A Time of Magic

One of the things that I think is really amazing is the way we’ve gotten so blasé when we watch a live news broadcast from the other side of the world. Yet, if you think about it, it’s less than 50 years that we’ve been able to do just that and it was quite a while after Sputnik was launched before the first of the international TV broadcasts starting arriving by satellite.

These days, it’s expected that you’ll get live footage from the site of wars with the missiles being fired in the background. Yet, 100 years ago it could have been weeks before you’d have heard news from the front.

It’s expected that the newspapers are in fact historical these days. There’s really no way that an inprint publication could possibly compete for real-time news in the way that it’s seen on our TV screens these days. Yet, it’s just over 25 years ago that CNN brought us the first 24/7 news channel.

Even this humble blog participates in the news aquisition services with almost 200,000 readers in the last week which implies that Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame was something of an underestimate: today we can all become at least a little bit famous and for quite a while.

It seems like a completely different age before the invention of credit cards, cash cards and debit cards and more particularly before the invention of the ATM, doesn’t it?

Many people happily travel the globe today with little thought as to how reliant they are on a technology that has only been in widespread use for little over 20 years. In fact, although the first on the high street was in London in 1967, it was many years later that the networks were established that allow us today to use our home bank ATM card pretty much anywhere in the world.

So, how did we get along pre-ATM? Well, even into the 1980s ATMs weren’t in widespread international use but you could still get a cash advance over the counter in a bank. In those golden days banks hadn’t saddled the card with the charges that they apply today so it was much more economic to get a cash advance even from a credit card (international debit cards are a much more recent invention) than to use travellers cheques.

Around Europe you could use eurocheques, a system that ironically was closed down just as the euro was introduced but further afield it was purely credit cards and travellers cheques.

I bought the big XML book a year ago. I even glanced at it. But it all seemed far too complicated to even think about it.

However, a spurt of enthusiasm caught me yesterday and with a lot of hunting around I came across the fantastic little routine called clsParseXML. What it does is to read an XML file and return a PHP array containing everything from the file but in a form that you can process very easily.

So, about an hour after firing that up I found myself having written a little routine to use the returned array and apply the processing I’d been toying with a year ago. About an hour after that and I’d even incorporated the results within my own website.

So, if you’ve been thinking of using XML, don’t dispair: clsParseXML makes it very easy.