I had noticed Dan Sickles reference/link to LINQ in his follow-up post earlier today (e4(x)linq), but assumed it linked back to the LINQ entry page on MSDN, and didn’t click it. However, I needed to reference the e4x specification for some related work, and given I still had his post open in a tab it was easier to just switch to the tab than it was to search for “E4X” (didn’t have it bookmarked — now I do :).

However, in hovering over the general area (the links are separated by “(x)”) I noticed that “linq” was linked to a URI other than its above linked MSDN home. Out of curiosity I clicked through and found an interesting post from Steve Eichert that apparently solved *ALL* of Scoble’s problems. Curious, I quickly parsed through looking for a Green M&M sorting algorithm of some sort, but unless I’m missing something, there doesn’t seem to be one.

Not-to-fret, however, as what seems to be in place of the missing algorithm is something even better: Something that the remaining 6,642,658,382 (based on the result of the formula (((World Population on August 23rd, 2006 @ 11:00PM EDT) - 100)) can use to our advantage… A URI Filter!

Okay, so maybe not all 6,642,658,382 of us… But close!

Setting this potential time wasting point-of-argument aside,

SPECIAL DISCLAIMER: What follows below is 100% my own opinion, though there are several facts contained in the text as well. Please also note, if you have no interest in reading things of a (somewhat) political nature (though there are no mentions of political affiliations, and instead, standard constitutional rights here in the United States), then there’s a chance you may not be interested in what follows.

That said, I do believe that the topic of “The New Media“, which is the primary focus of this post, represents technology quite well. From “affordable-to-the masses” professional quality audio and video equipment, to the web feeds in which provide subscription based access to this information for on-demand delivery directly to your desktop, there is a MASSIVE shift that has both taken place, and is continuing to take place in the way news is being gathered, reported, and accessed — all made possible via this wonderful “little” invention called XML.

To those of you behind both the original development of XML, the current and ongoing efforts at refinement, as well as the ongoing efforts to build and extend upon this wonderful technology… Thanks!

And to all of you… Thanks for reading!
—

[Story Follows Below]

Google Code - Updates: New GData API: Google Base

New GData API: Google Base
By Eric Case - 5:05 PM
Post by Matthias Zenger, Software Engineer

We’re excited to announce the availability of the Google Base data API, which lets you write applications that dynamically interact with Google Base. You can insert, edit, or delete items programmatically, complementing existing input means like the Google Base front-end or the bulk upload mechanism. You can also query other users’ published content and access their items via the API. This enables you to create domain-specific search applications (or mash-ups) combining Google Base content with other services.

The API is ReST-full and is based on the GData protocol; see the Developer Guide for detailed information about its functionality and use. Also see the interactive demo app for more usage examples.

NOTE-TO-GOOGLE: Two things,

1) While I realize this information is available in the GoogleCode updates web feed, given that I am not always reading your content from my feed reader, could you *please* add the date to the HTML version of your posts? “By Eric Case - 5:05 PM” does little more than aggrevate me, as the only take away is that the post was made @ 5:05pm. Is that 5:05pm today? Nope, cuz’ the rest of the posts on the main HTML page occur at non-chronological points in time.

Of course, I could click through to the permalink, but,

a) Why should I need to click a link to get something as simple as a date? If you are going to the effort of putting the time something was posted, is it really that much harder to add the date as well?
b) https://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/new-gdata-api-google-base.html only tells me that the post was made sometime in August.
c) and thats only if I use the URI as my point-of-reference. If I don’t, just like the front page, all that is listed is the time it was posted.

2) Who made the post?

By Eric Case - 5:05 PM
Post by Matthias Zenger, Software Engineer

Update: And I quote,

You’ll never catch me, Microsoft! Bwahahah haahaha hahaha ha.

Signed,

The Phantom.

DISCLAIMER: I may have got just a tad bit “creative” in regards to what Da, err, The Phantom, actually stated in his follow-up, which, technically speaking, is something similar to,

It’s a trap!

M. David Peterson theorizes that competitivness is behind MSFTs offer to help mozzila.org port Firefox to Vista:

“..MSFT doesn’t like to be outdone by ANYONE..”

Hmm, that doesn’t explain the last five years. My theory: they want to lure the FF developers up to Redmond in the winter and dampen thier spirits in the cold, grey, rain so the IE team can catch up. That’ll give the IE folks time to implement Javascript 1.7, more CSS, native svg and xaml. And they can steal e4(x)linq from the vb.net folks while they’re at it ;-)

Actually, I think if you add mine to his, the result is pretty cool! :D ;)

Thanks for the follow-up, Phantom!
—

[Original Post]
Never to be outdone by the crafty work of The Phantom, Microsoft attempts to pull some Phantom-esque moves of their own,

XSL-FO 2.0 Workshop 2006

W3C will hold a workshop in Heidelberg, Germany, to gather inspiration, needs and techniques for a future version of XSL-FO, the formatting specification of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). The W3C XSL Working Group expects that the enhancements for XSL-FO 2.0 will focus on layout-driven formatting, augmenting the content-driven layout facilities already defined.

People and organizations who have a specific interest in the work of the DDWG and who wish to participate in the workshop are invited to send statements of interest to the Workshop Committee. The email address for such statements is [visit above linked post for the address]

The workshop is being hosted by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG at the Heidelberg Print Media Academy in Heidelberg, Germany.

