The lovely people at Xfce and downstream at Fedora moved a new version of the Thunar file manager to fix a bug causing crashes when files are cut from one folder and pasted into another -- something I tend to do quite often.

The crash didn't happen every time but did often enough to be a little annoying.

Thanks to all who were involved, from reporting the bug to making the fix and then pushing new code.

I'm still undecided how I will convert XML to JSON in the election results app/script I am working on.

I'm considering Ruby and Node on the back end, and pure Javascript on the front end.

To those ends, I am looking for libraries that can do the heavy lifting for me.

Among the things I've stumbled upon are x2js.

Just putting this here so I don't forget about it.

If I go for Ruby, there is the Crack gem, which is packaged for Fedora, also hopefully for CentOS, and available for installation via Ruby if that doesn't work out.

Also, I don't want to forget my previous entry on xml2json.

Update: I am currently using the Crack gem with Ruby. I'm shelling out to Bash for some file-based operations that I hope to eventually replace with native Ruby code.

My initial idea of doing this all on the client in Javascript wasn't terribly practical because of all the CPU it took to do the XML to JSON operation on such large XML files.

I'm working on my election script, which has been Bash on the server to produce HTML with custom display on nine different websites controlled via CSS. Hacky as shit, but it works.

I've toyed with doing the script in Perl or Ruby, but my colleague Daniel Aitkin asked whether we could script the data into JSON, aka JavaScript Object Notation.

That way we could pretty much do this as a Javascript-on-the-client Web page. For California statewide data, we are working with XML, so a simple conversion to JSON in the browser would do the trick.

And here is one of many solutions to the XML-to-JSON problem: https://github.com/enkidootech/xml2json.

If this works, server-side scripting is limited to fetching and unzipping the XML files from the California Secretary of State. JavaScript will do the rest.

Since LA County sends fixed-width ASCII, this plan goes out the window, but I vaguely remember another ancient data format that I might be able to hack into JSON. Or the LA County data will be mangled the old-fashioned way.

I'm in the mood/mode to do things with JavaScript in the browser. I recently hacked together this simple Web page that takes any URL and spits it out with nine different domains and then copies them to my desktop clipboard via buttons, an admittedly narrow use case but one that I have about 30 times a day.

That's the best way for me to learn: Have an annoying problem and make it go away through code.

Along these very same lines, since I'm collaborating with others on this project, I decided that we needed a way to share the code.

And since I wanted to work out of a private repository, Gitlab ($0/month) beat Github ($7/month). And we are all learning git.