Related link: http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/ar/communications_cornucopia.html

Layperson’s guide to competition and regulation in new communications media (802.11, 802.16, VoIP, etc.). Written as an end-of-the-year piece for the American Reporter.

Related link: http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/1094?t=item

Kimbro Staken skewers a terribly contrived example of OO-to-the-max. It’s great fun at first glance, but in the end I find the treatment somewhat troubling.

I’ve myself undergone a conversion from mainstream OO orthodoxy to what I consider post-OO programming sensibility, and I have posted my own criticisms of the OO mainstream (recent example: “Objects. Encapsulation. XML?”). But there is good OO and bad OO, and I think that even OO advocates would scoff at the article Kimbro quotes as an unworthy straw man. I certainly hope I never perpetrated anything so ugly in all my years in the OO mainstream.

I think the stronger argument is that even when I think my designs were well considered, I could have done things better with dynamic, declarative and data-driven (D4) methodologies, mixing in OO in small doses only where it is clearly the best model. Aside: In my struggles to find good terminology for my recent thinking, “D4″ == “Agile programming” == “Post-OO”, where agile programming is not the same thing as agile process, such as Extreme Programming (which can be used with non-agile programming languages such as Java).

Anyway, Kimbro does point out the sore fact that OO often impairs maintenance and code reuse, two of its advertised benefits. Then he goes on to present an alternative solution in Python and XML to the example from the original article. XML really drives this example, and the fact that Python is the host language for the use of XPath appears purely incidental. It leads to my second worry about the blog item: that it seems to advocate reflex use of XML.

I’m a huge XML advocate, and I think it is the main catalyst, if not the quintessence, of the growing mainstream acceptance that it is okay to deviate from pure OO. But XML is certainly no panacea, and if you find yourself thinking that XML is overkill for a certain task, it probably is. Unfortunately, Kimbro does precisely say that XML is overkill in his code but proceeds to use it anyway.

As it happens, using only Kimbro’s code as evidence, I agree that XML is overkill. A Python dictionary would be a much better data represenation, and if persistence is needed, pickling would do the trick. Kimbro advocates XPath for its simplicity and I would agree if XML were a gven. But one must consider that XPath is much more complex than Python dictionary lookup.

Additional context might justify the use of XML, for example, perhaps the XML example is a standard interchange format. Of course, I would have little patience for such an XML interchange format. It brings me far too much to mind of Apple’s XML property lists, which rank among the ugliest uses of XML I’ve found.

In this case the key to fixing the mess presented by OO extremity is not data-driven extremity, but rather the dynamicism of languages such as Python. When I first got into REXX, my fist agile programming language, there was no XML, but it was very clear to me how REXX’s expressiveness was superior to the rigid object hierarchies I’d become used to creating.

This does not mean that “Dynamic” is the most important part of D4. If you go from toy examples to real-world problem solving, declarative and data-driven programming soon show their importance. If XML itself is not part of the solution, much of the mind-set that XML represents (setting aside reflex-OO tools such as SAX, DOM and parts of W3C XML Schema) helps bring sanity back to programming.

I don’t want to leave off without saying that OO is not always evil. It can be a useful way to package modest but strongly-cohesive bits of code (basically Abstract Data Types without declarative axioms). It can also make sense in systems-wide design if it naturally reflects the real world problem space the system simulates. I do think that such cases are rare, though (the original article was an example of how rigid OO can force you to invent all sorts of daft contrivances that have nothing to do with the actual problem space). The world is much too rich to be shoved into PIE.

What are your experiences with extremity in either OO, agile languages or XML?

A year ago I went to war. Besides the stuff I always have on me (10 meters of parachute cord, Leatherman multi-tool, infra-red chemical lights, and various weapons and ordnance), I took a lot more to the Gulf War Iraqi desert to keep me busy during the long stretches of inactivity. Luckily, we have plenty of desiel fuel and the generators that use them.

iPods

I started this war with a 20 Gb iPod, and it could not hold everything
I had, although 15 Gb was recorded episodes of href="http://www.thislife.org">This American Life. We often end
up far away from our home base for a couple of days, so the iPod is a
great way to take my entire music collection with me without
sacrificing space for other important things, like food and water.
With Audio Hijack, my wife
records my favorite NPR programs and sends them to me as MP3 files.