In a recent post to his personal blog, Dare Obasanjo reflects on life during his Microsoft internship,

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Intern Experiences

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been five years since I was an intern at Microsoft. It’s still fun to go back to read my blog posts about my Microsoft interview, my impressions halfway through the experience and my parting thoughts at the end if the experience. I’ve started thinking about my internship again because I’m going to be the mentor/manager of an intern in a couple of weeks and I’ve been taking strolls down memory lane trying to remember the experiences that made my internship worthwhile.

Dare continues,

My favorite experience is the story behind how I got the article Using the ECMA Standards: An Interview with Miguel de Icaza published on MSDN while I was still college and Microsoft had only said negative things about Miguel’s Mono project up until that article was published.

I hadn’t realized the story behind the story before now. I would encourage you to read it for yourself to gain greater understanding of what I believe was one of the single most monumental turning points in the history of computing: The day Microsoft chose to openly embrace the Mono-Project.

You might have your own opinion, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it is because of the efforts of Miguel, Nat, and the rest of the Mono hacker community, coupled with the vision of the current leadership at Novell that has led to Microsoft’s recent embrace of the Linux Operating System, and the OSS communities in general.

From the original article on MSDN we discover,

Personally I like the term “A List Blogger” because its an immediate reminder to me the chances are pretty good that the content is worth about the same as the Green M&M’s a member of Hollywood’s “A List” will demand to be made available before they will even consider “performing.”

Of course, its tough to state which “performance” is worth more: The one on the “Silver Screen” or the one that gets cut and pasted into the Hollywood tabloids for all the world to read while they wait for their turn to pay for their groceries, to then return back into the real world, AKA, The Long Tail.

Do the tabloids make money? Yep! LOTS OF MONEY!

Well, I guess LOTS is relative.

Question: Which vertical industry brings in more revenue per year?

SourceForge.net: saxon-help

Saxon 8.8. is coming out within a couple of weeks, and will have this capability (though it still needs some further testing). I suggest you wait till then. In principle you could get it working now by writing your code in Java and using the IKVMC technology to cross-call to .NET and COM, but it’s probably easier to wait.

Michael Kay
https://www.saxonica.com/

(NOTE: If you follow the above thread, you will understand what this answer directly relates to, but in short, I’m “pretty sure” that the answer is a most resounding YES!!! :D)

Thanks Dr. Kay! This opens SO MANY DOORS for the .NET development world to begin integration of XSLT 2.0 into their existing and future application work flow. As such, my guess is that this new found functionality will have a HUGE impact in regards to the adoption of XSLT 2.0 on the .NET platform.

WOOOOHOOOOO!!! :D

Am I the only one on the planet who has been having “issues” with GMail ever since their GoogleTalk system upgrade? I don’t think I have been able to send out any messages from GMail in over three days, though I’ve been away for much of the last three days, so its tough to know if this has been a continuous, or spotty outage. Archiving messages is broken, and while there are a couple of new messages, its no where near the normal level I would expect.

As I alluded, I’ve been off the grid for much of the last part of this week, so if this is a more wide spread issue, I can only assume folks have been blogging about it. I guess its time to pay Technorati a visit :D

—
Update: Hmmm…. If its a system wide issue, there doesn’t seem to be too many people blogging about it, though at this stage of the “Symantic Web” game, its difficult to pin-point the content you are most interested in, as the combination of keywords and full-text search, while fine for non-mainstream subject matter like “XSLT”, doesn’t fly too well when you are searching for “gmail” or “gmail problems” or “problems with gmail”, and while coming up with the exact phrasing that folks are using when speaking about potential gmail problems would obviously help, if we humans are the ones with the problem (in regards to finding what it is we are looking for from a fine-tuned contextual standpoint), we might as well forget about this whole “Semantic Web” business and go back to using newspapers, television, and our local public library to locate information of interest.

As an interesting side-note,

I’ve had one of the most AMAZING weeks unfold. While the result is something I can’t talk too much about, let me just note that the Viberavetions project is moving forward at full force, and in ways I had never even considered possible.

More on that when I am able to say more about it.

In the mean time, I am playing catch-up on MUST READ blogs, and stumbled across this gem from Dimitre,

XSLT: Riding the challenge: A New Release of FXSL 2.0

I have uploaded to Sourceforge.Net the latest release of FXSL 2.0.

It corresponds to the contents of the CVS on 13 Aug. 2006. This release of FXSL 2.0 implements all the features referenced in my recent presentation at the Extreme Markup Languages 2006 conference.

Here are the file release notes:

“Notes: 13 Aug. 2006 FXSL for XSLT 2.0 (version 2) ==========================================
Much work has been done in this release.

The main new results:

* Almost all standard XPath 2.0 functions (F & O) have now higher-order FXSL wrappers that makes possible to use them as higher order functions and to create partial applications from them.
* Some standard XSLT 2.0 functions and instructions have now higher-order FXSL wrappers that makes possible to use them as higher order functions and to create partial applications from them.
* All standard XPath 2.0 operators (F & O) have now higher-order FXSL wrappers that makes possible to use them as higher order functions and to create partial applications from them.
* All standard XPath 2.0 constructors have now higher-order FXSL wrappers that makes possible to use them as higher order functions and to create partial applications from them.
* Currying and partial application uses dynamic type detection of the arguments of the function. On the final evaluation of the function when all arguments have been specified the typed values of the arguments are reconstructed using the recorded type information.”

SWEET! Thanks Dimitre! :D

I’ve blogged recently comparing the two contenders for the standard office XML format crown: the Sun/IBM sponsored Open Document Format (ODF) and the Microsoft sponsored MS Office Open XML format (MSOOX). Also I’ve blogged recently on various metrics for XML: magic numbers that help provide objective evidence for help characterize things like complexity in documents, to help evaluation and produce estimation. A reader, unsurprisingly, asked if I could combine the two threads and provide some metrics on ODF and MSOOX.

