Dan Mayer's Blog

sorry i havent been posting for awhile, just been busy with the moving and getting sick and such. Anyways I will make some big post before I take off, for now nothing really new to report.

Less than a week until mexico... yippie! Beach vollyball.

Dominic Filosa Graduated yesterday YEAAAAAAAA!
Seriously good job and I am sure it was worth all the hard work you put in. So enjoy a little break for awhile before hitting it hard again at grad school.

Best of luck.

well peace out for awhile everyone i will have pictures and stories when I get back.

Alright well I am back again from mexico and there are stories to tell, but I am to tired to care or think about it right now. I will post some pictures and stories soon though I am sure.

It was a blast and I got alot of sun.... yippie for a company trip to mexico.

I have been bad at posting lately... i guess i have been a complete slacker when it comes to any of my websites in general lately. So I guess I will need to get on it, I just haven't been myself lately. So oh well. I still have pictures to post and stories to tell.... just not now.

Well I have been sick on and off for quite a while now and it sucks. I was sick before mexico a little during and again after, it is really starting to take its toll on me. Affecting my work, personal, and websites lives. So that is beginning to really bother me. Yes I know my blog has been incredibly boring for the last 3 weeks or so, and I guess I can't help that.

Scott is in town this weekend it has been nice to see him, even if only for brief little chats. I also got to see the girl I will be walking down the isle at his wedding with, I had met her once before over a year ago, and she is a very nice and friendly girl, so that should be amusing. Anyways the first thing I need to do is start getting my work and sites back on track, if I have any more health issues this week I will be sending myself into the hospital to figure out what is knocking me out for so much sleep and alternating fevers, chills, hunger, lost of appatiete, diharia, nausea, and insomnia. I am getting very tired of being sick.

So I have been reading a bunch lately. I really enjoyed Freakanomics, which is a quick and very interesting read. I also enjoyed motorcycle diaries which are a particularly good read while traveling as it instills a sense of adventure and helps you to bond with the book. I am currently reading two computer science books in an attempt to make myself into a better programmer.

Anyways there has been a spiral of events that I haven't posted about so I should do a little bit of that here:

Jesse Walker's FlowBots concert:

This was a great show and a great time. Mark, Jesse W, Dom, Nicole, Dave, Robin, and I partied it up hard. Knocking out a bill of over $100, which made the bar tenders so happy they gave us some free shots and took some shots with us. The night was great with great music, dancing, and conversation... all was well until we decided to take a last shot when we got home, I am pretty sure both Dom and I regretted that decision, and nicole probably regretted the last one in the bar. Anyways thanks for everyone that came that night was awesome.

Anyways as I have been sick I have had some time while laying around trying to sleep to think and here is one of the random rumblings that comes from my thoughts.

Fail to succeed -Dan Mayer

where does procrastination come from?
Perhaps only from fear.
Fear to try and not succeed.
A fear that your best efforts will fail
while simple never doing will certainly always lead to failure
Then how is it always far easier to give in
to lay back as the fog surrounds you and hide out of sight
than to walk forward into the light and be seen
perhaps hope which is thought as good
can also be an ally of fear,
for when you sit back and see all that surrounds you there is hope
hope that one day you will walk forward to success,
but that hope can also lead you to sit back and wait
to procrastinate until the opportune moment has past you
in which case hoping for the perfect beginning
caused you to miss a great opportunity
Not to say there is nothing to waiting a bit,
for if you step forward and fail miserably
that will be remembered and bridges have been burned
but if you never allow yourself to fail
you will never learn
and you will certainly just sit back
sealing your failure
with no chance for success.

Problem: Converting XML to Excel

I had to convert some XML to sort and display as we wished in excel. After reading a bunch of articles about XML-FO and other stuff about cacoon and other Java solutions I decided to go with just using a fairly simple XSLT stylesheet and convert the XML to HTML tables with the excel extension. This is even the recommended solution by microsoft (Which is probably because excel has a bloated and often changing format.) So converting this way leads to a well and easy and nice looking excel file and has the benifeit that anyone without excel can also view the file in a standard web browser. The microsoft tutorial on converting XML with XSTL is very good. If you have any problems or need more advanced XSTL this is also another very usefull set of XSTL examples.

The basic idea is to make the stylesheet so that it can sort and create a easy to view html table. Then you can either let excel open the XML which can find the stylesheet and apply it for the user, or you can use a program to do the conversion for your user and output excel or html files. I needed to generate the files for my users so I went with Xalan from the apache foundation.

Xalan is a XSL stylesheet processors in Java & C++

The example is simple to modify for whatever you need. I used the example file SimpleTransform, which can be found in the installation directory at

\xalan-j_2_6_0\samples\SimpleTransform

The result is simple and easy, below I will include my XSLT file to show how easy it is toe create simple large tables from a nice little XSLT file.

I couldnt include it as text cause it tried to render it so here is a link to it...
Download file