Since then Apple has even larger iPods, and I hear that other companies have ones even larger than Apple’s.

Laptops with DVD drives

We often have long periods of nothing to do but wait. I could buy a $200
dedicated-DVD player, but that only plays DVDs. Besides a larger
screen (up to 17 inches now), a laptop can also play games, work with
email, organize photos, play music, and a lot of other things to pass
the time.

Wireless networking

A lot of people have laptops, but we do not carry around cables and
routers. I can turn on my laptop’s Airport to create a
computer-to-computer network. Some people use access points for
multi-player games. It is quick, easy, and works between different
tents.

USB memory keys

I do not get to use my own computer on the Army’s network. I get stuck
with approved computers. Even if I could use my laptop, I do not carry
it with me, and I never know when I might get to use a computer. I,
and a lot of other people, carry thumb-sized USB devices that
store hundreds of megabytes. We write email to send later so we make
the most of our limited network time. I installed Windows software
for SSH terminals, web site suckers, and a lot of other things I like
to use but cannot install on public computers. Windows and Mac OS X software live peacefully together on the same device.

Digital cameras

Everyone seems to be passing around CDs of photos, starting from
events before the war to stuff that happened last week. We cannot
remember from where some of the CDs came or which units were involved, but we have some awesome pictures.
Indeed, digital cameras have become so useful that we carry them
almost constantly to document events that may be important later,
including pictures of people we meet, the cars they drive, and the
neighborhoods they live in. Cameras are a cheap and portable copy
machine too.

CD Burners

Burning CDs is the easiest way for us to share photos and anything
else that we want to pass around. We run the risk that our disk
drives could take a bullet, although the dust and heat seem more
dangerous, so back-ups are more urgent. A lot of disk drives have
taken a beating in the desert.

We can also send CDs home for free, which is a great way to share
full-size photos with friends and families, especially since our
bandwidth is often very limited.

Minidisc recorders

For most of the adventure I have carried a mini-disc recorder, and
have recorded close to 200 hours of audio diaries and sound effects.
I can make personal recordings that I send back to my wife, and
keep track of what I am doing for other projects. I can transfer
the audio to my PowerBook with AudioX or Peak, rip it with iTunes,
and burn it to a CD to send home, although I usually just mail the
mini-disks themselves.

---

What else might you need when you go? Solar powered battery chargers, rechargeable batteries (not just for the laptop!), power adapters that work with car batteries, 220V<->110V transformers, and duct tape.

What would you take to the remotest places on earth?

The big story in the media today (in the absence of the usual Al Qaida
assassination attempt) is the twentieth anniversary of the release of
the movie The Big Chill. And the media is actually
celebrating the movie. The Big Chill was supremely
exploitative and alienating even for a film industry totally
characterized by those traits. Historically it appears as a pathetic
attempt to scrape the “Me Decade” activities of the 1970s together into
a way of being, or a “life style” to use the degenerate terminology of
that earlier decade.

Who are the key figures in The Big Chill?

• A businessman all boned up about manipulating the market.

• A TV star who used to care about his work and now cares only about his
  image.

• A woman so obsessed with wanting to have a child that she’ll even bed
  down with a smarmy brat with the heart and mind of a ten-year-old in
  pursuit of her goal.

Cannily, the filmwriters thus concretized the key actors in Reagan’s
society: the unscrupulous CEOs, the solipsistic media, and the
re-oppressed women. The fourth main character is the shadowy Alex, of
whom only one cut wrist is seen. Alex of course represents the
characters’ 1960s idealism, and his suicide is supposed to show the
folly of maintaining ideals. Those still living in the movie laugh at
each others’ excesses and occasionally their own, but the verdict is
in: there is no alternative. One has to give up one’s hope of changing
society, buy in to its corruption and temptations, and if possible get
rich off of the manipulation of the crowd.

It is a sign of how exhausted, battered, and hopeless the American
public felt, in the wake of the Reagan counter-revolution, that so
many people could claim The Big Chill “spoke to” them. Many
critics, to their credit, saw through it. Unfortunately, some failed
to go beyond the surface; I even heard The Big Chill compared
obscenely to John Sayles’s Return of the Secauscus Seven, a
truly sensitive, humane, meaningful (and low-budget!) film.