Fair enough! Here are some XML metrics for a large document with almost 180,000 words, tables, lists, sidebars and some graphics. I chose a large document so that bootstrap effects would be minimized. I used the ODF v.1.0 specification, converting it from .SWX to .DOC and .ODT in Open Office 2.0, then converting the .DOC to .DOCX in Word 2007 beta. Then I used a COTS archiver to treat the ODT and DOCX files as ZIP archives, and extracted the XMLfiles containing the basic text and markup: content.xml (ODF) and word/document.xml (MSOOX). I chose to use a .SWX format because I didn’t want to have any MS-dependencies in the data, .DOC being proprietary.

I also resaved the document to .DOC, re-opened it and re-exported it to .DOCX and extracted the word/document.xml file. Resaving data is a good trick when doing data conversion, because it removes extraneous information or structures from the source: the first .DOC are what Open Office thinks .DOC looks like, the second .DOC is what Microsoft does things.

I used the upcoming release of the Topologi Complexity Detective to create the metrics. The reports on the ODF document are here Download file; the reports on the original MSOOX document are here Download file, and the better reports on the resaved MSOOX documents are here Download file. Comments below.

Google Talk

File Transfer
With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable.

It’s about damn time! But wait…

Maybe its just me, but doesn’t a 6.6 megabyte cookie recipe seem a bit … oh, I don’t know … like the size of a track off the new ‘Super Cookies’’s album cleverly obviously disguised as a “Super_Cookies.txt”?

I guess since Apple took so much heat with their “Rip It!” campaign, Google decided to try something just a little more subtle?

Or maybe that recipe just makes a lot of cookies?

Like

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

of them ;)

That’s probably it, huh?!

Nope. err, I mean, yeah, probably.

Update: Sylvain Hellegouarch brings out an interesting point in a comment below,

It seems that many people have used the Microformat example as a way things ought to be done but I stay careful.

Creating a standard in a fairly narrow area with no pressure for output is different from creating a whole standard body such as the W3C.

As per my follow-up,

This is a good point, though it would be tough to compare the development of something like hCard to the development of its parent format, XHTML (for those unaware, hCard is an XHTML-based implementation of vCard. See: https://microformats.org/wiki/hcard < for more detail.)

It seems to me that the current stage of the Microformats development era is comparable to that of the days when the W3C was just getting underway. I *think* it was Tim Berners-Lee that stated something similar to,

“The development of XML came at a time when we were able to slip under the radar of most. XML could not be developed in todays W3C.”

PLEASE NOTE: This is completely from memory of which is based on reading the quote once, several years back. While I am pretty sure it was Tim Berners Lee that stated it, even that I am not completely certain of. With this in mind, PLEASE DO NOT use the above for anything other than general reference, and even that you should be cautious of.
—

Update: Gregor J. Rothfuss brings out a couple of interesting points when he writes,

both of your “shining examples” where done at the IETF, not the W3C, and i agree they shine. the secrecy of the W3C cabal with member-only discussions is really an artifact of a bygone era, imho. when will the W3C enter the age of participation?

As I made note in my follow-up, while I was aware that both Atom and APP were developed as part of the IETF, I didn’t make that very clear in my post. For those of you who were led to believe that Atom and APP were developed as part of the W3C, firstly, my apologies, and secondly, (please see above) :)

If interested, please see my same linked follow-up to Gregor’s comments for more details in regards to my own opinions to the points he brings out. In short, I COMPLETELY agree!

—
Update: Mike Champion (somebody who just so happens to have some experience with the the W3C process) has done a nice job of pulling both sides of the argument together into what I would term a pretty fair analysis of the entire situation at hand, and the reality (both + and -) of each. *DEFINITELY* worth a read!

Thanks Mike!

—
Update: Worth noting, Karl Dubost (from the W3C) brought the following two links and snippets to my/our attention in a comment below:

[[[
So on the other hand I actually like some of the things being done at the W3C now and some of the things that will be done soonish.
]]] - https://annevankesteren.nl/2006/08/w3c

[[[
Jeffrey Zeldman has written a weblog entry An angry fix about Björn Hörmann’s message on his reasons for leaving the group doing the development of W3C validators. He made a few points in his message which will be certainly discussed by the Web communities in the following days.
]]] - https://www.w3.org/QA/2006/07/a_peaceful_ear.html

Also, Rick Jelliffe brings out an interesting point worth considering,

On Dare’s article, isn’t it a bit much for an employee of a large company to say the W3C is bad because it is in the thrall of large companies and then to advocate that the answer is for us to just adopt proprietary ’standards’, presumably made by large companies?

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to follow-up!
—

SPECIAL DISCLAIMER: While technically not necessary (this is already specified at the bottom of each blog entry published on one of the O’ReillyNet-based domains), except for the quoted material, what follows is 100% my own opinion.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - W3C Process is Broken? Film at 11

The question I sometimes ponder is what’s the alternative? De-facto standards based on proprietary technologies seem to be one option as evidenced by the success of RSS and IXMLHttpRequest. There is also something to be said about the approach taken by Microformats community. Either approach seems preferable to the current mess we have with the W3C’s approach to standards development.

The above linked rant, of which the above quote comes from stems from a recent rant from Anne van Kesteren, someone who just so happens to know a thing or two about pretty much everything that has to do with Web Development, and/or any other type of development. It sounds as if Anne is pretty upset, and to be honest, who can blame him!

