Quote of the day

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

- Scott Adams,

Wile E. Coyote, Super-genius

I spent much of the weekend trying to debug a strange Saxon XSLT bug.  There was a unit test that failed with the mysterious message:

 Variable Code has not been declared

This error message is nowhere to be found in the Saxon Javadoc, or anywhere it the Saxon source code, and according to Google nobody has ever reported it before.  Nor could I find any hint about what a "Variable Code" could be.

This morning I looked at my own code and, yes, I used an XSL variable which I called "Code" and which I neglected to declare.