To the fortunate few, the 1960s was only a moment within a long chain
of activism. From the vantage point of 2003, it’s clear that 60s
activists underestimated–yes, underestimated–the venality
of society and the urgency of challenging its very precepts and
foundations. The goal we set for ourselves was to maintain our
idealism and get smart about it.

Who finds that The Big Chill “speaks to” them?

Related link: http://www.newsforge.com/business/03/12/29/1413240.shtml?tid=2&tid=82&tid=85&tid…

Back in the 1980s, several large firms (who later shrunk a great deal)
launched lawsuits against their competitors, on the basis that the
competitors had created products that deliberately looked and operated
like the originals. Had these lawsuits succeeded, there could be no
OpenOffice today with its cloning of Microsoft keystrokes and other
behaviors. The lawsuits helped to spawn the
League for Programming Freedom
in response. (It’s other issue, software patents, are still a major
threat.)

Well, the look-and-feel lawsuit seems to be back. This time it’s SCO
claiming that Linux is infringing on its copyright because Linux uses
published, standardized interfaces that were invented as part of Unix.
See the commentary by BSD leader Kirk McKusick, referenced at the top.

To my non-lawyer mind, the fate of the earlier lawsuits should dictate
a quick dismissal of SCO’s claims, but apparently they’re hoping to
get lucky.

Related link: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0312/gallery.terror.alert/content.5.html

I like Microsoft Word. It’s bloated, but it’s a good word processor. If I were creating paper documents all day, I’d be happy with it. There’s just one thing I can’t forgive it for.

Word actively dumbs down the design sensibilities of those who use it. Word makes it frighteningly easy for the casual business user to create bad documents. For example, Word ships with that memo template with “MEMO” in huge letters, as if “Memo” is the most important thing for the reader to see first.

The most annoying Wordism that gets out, though, is the randomly-aligned, too-small, all caps, Times New Roman sign. Here’s a photo from CNN.com, showing a perfect example of this design troll. There’s an important message to be conveyed: The park is closed because of increased security. I imagine someone called down from on high saying “We need a sign to tell people the park is closed. Bob, can’t you do that in Word or something?” Why didn’t Bob just get a black magic marker and write it out? It would certainly be more visible from a distance.

With just a few small changes, the sign could be a good deal more useful:

• Turn off the capitals. They make things harder to read.
  
• Put some whitespace between “Park Closed” and “Due To Increased Security”. In fact, drop “Due To”.
  
• Use a strong sans serif font. Word comes with Impact, which would be fine for this.
  
• Use more of the paper. Why is there all that whitespace? Be sure to decrease the margins to 0.25 all around, so that you have more real estate to work with.
  
• Increase the font size. You’re not limited to the 24, 36, 48, 72 that are in the drop-down box. It’s a combo box, so if 28 lets you fill up more of the paper, then use it.
  
• Look at using landscape mode instead of portrait. It probably makes more sense for two two-word phrases.
  

If I could hand out copies of
Robin Williams‘ marvelous
The Non-Designer’s Design Book, which just came out in a 2nd edition, I would. With a cover price of only $20, it’s one of the best buys in the computer industry today. It should be required reading for anyone who creates documents of any kind.

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/national/21BRAU.html

Harold von Braunhut, the man who “invented” Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs, is dead at the age of 77.

To all Internetworking and Security Professionals.

The DNSEXT Working Group at IETF would like to urge you to review and comment on the DNSSEC document set. This specification has significant impact on the DNS and it is important that the specifications are unambiguous and implementable. The working group last call will conclude Jan 15 2004.

DNSSEC Document Set:

1. DNS Security Introduction and Requirements, revision 08 (Dec 17, 2003)
2. Resource Records for DNS Security Extensions, revision 06 (Dec 17, 2003)
3. Protocol Modifications for the DNS Security Extensions, revision 04 (Dec 17, 2003)

Extensive background information about the DNS Security Extensions can be found on the DNSSEC.net website.

Related link: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2003/tc20031216_9018_tc047.htm

Current search engines–even the constantly surprising Google–seem
unable to leap the next big barrier in search: the trillions of bytes
of dynamically generated data created by individual Web sites around
the world, or what some researchers call the “deep web.” You can’t
look up the status of a Federal Express package without going to the
Federal Express site, or the details on an eBay item without checking
the eBay site. Dynamically generated data can’t be spidered.