I have no idea if this particular issue had anything to do with Anne’s rant (still need to read it, so the answer may be contained in his post), but after being, for all intents and purposes, “burned by the process“, which from the initial outset made him (Anne) look like the ungrateful culprit, when in fact it was by matter of (bureaucratic?) internal W3C process in which pushed forward a half-baked document without regard for the obvious side effects of which would take place as a result — If it were me, I’d be pretty upset as well.

Two areas that Dare didn’t include in his post that I believe are shining examples of spec development by committee done right,

Update to “One additional note:” below: Uh, found the link, and it seems the way I remember things being handled is different than it is actually handled. In short, they handle things the same way.

So I guess my whole rant is effectively pointless, and meaningless.

On a related note: that really bites! ;)

EXTENDED POINT: You would have thought that making a fool out of myself on the Atom syntax mailing list when MS first announced they were going to handle things this way would have been enough to keep me from making a fool out of myself in the follow-up below.

My only response to this is,

You don’t know me very well, do you? ;)

Okay, now that we have that clear, here’s why what I stated below is a bunch of bologna,

99% of the worlds population are (somewhat) normal.

The other 1% of us are not. Of course, “the other 1%” refers to us geeks.

To us geeks, we get web feeds. We’ve adopted them as part of our daily lifestyle.

The rest of the normal people have not.

As such, MS, Apple, and any other company in the business of presenting content served up by web feeds have to be as flexible as they can be, providing a consistent user experience from one web feed to the next.

With this in mind, the reason why,

* <feed is enough information to pass the XML file to the web feed rendering engine
* <?xml-stylesheet ... must be ignored

is the fact that the user experience MUST be consistent regardless of the edge cases where someone (like me) has chosen to preface the top-most parent of an XML document with something like feed-transform-init, or someone (again, like me) would REALLY like to invoke a browser-based transformation of a web feed using the <?xml-stylesheet ... processing instruction.

The truth of the matter is that folks (you guessed it > like me ;-)) can find other ways to hack around things of this nature (e.g. using a bootstrap XML file that imports an external web feed via the document function (yo Opera, < See why the document function is so important? :D) for rendering locally.) where as normal people who visit a web site, see the little orange icon “light up”, and click it, expect to see whats contained in the web feed rendered in a consistent manner.

If they don’t,

One of the old secrets of text processing used to be using multiple stages: a pipeline so that each stage did something clear and comprehensible. The programming language OmniMark actually built this notion in, first by having a three stage processor (text, SGML, ESIS) then by generalizing these into processes; in OmniMark they were all implemented as efficent co-routines or semi-co-routines.

But I only figured out how to do this in XSLT recently, multiple stages in a single script (not to be confused with multiple passes of the same data, which modes handle, nor with functions). Probably it is obvious to everyone else. It had never really clicked with me that you can store a tree of elements made from parsing the input data in a variable, then use another set of templates to process that, perhaps into another variable. It is not as flexible as OmnIMark still (no validation=no enforced unit test; no processing of unmarked-up text into marked-up text).

As per the title run-on-sentence suggests, in this edition of The SLC Geekcast, Come fly the friendly skys of Primus and Southbound Airlines (with a twist) as Robert Scoble provides his “Guide to Blogging & Podcasting for Beginners: How to Get Noticed”. There’s also what I believe to be one of the more interesting conversations I’ve been involved with in regards to the Overseas Tech Work Force and the importance this work force has in the growth of the Global Tech Economy.

GeekCast:PartThree is now available in MP3, WMA, and OGG formats.

[The initial announcement w/ photos] [Part One] [Part Two]

Enjoy!
—

The tracks from Primus and Monica & Dem Franchize Boyz can be purchased from Amazon.com and Sony Music Store, respectively.

Dimitre Novatchev’s Blog

Hello, World!

I am Dimitre Novatchev — your host in this blog.

Here you’ll find a description of XSLT challenges and solutions. I will share my expertise in solving interesting problems raised in the XSL List or other forums.

On this blog I will announce new versions of the tools I’ve developed — the XPath Visualizer and the FXSL library among some of the more well-known ones.

NOTE TO REST OF WORLD: For those unaware, Dimitre’s influence on me as both a mentor, friend, and colleague goes beyond that of *ANY* other. I’ve been both hoping for and waiting for this day for a LONG time! And today, that day has arrived.

WOOHOOOOO!!!!! :D

WELCOME DIMITRE!!!

I found the funniest email in my inbox the other day from Dan Sickles,

I thought you would appreciate Uche’s latest Developer Works javascript using e4x instead of DOM. I personally hate the DOM api. No I despise it. One of my goals in life is to get to the end without ever having to use DOM again. Okay, it’s my only goal. I live on the edge. Must be the python prgrammer in me. Anyhow, I posted the code:

https://dansickles.blogs.com/weblog/2006/08/dom_2_e4x.html

dan sickles

I LOVE IT!!! I could not agree with Dan more than I do in regards to my dislike of the DOM API (No offense, Mike, but uh… yeah, well, anyway :D)

But wait, it gets better!

via my inbox,

To: me
From: Russ Miles

… another little tutorial I’ve slung up on the SOA Ranch that shows how to consume third party developed LLUP web services from Rails (in a generic sense, but I use the LLUP subscription service as an underpinning example). The article is available here

I’m in scramble mode right at the moment trying to get a project out the door, but a little later this afternoon I plan to come back to this and see if I can plug this into some other work that I am doing, and as such, be one of the “Third-Party LLUP Web Services” in which Russ can then consume via Rails.

