a consulate's address cannot be hard in this day and age, can it? I mean, google always knows where anything is. So, fired up Firefox, opened Google and started searching for "Consulado Português Roterdão". Good luck finding it.

Thought about using the official government portal to find this info. Went to "Portal do Governo". Was I really expecting to find anything here? No, not really.

Kept on googling for a while and then I did eventually find out this page which contains all the addresses for all the Portuguese consulates all over the world. Brilliant page, I thought to myself. Must be somehow controlled/built/maintained by the Foreign affairs ministry, right?
Very wrong. It's actually maintained by a Bank. A Bank of all things.

Never mind.

Found the address, hopped into the car and there I went. Of course, got completely lost in Rotterdam (it's only 20 km away but I never go there - I mean who wants to go to Rotterdam?).

As any man knows, when lost the only thing you have to do is keep your cool and keep on driving. Even if you've never been to that city, you know your target can't be too far away, and if you keep on driving you will eventually get there.
And so it happened. After turning right somewhere I saw the Portuguese flag hovering about hanging from a wall. That was it.

Found parking space (did eventually get a ticket, of course - any trip to a dutch town is incomplete without the 47.50 EUR parking ticket), went into the consulate and only had to wait about 15 minutes to have someone speaking to me.

For the first time in my life I had all the required papers and documentation, plus sufficient photos. "It's just a few minutes, you can take a seat here and we'll call you once it's ready."

Great. This was now 10:00, and it would mean that Morgana could be back in school by 10:30 and me in the Amsterdam office by 11:15.

Except that it took them exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes to enter the request into a computer form. "The passport will be ready in about one week, we'll give you a call once it's done." What? "65 Euros please." WTF?

I lose a whole morning to see someone take 75 minutes to fill in a computer-based form and I still have to pay 65 Euros on top of it?

Well, never mind, the weather is great today, Morgana's off for a sleep-over party with a friend, and when the kid's out it's Parent Party time at home (it used to be the other way around, wasn't it?).

Have a great weekend!

Feeling good

Just had one of those ego-boosting moments that will definitely last for a few days. One of those where nothing and no-one can wipe the smile out of my face.

It just feels so good when you show your work and get appreciated for it.

If it wasn't this early I would definitely go out for a celebrating beer...

Simple application description:

• Tridion Content Manager
• WebSphere Application Server
• JSP Templating
• Dynamic Content Publishing

Basically, a whole bunch of JSP templates that can be used to dynamically retrieve Tridion-stored content without any intervention. Just define which components should appear (within Tridion) and WebSphere will serve it ;-)

Just a small reminder...

...that today's the longest day in the year.

Not that I risk seeing the sun today, as it is clouded all over and I can declare myself lucky if it doesn't rain...

A situação em Portugal

Isto é complicado. Eu não tenho nada a dizer sobre quem manda, mas por vezes cheira-mal (de tal maneira que sinto o cheiro aqui, a 2500km de Lisboa).

Então um país que já tinha falhado na regra dos 3% mais do que uma vez, vem agora com um défice de 6.8%?
Um novo governo - que tem por obrigação mudar as coisas - volta a tocar o mesmo disco?
Um vice-presidente do Banco de Portugal trabalha 6 anos e reforma-se com 1.500 contos/mês?

E eu não consigo arranjar um tacho assim?

Não se percebe

Release .1

Today we're releasing our 0.1 version of my current project. Everyone seems ecstatic about it, and I just think it sucks.

But that's only me, so it's no big deal.

Anyway, the interesting part is that - being hired as a Tridion specialist - this is what I've been doing:

• Writing JSPs
• Modifying Tag Libraries
• Configuring Verity
• Writing XSLTs
• (Occasionally) VB Scripting in Tridion

In other words, 0.05% of my time has been spent on their Tridion infrastructure and all the rest has been a web developer's work.

The customer is always I right, I guess...

I survived...

Just to say I survived my 10 day vacation, pictures to be posted some time soon.

Cheers,
Nuno