But the article cited above shows how this barrier is slowly
cracking. Now I can enter “fedex 791725670102″ into Google (not
Federal Express) and discover that the jigsaw puzzle I mailed to an
author in Australia was signed for by him.

Of course, Google has to send me to the Federal Express site (which
takes an extra click) to complete the search, but the principle is
established: a search at Google can kick off a deep search on another
site.

The burn-out of the dot-com era left a smoldering envy of those few
dot-commers that managed to stay alive. Google is foremost among
these. If they can continue pulling in dynamic data from more and more
sites, their dominance may well continue–for access to dynamic data
is indeed the key to the next big improvement in search.

A generalization of the Google/FedEx collaboration would lead to what
is commonly called
metasearch engines,
a peer-to-peer solution to the search problem that involves a
radically different architecture from any of the current popular
engines. I said different, not new. The idea of peer-to-peer search
was aired at least as far back as early 2000. I described it in my
first
article
on peer-to-peer systems in May of that year:

Gnutella is a fairly simple protocol. It defines only how a string
is passed from one site to another, not how each site interprets
the string. One site might handle the string by simply running
fgrep on a bunch of files, while another might insert it
into an SQL query, and yet another might assume that it’s a set of
Japanese words and return rough English equivalents, which the
original requester may then use for further searching. This
flexibility allows each site to contribute to a distributed search
in the most sophisticated way it can. Would it be pompous to
suggest that Gnutella could become the medium through which search
engines operate in the 21^st century?

What’s holding back metasearch is the lack of standards for
categorizing data and knowing what to search for. It’s easy to guess
that “fedex 791725670102″ should be interpreted as a search for a
Federal Express package, but anything less strictly defined is a big
metadata problem.

A lot of people have dumped on the ideal of metadata, notably Cory
Doctorow in the article
Metacrap.
So the waters of the deep web will be slow to stir, but as the
benefits become clear, more and more sites may emerge.

What business model would drive metasearch? That question is classic
in peer-to-peer systems, because distributed systems typically have
problems generating and distributing income. Sites could be motivated
to solve the metadata problem because they’d draw more traffic by
joining the system, and expose more of their data to people’s
searches.

As for the aggregating site–Google or a competitor–it would
potentially have an easier road to profitability than Google has
now. The aggregating site could continue to derive revenue from ads
and from the sale of search software. Since the computing resources it
needed would be vastly less than the current Google, it would need
less revenue from ads and sales. And since the use of its software
would be a prerequisite to joining (although one hopes it would
tolerate the use of compatible, competing software) it should be able
to land more sales.

Can metasearch become widespread?

Related link: http://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour2.htm

I’ve never liked the metaphor of software development as manufacturing. For one thing, it’s emotionally disturbing to hear programmers alluded to as assembly line workers. More seriously, it confuses intangible software with tangible items.

Reeves has it right: the source code is the design. That’s not intended as an excuse for cowboy coding, nor is it a proto-justification for agile development (though it is clearly connected in many intelligent ways). It’s just the fundamental nature of software — perfect duplication is easy!

As my friend Jim Shore likes to point out, it’s the compiler that actually builds software. There’s your assembly line. The most important part of the assembly line, as I see the metaphor, is the perfect duplication of a physical product.

Of course, the people on the other side of this debate seem to prefer the cheap hordes of replaceable labor as the important point of the image. I think trying to build software this way dooms you to mediocrity, at best, and spectacular, if unremarkable, failures.

As always, I could be wrong, though I managed not to use the epithet “Taylorism”. What do you think?

Related link: http://www.phpmag.net/

PHP Magazine has a free issue coming up on 15 Dec 2003 to celebrate the new monthly version of their magazine to be published in PDF format. A few weeks ago, I was asked to write the cover article, an offer I happily accepted.

My article discusses sessions. After covering some basics about HTTP, maintaining state, and cookies, I spend
the rest of the time discussing impersonation attacks and methods of prevention. My approach is to give readers the background information they need to make educated decisions about the techniques they employ, and then to contrast a few suggested techniques with the steps necessary to subvert them. I think this contrast provides a nice metric by which to measure the strength of each approach.

One important point that I mention in the article is that there is no perfect solution. While I introduce a few different techniques that can be used to complicate impersonation, I am hoping that my readers will think of many more and be willing to share them. If you have a favorite technique for securing your sessions, please contact me and describe it. In exchange, I will send you a reply with my review of your implementation, and I will also compile my favorites and share them in my blog or as a future (free) article.