I’ll post the result, if any, once its ready.

Thanks Russ!

Update: For all of you APP (which includes me) fans out there, Joe Cheng recently provided this juicy piece of info in a follow-up comment,

Blogger is going to force everyone’s hand, including ours, when they move exclusively to APP… sometime soon. Looking forward to that day as everyone’s metaweblog implementations have their own quirks.

I must admit that it does add an ironic twist to hear someone from Microsoft make the all too famous,

“force everyone’s hand … when they …”

comment, but from the defensive, instead of offensive point of view. Just goes to show that no matter who you are, and how much of any given market you might own, you can’t sit still in this industry and expect such a “strategy” to work. Thats not to suggest that I believe MSFT has been sitting still, and instead that no matter who you are, or where you are from, simple ideas can, quite literally, become the next “big thing” overnight.

Who knows, maybe your idea, whoever you are, and whatever that might be, will be in place of “Blogger” the next time someone from ‘GigantoCorp’ (whichever GigantoCorp that might be) speaks these same words.

Thanks for the info, Joe!
—

Those of you who have been around the Web since right around day one or so will understand what I mean when I state: HomeSite ROCKS!!! (a statement often made in WebDev circles circa 1995)

For the record, HomeSite still ROCKS!!!, but thats beside the point.

So, what is the point?

I’m gettin’ there, snappy, now go take another Ritalin Adderall Adderall XR and go sit in the corner until it takes hold!

Okay, for those of you still with me,

Today I’ve been working on getting a community-based XSLT development, test, and module library set up, and as much XSLT code that seems ready enough to be checked in, as well as existing vendor XSLT extension modules such as Dimitre’s FXSL library (both FXSL 1.2 for XSLT 1.0 and FXSL 1.1 for XSLT 2.0), as well as Russ and my AspectXML project, and pieces of my own AtomicXML code base.

The above is a result of spending part of the afternoon writing a web feed aggregator out of frustration due to the discovery earlier today that another main stream OSS hosting provider went to all the effort of providing a web feed aggregator interface for external web feeds (nice!) only to discover that this so called aggregator doesn’t provide support for ANY OTHER format other than RSS 2.0 — FOR A WEB FEED AGGREGATOR!– Please tell me I’m not the only one who finds that to be a bit strange?!

Anyway, as mentioned, it did spur me to start to roll my own which I am in process of finshing out at the moment, a side effect of which led me to spending the last few hours readying the repository with a bunch of other code, which led me to the GoogleCode site (where this particular project will be hosted) which then led me to the following, [Sorry to have put you through all of the above — but I needed to vent — Venting now complete :)]

Just getting my day started, and in doing so noticed a new “Spreadsheets” link on the top left hand side “Menu Bar” contained inside the Gmail interface. Out of curiosity I clicked and found what seems to be a pretty slick little personal spreadsheet tool,

[Access 1024×768 view]

I have a tendency to discredit folks who make attempt at building hosted applications intended for use within web browsers, and this hasn’t changed. But when it comes to Google, I have to keep reminding myself that,

Eagerness and laziness just don’t mix.

There are basically two kinds of XML Schema applications: one kind relies on having all the various schema documents present, the other kind dynamically locates and loads schemas for namespaces as elements or attributes with that namespace are found in a document, lazily. Examples of the first kind include XML IDEs and XML Databinding tools; examples of the second kind include most server-based library tools, such as Apache Xerces and MSXML.

The reasons are obvious: speed. An IDE needs to have all the information at the user’s fingertips. A server-based validator needs to avoid loading spurious schemas where a namespace is possible but not actually used in the instance.

But they are incompatible. The trouble comes whenever you have standard envelope elements or whenever you have multi-vocabulary documents that can start in several vocabularies. The IDE kind of application resolves all th imports in the schemas eagerly; the server kind of application read declarations in a schema, including the import elements, lazily.

XML Schemas allows both behaviours. So you have have a set of schemas that your IDE says is complete and OK, and which validates your sample documents, and then pass the same schema to a server validator and have reports that certain schemas are not available. HUH, BUT I CAN SEE THE IMPORT STATEMENTS?? ( I’ll give a little example later, to help clarify it.)

So what can you do? For a start, if you create documents using an application that has all schemas loaded, you need to be aware that there is a large chance (if you have multiple schemas and standard envelopes, etc) that your schemas will not run successfully in applications of the other kind. There are a couple of remedies: importing everything from everywhere, is one ugly one; having facade schemas is another. But you should probably think in terms of “document type”, just like the old days of DTDs: base the document type on the namespace of the top-level element, and if you have multiple namespaces possible, make up a separate schema (invoking the common components) directly.

I’m just getting ready to close up shop for the night, but noticed that Uche had linked to his latest article in his ‘XML in Firefox 1.5′ series on IBM’s developerWorks, which opens with,

XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 3: JavaScript meets XML in Firefox

In this third article of the XML in Firefox 1.5 series, you learn to manipulate XML with the JavaScript implementation in Mozilla Firefox. In the first two articles, XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 1: Overview of XML features and XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 2: Basic XML processing, you learned about the different XML-related facilities in Mozilla Firefox, and the basics of XML parsing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XSLT stylesheet invocation.

Nice! I have ear-marked this for study first thing tomorrow morning, so unfortunately I can’t state that,

“I have read this and its *fantastic!*”.

What I can state is

“Uche wrote this… Need I say more?”

If yes…

“I promise, it’s *fantastic!*, now go forth and read, Grasshopper, and you will be all the wiser because of it.”

