This is a quick tip that I should have probably already known but figured out with a friend today. He was working on an XML file that he needed to transform that had several namespaces attached which had their own aliases as well as a default namespace with no alias:

In his XSLT, the XPATH that referred to nodes in the aliased namespaces were working correctly but the references to nodes under the default (unaliased) namespace were not.

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Here’s a couple of movie clips that I took this week.

This one is of flock of birds in Tempe at Mill Avenue. We like to go there every now and then to have dinner or meet friends (it’s central to where we all live). About half an hour or so before sunset the birds come from all over to congregate in the trees that line the street. It’s quite a spectacle for the eyes and ears.

You’ll have to pardon Avynn’s commentary. He’s been into WW2 airforce history lately so that’s what was on his mind.

The other clip is one of my cockatoo, Kaelin singing and dominating our poor shi-tzu. It’s sad when a prey animal has the upper hand on the predator!

While perusing the Technique group on Flickr the other day I found a post about creating “Amazing Circles”. The name sounded so cheesy I couldn’t resist checking it out. And now it’s my latest addiction. I spent the better part of a weekend going through my old pictures looking for good candidates to try out this technique on and in the process learned a few things about how to make a good Amazing Circle.

I learned how to do it from a tutorial that one of my fellow Flickrers wrote up, but I made a few changes to the process to suit my needs. This is a description of how I make mine.

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Well, the grand Christmas 2005 hunt for an XBox 360 is finally over and I am victorious. The prey is sitting on the bench in my hall. And it will soon be in the hands of some happy local family via Ebay. Why would I give it up? Well, TAD got one too and after what I’ve gone through to get one of these things I’m going to thoroughly enjoy the small profit we’ll be making on it.

For the last 2 weeks I have learned a very important lesson: Unless you enjoy whining, pouting, begging, driving all over town, depending on the mercy of disgruntled minimum-wage store personnel and standing in lines in the cold for significant amounts of time, never tell your tech-geek husband about the XBox 360 that you won in the company raffle until you can physically hand it to him. Sometimes blessings start out as curses!!

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I have a confession to make. Linux intimidates me. And I am also afraid of using a hosting service other than my favorite, Crystal Tech, because they have given me outstanding service for more than 6 years. So when I decided that I wanted to start blogging again and was convinced that WordPress was the best option, I knew that I needed to find a way to make it work on my account at Crystal Tech.

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Well, here we go. My blog breathes and says “Hello, World”. The world sighs and rolls its eyes. Does it need another blog? Probably not. But do I care? The answer is obvious.

My goals for Macro Linz are to occasionally post something that might be useful or at least interesting to people with my interests and educate or at least entertain myself in the process. Tutorials, code snippets, commentary on interesting developments in the evolution of the internet, geeky stuff in general, absurdity and paradoxes are all things you’ll find here eventually. As well as probably a few rants and raves. We’ll see how it goes.

Assuming that anyone will actually read this post, then I’ll go ahead and say that things are going to be in flux for a while while I learn how to use WordPress, PHP, WordPress themeing, and decide what, if any, ads I should I use and generally get back into the blogging groove.

So I guess that’s the first post down. Stay Tuned!