What are your favorite techniques for securing sessions?

I’m party to a lawsuit in small claims court. This guy named Paul signed a contract to buy our house back in June, and backed out of the contract, declaring it null and void. Now he wants his $500 earnest money back, and is suing me in small claims court for it.

So we both showed up in the courtroom on the appointed date, and the judge called us up. Paul and I stood in front of the judge, with our stacks of legal documents ready to go. We were all set to start in with our arguments, and the judge opened with a line of questions that seemed strange at the time:

Judge: “Are you Andrew Lester?”

Me: “Yes, your honor.”

Judge: “Do you have the $500?”

Me: “It’s in escrow, but yes.”

Judge: “Is he entitled to it?”

Me: “No, sir, he broke the contract.”

Judge: “I’m going to set a trial date for December Nth. As an alternative, you can work with the arbitration office to help settle this dispute.”

Well, of COURSE I have the money, and of COURSE he’s not entitled to it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, right? But what if those questions weren’t answered the way I did? What if I didn’t actually have the money, and I was being sued for no reason? What if I was willing to return it to him, but had just never been asked? We’d have gone to trial for no reason, and everything would have been cleared up that day.

How many times have you been on a software project like that? Where the programmers are just ready to go, like me and Paul with our manila folders of paper, waiting to be unleashed?

It’s a wise project manager who asks the dumb questions at the start, as well as provide potentially less-expensive alternatives to the stakeholders.

What lessons have you learned from unlikely places?

Related link: http://www.artima.com/intv/garden.html

Lately, I have been thinking about useful metaphors for programming. What other activity accurately reflects the real work of software development? I think quite naturally, many developers look to architecture and engineering for inspiration. Perhaps many of us have even been inspired by the architectural underpinnings of design patterns. However, I recently came across this article on artima.com: http://www.artima.com/intv/garden.html. The article recounts an interview with Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. In this excerpt, they compare software development to gardening:

There is a persistent notion in a lot of literature that software development should be like engineering… We paint a different picture. Instead of that very neat and orderly procession, which doesn’t happen even in the real world with buildings, software is much more like gardening. You do plan. You plan you’re going to make a plot this big. You’re going to prepare the soil. You bring in a landscape person who says to put the big plants in the back and short ones in the front. You’ve got a great plan, a whole design.

But when you plant the bulbs and the seeds, what happens? The garden doesn’t quite come up the way you drew the picture. This plant gets a lot bigger than you thought it would. You’ve got to prune it. You’ve got to split it. You’ve got to move it around the garden. This big plant in the back died. You’ve got to dig it up and throw it into the compost pile. These colors ended up not looking like they did on the package. They don’t look good next to each other. You’ve got to transplant this one over to the other side of the garden.

Now, there’s an analogy I can identify with. Back to the garden I go. Check out the rest of the interview on artima.com.

Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61527,00.html

I’ve been following the recent news on the
World Summit on the Information Society,
and it’s getting really bizarre. The Wired article cited above is one
example of out of the out-of-this-world coverage on the World Summit;
I heard a similar spin yesterday on a radio show that often shares
material with the BBC (but I haven’t seen a story about WSIS on the
BBC Web site yet).

What king or dictator or bureaucrat has signed the document giving
power over the Internet to one organization or another? Did I miss the
ceremony?

One laughable aspect of news reportage is that the founders and
leaders of ICANN always avowed, with the utmost unction, that they
were not trying to make policy decisions and were simply tinkering
with technical functions on the Internet. Of course, there is rarely
such a thing as a merely technical function, and that truth has been
borne out by the effects of ICANN’s policies on “intellectual
property” and on the allocation of domain names in general. Perhaps
it’s good for people to be talking openly of ruling the Internet.

But, in whatever ways ICANN has managed to wield its three-pronged
fork (domain names, addresses, and assigned numbers such as
protocols), it has never come close to being master of the Internet.

Now that the mainstream media have announced that the Internet is up
for grabs, they are presenting the debate falsely as a two-sided fight
between ICANN and the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
That body that has regulated telecommunications for over a century,
eventually came under the auspices of the United Nations, and has been
searching for several years for a way to gain new relevancy in the
Internet era. (I wrote an href="http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/ar/govern_itu.html">article
on one of their forays some time ago.) It has never gotten anywhere
close.