At least thats my plan, anway :D

Thanks Uche!

Just found reference to this article in an email from Peter Hale,

User Driven Modelling: Translation and Aspect-Oriented Programming

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) can also be used in the translation as either a programming language AspectXML, or a language for representing results. The results could be visualised using stylesheets and interactive software, and where useful translated further into other kinds of representations other than trees e.g. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) diagrams and graphs.

SWEET! I need to study Peter’s graphs to understand things a bit better, but I’m loving the fact that folks are finding new and innovative ways to use AspectXML! :D

Thanks Peter!

The Extreme Markup Languages© 2006 Conference is currently in full swing in Montreal, Quebec, and following B Tommie Usdin’s traditional opening to this years conference, was none other than my (and I assume yours as well? If not, you might want to reconsider your priorities there, champ, cuz’ uh, yeah… you need to. ;) :D) *VERY FAVORITE* hacker of *ALL TIME*, Dimitre Novatchev.

Higher-Order Functional Programming with XSLT 2.0 and FXSL

XSLT has turned out to be very different from the typical programming languages in use today. One question that’s being asked frequently is: What kind of programming language is actually XSLT? Until recently, the authoritative answer from some of the best specialists was that XSLT is a declarative (as opposed to imperative), but still not a FP [functional programming], language. Michael Kay notes in his article “What kind of language is XSLT” [Kay]:

This is as far as I’ve got into the paper, of which I plan now to rectify. But because of the luv’ I have for *each* and *every* one of you — well, most of you anyway ;) — I decided to share.

You’re welcome :D

Thanks Dimitre! I can’t wait to start learning… *IN PROCESS* :D

Update: SWEET! Just noticed the link to the PDF version of his presentation. While I could always print the HTML version, by habit I usually don’t as it just doesn’t read the same way as a well organized, clearly printed format such as that in which a PDF tends to promote. When a PDF (or .doc for that matter, though .doc is not as common when alternative formats are provided) is available, I immediately Ctrl+P as soon as its finished loading, as I prefer printed paper to the glow of an LCD on *ANY DAY* of the week.

Except holidays. I prefer family to *BOTH* of these on holidays. For that matter, I prefer family on non-holidays too, but — well, maybe I’d just best stick my nose back into the still warm to the touch paper I am now metaphorically devouring.

Again, you’re welcome. :D

Yet another Update: Uh, just finished reading this *REALLY GOOD* summary of day one of the conference (I *REALLY* needed to be at this conference, but I also *REALLY* need to finish some projects that now have specific deadlines attached to them as well, so unfortunately thats what I am presently in process of), written by David J. Birnbaum, when I came across the following comment from Ann Wrightson,

Like a lot of people, I think, I installed Java on my year old Linux box without configuring FireFox to run it. I finally got round to it, its about 2 minutes work. Here’s how.

Update: Martin Payne has just come up with what I feel is the most *ingenius* solution to the not ‘not important‘ dilemma…

The first time I saw !important, I also thought it meant “unimportant”. Even though I now know how to use it, I still don’t like it much. Perhaps a double negative !unimportant would have been better, but I guess that would cause just as much confusion for people not familiar with Boolean. How about !!important instead then? :o)

I LOVE IT!

Anybody have a contact on the CSS WG at the W3C? I’d send them the suggestion, but I’m pretty sure that if there isn’t one already, an automatic filter to send any emails from me directly to the “Trash” folder would be created soon thereafter. ;) :D

–
Update: I got home last night running on energy reserves, so I am just getting to this planned update now. As per this same linked comment below,

@David Håsäther, Anonymous,

All *VERY* good points. Thanks!

I am literally rushing out the door, and I need to read both of your comments more thoroughly to absorb things a bit more. One thing I will add to the top of the post later tonight when I return is the fact that,

a) This was obviously something that the designers of the spec *HAD* to take into consideration when they chose to move forward with it, and as such,
b) There’s probably a pretty good reason why they chose to move forward with it.
c) I’m probably being just a little too annoyingly nit picky.

So there ya have it. :)

There are some *REALLY* good follow-up comments below from the above mentioned folks, as well as David Buxton, and Asbjørn Ulsberg. If you have a moment, taking note of their comments would be *WELL* worth the time you invest.

Thanks folks!

[Original Post]
By force of habit, when I visit any of the documents that relate to a particular standard hoping to gain further in-sight into why something is not behaving the way I think it should, I will often times find myself running through this same specification from start to finish, just to make sure that the reason behind my misunderstanding relates to the specific question at hand, instead of something else in the specification that might override the specified behavior, and therefore be the source of my misunderstanding.

I was just brushing up on a few CSS-related things as they relate to the rules of inheritance. Of course, in doing so I came to the ‘!important’ section of the Assigning property values, Cascading, and Inheritance section of the CSS2 specification.

Maybe I’m the only person on the planet who feels this way, but coming from the perspective of a hacker who’s experience with coding is built from a ‘programming language’ foundation, instead of a ‘property=value’ pseudo language such as CSS [1], when I see the ‘!’ character in front of any other character, or set of characters thereof, I immediattelly think “not important”, which for those unaware, is the standard way in most modern day programming languages to negate the object, or element, or attribute, or operator, or etc… that follows it, using this to compare two of the same previous mentioned items, using the resulting boolean value (true or false) as a way to make a decision as to what to do next.

For example,

This week’s issue of eWeek features a comparative review of ESB products, including open-source offerings. eWeek Labs Director Jim Rapoza summarizes: “The Sonic ESB platform defined the ESB category, and Version 7.0 is the most mature and capable ESB available; Sonic ESB, coupled with the Sonic SOA Suite, is a powerful services platform.”

