Hung Truong: The Blog!

Are You Smart?

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I felt like trying out my new Yamaha Silent Brass and Sennheiser HD-280 Pro headphones from the Facebook contest, and since I haven't recorded anything lately I figured I'd play some My Funny Valentine. The Aebersold track is fun and all, but playing with it makes me feel as though I'm playing as the accompaniment, rather than with the accompaniment. So here's a sans-backing version of My Funny Valentine.

The sound quality came out okay, though the silent brass makes it sounds a bit stuffy and adds a lot of backpressure to the horn. But I guess it's still better than playing without a mute and pissing off my neighbors. It works great for practicing; recording not so much. The headphones are also pretty sweet. I haven't used them that much. I mainly use them for listening to This American Life while doing dishes. They block outside sound pretty well.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, yes, I stole stuff from Miles and Wynton. I hope they don't mind.

Previously: Each Day is Valentine's Day. (I'd like to think I'm more mature in my trumpet playing since 2 years ago)

Who Says Windows Should Get All The Bad Error Messages?

I just saw this on my Macbook Pro while trying to move a file:

I tried it a few times and it gave me the same useless message. Then I figured out that I was trying to copy a 4GB+ file to a Fat32 partitioned drive. I can figure that out from memory, but OSX should be able to tell a less informed user…

Oh, and by “move” I mean copy, paste, then delete, since OSX doesn't have cut + paste…

Dominos Ad Makers Are Jerks!!!

I just saw this ad on Facebook:

The words that jump out are obviously MEDIUM CHEESE and $3.99. But if you actually read the thing, you'll find out that you have to buy another pizza first. Jerks. The first pizza is $13.

Guess what I do when faced with deceptive advertising? I click away since they are probably working on a pay-per-click model. Take that, Dominos! No return on your ad and you have to pay!

Offline Gmail != Revolutionary

So today Google wrote a post about offline Gmail.

Whoa, amazing! Now I can use email even when I'm not connected to the internet! I can read mail, and compose mail, and it'll send the mail when I get back online!!!

Oh, wait. There was a solution for all that years ago. It's called IMAP!!!!

Now, it's true you can't star stuff/archive/etc in an IMAP client but c'mon, offline Gmail is not the revolutionary development that people are making it out to be!

Checkin’ Out XSLT

So at work, I'm trying to figure out a good way to make some web pages extensible and also extremely easy to edit. Basically, the people in charge need to be able to make new pages and edit the existing ones when I leave. I was trying to figure out how to do this without a CMS. Because I can't just throw a CMS into the web server.

I have a friend who wrote something for his portfolio that involves making an xml file, then using the xml to make an HTML page. I was curious to see if this was some kind of common paradigm, and if so, if there were frameworks I could use. The ideal situation would be if I could just set up some XML schema for people to fill in content and then somehow create the HTML from that. Then whoever was updating it would just update the XML (which would be fairly easy since they wouldn't worry about markup, just the data).

I came across another old friend's framework, Onion ML, while searching for a solution. It's pretty funny that I went to undergrad with this guy but just found his site by looking up my own keywords. The Onion ML thing led me to XSLT, which seems to be the solution to my problem.

Apparently XSLT is a way to transform XML into HTML (or something else that's useful). Unfortunately, XSLT seems a bit more complicated than I was hoping. It looks like the style is defined in one file, then the XML is in another, then there needs to be a way to smash the two together (at running time). I guess there are ways to do this using javascript but I haven't gotten that far yet.

So what's the point of this post? I dunno. Probably just to document my thought process on how I got this far. Next step is to see if XSLT can make the job easier or make it needlessly complex (it seems to be a technology that was popular in the early 2000's, if all these Google searches are correct).