The WSIS meeting has generated the most news coverage of the ITU I’ve
ever seen, so it must already be a success for them. If they can bully
the U.S. government and ICANN enough to wrest some piece of the ICANN
treasure from its grasp, I suppose they will consider the summit even
more of a success.

So what is up for grabs? Certainly the right to define new
top-level domain names (anybody visited a .museum site lately?) and to
hand out to various favored organizations the plum of domain name
registration (which really should be a nearly pure technical
function, and has been turned into a heavy-weight, politicized
activity by the “intellectual property” interests). But that’s not
really very much.

The fears that seem to be circulating around the domain name fight is
that governments or other organizations will use control over domain
names to censor the Internet. Ironically, the biggest threat to
freedom in the use of domain names has been from the private sector,
specifically the “intellectual property” interests. But the danger is
present that governments will catch on (China seems to be doing so)
and manipulating the system to restrict free speech. Still, with
search engines becoming more popular and more powerful all the time,
domain names are not the prime prizes they seemed in the late 1990s.

IP addresses are also a potential source of control that Internet
users should be conscious about, if not worried about. Addressing can
be abused mainly in a context of scarcity, and there has been debate
for years over whether IP addresses are getting scarce. (They’re
certainly scarce when you ask the average local ISP for more than
one!) A vigorous campaign to adopt IPv6 would remove most of the
worry over this potential choke-hold.

And who ultimately is in charge of the Domain Name System? You
are. You determine what domains you view. Somewhere on your personal
computer is a configuration option that determines where you go to
resolve top-level domains, and you can go far beyond what ICANN would
like you to see. Visit the
Open Root Server Confederation.

Well, I don’t really mean to say that the Domain Name System is
totally open and that nobody has control over it. ICANN is still
enthroned. The ORSC is mostly a form of protest, not a model for the
future. (It doesn’t solve the problem of name collisions, for
instance.)

My point is that the Internet is a subtle ecology that has always
rested on the cooperation of multiple parties. This cooperation spans
a spectrum from the individual home user on his PC to the peering
agreements between major backbone owners. As these peering
arrangements and the history of ICANN show, systems have evolved
historically in a rough, unsystematized way, and some participants do
not like the terms of cooperation.

For instance, underdeveloped countries complain about the
interconnection fees they have to pay to more powerful backbone
operators in developed countries. Expanding interconnection points is
a way to bring down costs without trying to change the politics of
peering, but a review of the politics would also be pertinent.

While ICANN has bumbled many tasks and exceeded its authority on
others, its leaders have a sense of the fragility of the Internet
ecology. The ITU, in contrast, is tromping all over the grounds just
in the process of mapping it. I find it amusing that, in their search
for a boogie man, they have ceded to ICANN far more authority than
anyone else has.

(The U.S. government reviews its contract with ICANN every year or
two. It’s generally unhappy with what it sees and gives ICANN a
tongue-lashing each time. But so far no one in the government has had
the guts to propose something new. Given the problems of dealing with
Internet ecology, I can understand their reticence.)

There are so many people who have spent years fighting within and
outside ICANN to change the policies on domain names, that the view of
Internet policy as ICANN vs. ITU is truly insulting.

Anyway, it’s time for some responsible journalists to untangle the
mess caused by the current spin.

What’s up for grabs at WSIS?

John
Smart predicts the coming of the Linguistic
User Interface(LUI) for around 2020. Microsoft
Research is already working on it, actually
voice recognition, the first step towards a LUI will be an integral part of
Longhorn. Same at SAP,
voice can be used as one of the many channels to interact
with their applications.

But slow down, I hate it already today when people are yapping on their cell
phone in a public space. Although, I admit, that sometimes I am one of them.
Same in cubical country, it is super distracting when people are on the phone
in the office, which usually is only one or two. With the LUI it would be everyone.
Give me a break.

Maybe we can jump that, or leave it somewhere in the privacy of our homes. The data rate of 160 words per minute is far better than the 40 to 60 that you get on a keyboard, but how about going directly to a brain user interface (BUI).

I was getting hopeful when I saw professor Kevin Warwick, self proclaimed first cyborg, as he is the first human that implanted a chip into his body (you have to discount all the people with pacemakers, minor detail.)