The feature can be found online at https://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1997940,00.asp. It has nice things to say about each product, but also has a few digs for each one. I have included some excerpts from the article that I found interesting -

In this episode I immediattely get my blind eyes corrected in regards to my opinions about community generated content. I now see the light — Community-based content development has a brighter future than I have ever given it credit, and is, in fact, the past, present, and future of a successful business on the internet.

Couple communities with the ability that services such as Amazon’s S3 provide to quickly and cheaply develop and test new ideas without need for significant venture capital and, in my opinion, the result of locking down content with DRM-like controls will be that of locking you out of, instead if into, the market.

Does Scoble agree?

Listen to Sam Roberts lead you into and out of the answer in this second of three episodes of Scoble and the SLC Geeks, available now in MP3, WMA, and OGG formats.

Update: QuotationsPage.com, run by Michael and Laura Moncur [photo, Michael’s blog], is the primary topic that led the focus of this conversation.

Michael, Laura: Truly FANTASTIC and VALUABLE information you’ve provided for the rest of us. Thanks! :D
—

NOTE: To save you the hassle of locating the related threads, I posted part one of this series yesterday morning.
—

Update: Worth noting are the lyrics to the chosen intro and exit for this edition: Sam Roberts “The Gate” from his recently released album, Chemical City.

My favorite line,

Update: Part two of three is now available.

[Original Post]
As per my post from yesterday afternoon, Robert Scoble was in Salt Lake City yesterday, and pulled together an impromptu meeting of the local Geek community. As it turns out, his suggested meeting location is less than one block from my back door, so it was obvious this was an opportunity that could not be missed.

Never one not to take *FULL ADVANTAGE* of just such an opportunity, I showed up at 11am with full mobile podcasting unit in hand. :D

Part one of what seems to be around three 15-20 minute content segments from yesterdays recording is now available in MP3, WMA, and OGG formats.

Back with part two and three once I have them edited and ready to go.

Please share, and enjoy!

A number of folks around the country have been asking me recently “Did I see you in a BOSE headphone commercial?”. In case you too were wondering, the answer is yes. There’s a TV commercial for the BOSE Quiet Comfort 3″ headphones that is currently airing nationally which contains a number of customer testimonials. I have a very small part in there where I talk about how much I like the headphones. The commercial has been airing for about a month now. I have not seen it yet myself on TV, but I get regular calls an emails from folks who have. One of the Progress field engineers who is based in Texas saw it during the World Cup finals. I even got a call from David Linthicum last week who saw it on his big screen TV in Reston VA.

I bought the QC2 headphones a couple of years ago, and I filled out the registration card and sent it in. I guess it pays to send those things in! They picked me out of their database and called me one night at home and asked me if I wanted to be in a commercial. I almost hung up on them thinking it was some kind of telemarketer scam.

The whole commercial was filmed over a 5 day period over different locations. For the part that I was in, they rented out a small nearby airport for a Saturday to film the customer testimonials. They put me in a room and had me try out the new headphones, then they put me on camera and asked me a series of questions about how I liked them. In the end I got a 2 second clip where I’m saying that the headphones are “extremely comfortable”. Well that’s show biz I guess :)

They rewarded me with a pair of the QC3 headphones for doing the commercial. They’re much smaller than the QC2 which means they fit in your laptop bag much easier when you are traveling. The sound quality and noise reduction is also better IMO. They have a new design, which is to fit just over the surface of the ear rather than cupping around it. And they are, btw, “extremely comfortable” :)
Dave

I’m going to break something of a cardinal rule for me (and doubtless will rue it later) … I’ve tried in general to keep this particular blog as apolitical as possible. I think that this is important - as I’ve become older I’ve realized that it is difficult to persuade people about the rightness or wrongness of their political beliefs, and that, especially in such a technical venue as this it is unwise to try.

However, I recently read a fascinating article, The Revolution Is Not Being Televised, by Stirling Newberry, a columnist and political consultant who has been fairly heavily enmeshed in the political uses of the Internet. Given the source (Truthout), I do not doubt that there are those readers who will sigh or even turn apoplectic at the political messages, but I wanted to comment not on the politics so much as at the message he himself presents.

There’s a great article from Dan Foody on the subject of automating SOA governance.
In this article he talks about the challenges of broadly adopting SOA, specifically homing in on the “3 Blind Spots” of SOA adoption -
1) Service behavior
2) Process Awareness
3) Rogue Services
Click here and have a look.
Dave

My son Chris has been studying jiu-jitsu for four years now. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a form of wrestling that is also referred to as “grappling”. Its a very strenuous sport that involves close up wrestling with choke holds and submission holds.

Last weekend there was a local tournament where Chris wrestled. He won some matches and lost some matches, but the two matches he lost were to veteran black belt wrestlers. There’s a discussion forum about this weekend’s jiu-jitsu tournament with a thread where people are talking about Chris’s matches. There’s also a comment from the president of the AGC (the organization who sponsored the tournament) about how good Chris did against the more seasoned fighters.

For the purpose of the tournament, there is a point system where the wrestler gets between 2 - 4 points for gaining control, or changing from one position of control to another, as shown in this video. Chris is the one in the red shorts.

