The XSLT solution
News ·Monday December 17, 2007 @ 21:28 EST (link)
On
picky children and the mothers that cater to them:
You're supposed to be your kids' mom, not their full-time birthday clown. This means meeting their needs, as opposed to falling prey to their ransom demands; i.e., "Send in the chopper and the cupcakes or I'll scream my lungs out until spring!" If you're keeling over from reading "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" 40 times, it's because you didn't say no 39 times. "No" is also the correct response when besieged with requests for a chunky peanut butter sandwich with all the chunks removed. But, children can be such finicky eaters! Correction: American children can be such finicky eaters, because their parents tend to confuse parenting with working room service at a five-star hotel. In France, on the other hand, the kids' meal is whatever the parents are eating; brains, livers, kidneys and all. And while the kids can pick out bits they don't like, their choice is clear: eat or starve.
20071212: Co-authoring: created a co-authoring co-routine (an idle time background process that preserves state; Word's re-entrancy is unfortunately too weak to allow free-running threads) to do various tasks including the (internal) open and save necessary for merging other users' changes; also turned on saving OCXs (controls) and ink in the background; they had blocked background save, but not for any good reason I could determine, going all the way back in the source history and looking for the changes adding the restrictions and related bugs.
20071213: My dentist (Brooks) lost his schedule, and (so he says) the backup failed (or perhaps they didn't have one, hm? maybe they will now, if that was the case); they sent out cards asking people to call in old appointments, which I did.
20071214: Radical plan for modifying the co-authored server document: transmit updates as XSLTs, which will modify the document and/or lock table atomically (or entirely fail). Too late in the game, really, and it'd take a lot of fast-talking to get WXP to put an XSLT processor on the server, but it's a safe way to transform documents, is future-proof, avoids sync issues, and reduces transmission data requirements in both directions.
20071215: Went to Ruth's Chris steak house for Honey's birthday.
20071217: Co-authoring: presented partial-open plan to EB; thought it sounded interesting, but not sure how the merge code will handle it (it definitely won't yet; it doesn't trust paragraph IDs enough and will think one file has blank paragraphs). Put out a PR for test with the open/save in background for pushing/pulling locks.