He presented his research at Stanford a couple of weeks back. Professor
Warwick connected a chip to a nerve fiber of his left arm and was able
to send signals through that nerve to a computer, as well as getting signals
back from the computer to his brain. After a bit of training he could manipulate
a robotic arm even over the Internet.

The video that he showed, looked to me as if the robotic hand movement was
only binary on or off. I could not discern fine-motor movements. When I asked
him, he assured us, that while blindfolded he was able to grab a raw egg without
braking it.

He also showed a video of an experiment, where he was blindfolded and the electrode
in his arm was hooked up to movement sensors attached to his head. When his
assistants would go towards him with a large piece of cardboard he would get
such a strong signal, that he would jump back.

I was sure, that the human body would reject such a foreign object, but to my astonishment he said that it was tough to get the device out of his body, because it was so grown in.

I
remember once seeing a documentary about the first flight of the Wright Brothers.
Back then I thought, what’s the big deal, they barely left the ground. I didn’t
realize back then that it was a big deal, because humans for the first time
left the ground powered by an engine. (Which if you have not heard happened
100 years ago this month: December 17th. The picture to the right has to be
over 100 years old and can’t be copyrighted anymore, or am I wrong? I will take
it down otherwise.)

Kevin Warwick’s findings felt a bit like this "barely off the ground",
total baby steps, but the possibilities are humongous. One of them is the BUI:
You formulate your email in your brain and like magic it appears on the screen.

Researching his work, or ahem Googling him, I realized, that you have to take
what he says with a grain of salt. The register even calls him Captain
Cyborg and has a whole list of articles dedicated to his publicity stunts.

Probably the LUI will be before the BUI.

Related link: http://www.localfeeds.com/

I just discovered Localfeeds, a search engine for feeds where the searches are based on geographic location. This seemed interesting enough, so I typed in my ZIP (10001) and was shown the most recent blogs within 50 miles of 10001 (New York City). Sure enough, there are a lot of people talking about the big snow storm we’re having here. Neat.

The current trend seems to be that people interested in a particular topic tend to read the same blogs. While this can be good in that you explore the perspectives related to a particular topic from people all around the world, it is pretty fun to see what random people who live near you are talking about. I would never think of writing about the current snow storm, for example, because most people who read my blog are interested in PHP or Web development, but it was cool to read blogs of people who did just that.

Not wanting to be left out, I went back to the first page to see how to get added to such a thing. Is your site ready for Localfeeds? I typed in http://shiflett.org/ to find out. I was shown the checklist for shiflett.org, which was much different than what you will see now. I did not properly indicate the coordinates for where I live, which I learned must be expressed in a meta tag:

<meta name="ICBM" content="40.750422,-73.996328" />

After adding this and returning to the checklist, I found everything to be in order, and I was told to click a link to notify Localfeeds and GeoURL. I then visited GeoURL, out of curiosity, and I saw my site listed:

Chris Shiflett: Home (near New York, USA. see neighbors)

Very cool. Of course, I feel like the last to know about this stuff, but maybe this will introduce it to someone new.

I finished my R&R leave two days ago and have finally made it back to the Middle East. At least I do not have to dread that anymore.

Not everyone on leave was so fortunate. The domestic airline, United Airlines, was code-sharing with a foreign carrier and somehow horked the reservations of a lot of soldiers. I was able to get my state National Guard headquarters involved to fix my problem since I had called up the airline the day before to verify my reservation. Soldiers who simply showed up at the airport ended up stranded at various places, and not just their point of origins, despite several empty seats on the flights.

We do not have to wait for that Terminator 3 moment when the machines take over, at least not for United Airlines, because they aleady let their machines rule them. Almost every customer service person blamed the computer in some fashion: insufficient access privileges, my record is locked, it is somebody else’s system, unscheduled updates, and so on. When that failed, they just told me “We do not do that.” The person checking in next to me at O’Hare, a German fellow I think, was having the same problem. They kept telling him that the computer said the opposite thing than his ticket. Snags are not so bad—stuff happens—but the ticket agent just kept saying “But the computer says…” without even listening to him.

