Mon, 25 Nov 2002
Here's a quickie poll of the major local media, and their
reporting on the state election campaign (yawn)
We're in the middle of an election campaign here, and in a desperate attempt to stay awake, the Liberals have made gaffe after blunder after ... well... first the Shadow Treasurer forgets to enrol to vote, thus making him ineligible to actually stand for parliament. Closer to my home, the Liberals are talking up their acceleration of the freeway developments, including the tunnel under the Mullum Mullum creek - which all parties agree to. Oh, hang on... except their bedfellows, the National Party who they need to form a coalition with to form government (normally, and this election seems far from extraordinarily good for the Libs). So that promise is out the window the day they form a coalition government.
Now we have them allegedly telling lies on TV. Companies saying that they're being misrepresented. Now things are getting a little more interesting for a change :)
Of course, the mouthpiece for the Libs - the Herald Sun - runs several
pieces
(this one smacks of desperation)
to try to prop up
the Libs' popularity. No mention of the TV ads anywhere in sight...
Although they do mention the Nats' plans to "scuttle" the Libs's spending
in the city...
OK, the XML rant yesterday was a little over the top - the minidom package is documented, though I will say that it's only useful if you know what minidom does. There really needs to be a top-level xml package document which outlines the use of the various xml.* packages. Or something. There's an awful lot of XML-handling code - some of it performing slightly different functions than others - and no real guidance to a newbie as to what it all means.
I spent the time this morning on the train (I usually have about 20-30 minutes) writing the beginnings of the Qt interface for my Ogg/MP3 player. By the time the ride had finished, I had the music playing under play/pause/stop controls. I spent about 20 minutes this morning deciphering the python XML documentation (rant below). Then another 10 minutes being actually productive and parsing the XMLPlaylist into a list of tracks to play.
This afternoon, I've spent about another 20 minutes re-writing that to populate a heirarchical list view in a playlist dialog (which also has by-artist and by-album listing tabs, but they're not filled yet). I can click around the list and change the currently playing track though.
Not bad for about an hour's real work (I'm not counting the time I spent delving into the minidom source to figure how to get at my XML data)
<rant>Really, there's no mention of the XML basics, like how to actually parse a file. I shouldn't have to read the source! It's hard enough that there's four XML packages included with python 2.1 - one of which (the useful one) isn't actually mentioned in the documentation (ie. minidom).</rant>