Sometimes the person who is on the bottom is the one who is in control, as shown in this video I found on the discussion thread labeled - “Chris’ guillotine choke”

If you have ever seen an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) match on pay-per-view, its the jiu-jitsu guys who usually win those things. UFC is based on what is referred to as “Mixed Martial Arts” (MMA) which is a combination of grappling with punching and kicking. Chris is training for one of those fights in the fall.
Dave

Update: My apologies for not updating this post, and to those of you who didn’t see the release of part three from a while back. In short, part three is now @ now available, (though has been for some time :D).
—

Update: Part two of three is now available.
—

Update: Part one of what looks to be about three recorded segments now available.
—

Update: I ran out of steam before finishing the editing (I live/work on GMT (for the most part, anyway), so my day is just now getting started again), but am moving forward with finishing this up and getting these posted for download/streaming. I will update with a new post when ready.

To those of you involved with this recording: If you would like access to the raw, unedited WAV files to use for your own purpose, please see my most recent comment to Robert’s original post.

Thanks!

—
[Original Post]
Just got back from lunch with Robert Scoble and the local Salt Lake City Chapter of Geeks Not-So-Anonymous. I have in my possession ~ hour and half worth of audio recordings of some of the best geek-related group conversations I have had in a LONG time! REALLY GOOD STUFF!

I am going to spend some time now editing as much of it as I can, making the result available for download and streaming just as soon as its ready.

In the mean time, here are a few pics. Enjoy!

NOTE: If you happen to be one of those folks involved with this conversation, can you please leave a comment with your name, and point out to the rest of the folks which of the pics is of you, such that those who might read and listen can place a name to a face, and then play “guess that voices name and face” while they listen to the podcast?

Thanks! :D

Thumbnails with the links to the Photo’s are below:

A good year and half back, I came to the realization that while Bruce (D’Arcus) claims to be a scholar, he’s truly a hacker at heart.

Proof:

darcusblog � Blog Archive � RELAX NG, XSD, Schematron

However, you end up with a much looser schema, so now what? It’s hardly much use to be creating instances against such a loose schema, where they may be invalid against the normative spec and schema.

Answer: create some separate Schematron rules to model the constraints that XSD cannot. If you want to write it within your RNG customization schema (which can then be extracted using Trang XSLT), then just do stuff like:

    s:rule [
      context = "/cs:style[@class='author-date']"
      s:assert [
        test = "cs:bibliography/cs:sort/@algorithm='author-date'""Must use author-date sorting for the author-date class."
      ]
      s:assert [
        test = "name(cs:citation/cs:layout/cs:item/*[1]) = 'author'""The citation item layout must include an author element first."
      ]
    ]

Finally, write a little shell script to run both validations.

Nice!

Please visit the above linked post for more info.

Thanks Bruce! :)

Russ Miles continues his series on Blip messaging with SOA Ranch - Articles - SOA on Rails, Part 2: Consuming a Rails web service from a Rails application

In the first article in this series you walked through how to create a web service in Rails that could then be consumed by a .Net application. However, the rest of this series on SOA in Rails is going to focus on Rails development so it makes sense that part 2 looks at how to consume a web service from Rails.

Excellent! Thanks Russ :D

The slides for my talk at the Sydney Open Publish conference last Friday “XML Governance and Publishing” are up now at the Conference website.

The topics include some of the governance aspects of the Extensibility Manifesto, and the management aspects of XML Metrics, which I didn’t have a chance to treat in depth due to time. This talk got an ovation, which is always nice, especially because the first time I presented similar material at a seminar a few days earlier it was greeted by stony silence :-) Not in the slides is material I made actually doing metrics on the leading contender office document formats: ODF, etc. I don’t want to present those yet, because presenting it has commended some improvements needed in the metrics. I have been upgrading Topologi’s Complexity Detective tool to give some of the extra metrics.

Summer’s been fairly brutal throughout much of both the US and Canada the last few weeks, and transplanted American that I am I have to admit that I’m beginning to appreciate what 35°C really means and that it’s a lot warmer than one might expect - a sweltering (for Victoria) 95° F. As Victoria is on an island that usually has most extremes of temperature moderated by sea breezes and is positioned on the largely leeward side of the island, it says altogether too much about the wave of heat that has had most of the continent in thrall … and yes, I say this knowing full well that I’m about to receive all kinds of brickbats from those of you who’ve been toughing it out in 110° F (or a mind-boggling 43°C) temps that have hit much of the plains.

I gave a keynote address on SVG last week at the GeoWeb conference in Vancouver, and will be sharing my remarks from that shortly. Today, I’d like to give you the fifth installment about XForms, of six - this has been a remarkably well read series, which gives me a certain amount of hope for the specification. I should be making an announcement shortly concerning XForms in this space …

via a recent post to the Live-Clip mailing list from Matt Augustine, we discover,

Charles Torre of Channel9 interviewed Paresh Suthar and me about Live
Clipboard and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). The video and discussion
are here: https://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=222215.

You’ll need 30 minutes to get from start to end, but speaking from experience (just finished watching it) its 30 minutes well spent/invested.

Thanks Matt!

Government Computer News features a profile on Washington, D.C.’s adoption of SOA using Sonic ESB

https://www.gcn.com/print/25_20/41319-1.html

While this article talks about having ubiquitous access to property information for housing inspectors and tax purposes, the broader DCStat program also encompasses an emergency response system for the city of DC and the surrounding areas.

During my recent tour of SOA forums throughout Asia and Australia, I occassionaly had some time to speak with some journalists. One such interview was with the Hong Kong Economic Times. A clipping of the article, along with the english translation, can be found here -
Download file

Dave

Still very early days yet, but a tantelizing article at SearchWebServices.com suggests that the big boys are looking at Schematron. I’ll be interested to see how it pans out.