My problem got fixed by force of will. The State just called the airline and said “Look, this is how it is going to be, I do not care what your computer says”. That fixed that. The stranded soldiers do not have anyway to bring that force to bear when business hours are over, though. In my experience, United Airlines would rather believe its computers, and stick by that, than actually help the customer. I was actually surprised at how hostile some of the representatives were, especially considering since I normally just say “active duty in Iraq” and companies fall over themselves trying to help me.

When that is the way the business runs, someone needs to take the computer aside and give it a spanking. The computers should work for us, not us for them. Customer service people should not be simply data entry technicians, and gate agents are not just ticket tearers, that is, unless they let the computers be the boss.

I should not be surprised at that though. I have seen a lot of places where people work within the limits of the computer vendor they have locked themselves into, rather than using what actually works for them. It still boggles me, though.

Have airline computers horked your travel plans?

Like many, I’m a happy slimp3 owner, and while I covet their new squeezebox appliance, my real joy is having the slimp3 server software. It is fantastic. Considering the recent interview here on O’Reilly, I felt that readers might like to get a picture of some of the benefits of the slimp3 server software for those who don’t own a slim player.

About 3 years ago, I ripped my entire cd collection of about 400 cds onto a networked drive at my house and put it onto a networked drive. I promptly began to hate my archive. Due to poor planning, the tags stank and titles were just barely accurate. The archive was hard to enjoy and use. As it grew with my collection, it became less useful. Less useful until I installed the slimp3 server software on my server.

The slimp3 software hosts not just the slimp3 hardware but every standard mp3 stream playing program out there, which as you know covers every platform that matters (sorry, wang vs users!) and, most importantly, provides a extremely usable web based interface for my archive. I can stream different music to multiple machines in the house at once and find music very quickly by genre, artist, song, etc and via the search mechanism.

So, if you have a large archive of music, go and download the slimp3 server software, you won’t regret it. The only caveat is that you’ll really want to buy a squeezebox to feed if you do.

All hail the Slimp3 server software.

Related link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/plucker/

I used to think that AvantGo on my Treo was pretty keen, if troubled. Imagine my happy surprise when I tried Plucker. Plucker, like AvantGo, is an offline web reader for a Palm based pda. It reads and processes the websites you want to browse offline and presents them to you in a palmish way on your PDA.

It really is a remarkable tool. I spend altogether too much time on planes, so it is very handy for me to be able to read, for instance, O’Reilly network articles on my PDA when waiting in one of the many lines that typify travel in america today.

AvantGo has some subtle annoyances…and not what you are thinking either…I’m not really bothered by ads, but avantgo allows some ads that are larger than the screen so you have to restart the app to get an ad small enough to pass on a 160×160 screen like the treo has. Also, the Avant Go program is always going to its home server…which is odd as I thought it was all offline storage. It makes me nervous when programs call home, and avantgo seems to work when I shut off the wireless networking on the phone, so I don’t know what is up with that. Also, avantgo costs money if you want a feed larger than 2mbs. I have no similar restriction from plucker. I can use as much or as little as I want. I’m cheap I guess.

Plucker allows for some very nice configurability, allowing you to chose how deep you want it to spider your favorite sites, whether or not you want images, if you want the data stored in main ram or on an addon card, etc, etc…. the only way that avantgo surpasses it is in the way that avantgo can update on the pda itself via the gprs tcp-ip connection, but that is almost not worth doing.

Plucker isn’t perfect, it doesn’t understand the Treos 5 way pad, and its interface isn’t perfect, but it gets the information to you, and that is what matters. Anyhow, for those of you with groovy palm based pdas, you should really check out plucker.

Plucker, Plucker, Plucker

The season has come around again. Presidential candidates are barking
insults at each other, and there’s a shadow of a hope for drawing some
attention to issues of true importance.

In the spirit of stirring up debate around what really matters for our
future, therefore, I am modestly offering a few of my own creative
solutions to the problems that the national campaigns should be
dealing with.

The energy crisis

There are so many simple ways people could cut down on the appalling
waste of energy in this country that it’s hardly fun to propose
anything new. But I have an initiative to offer, centered on the
crucial task of making public transportation appealing to Americans.

The terms “public transportation” and “appealing” sound so absurd
together as to be almost an oxymoron, in a culture like the United
States that handles public transportation as just another of the many
ways to punish poor people for being poor. The idea that public
transportation could be appealing didn’t come to me until I saw it in
action in other countries. And what I want to see in the United States
is even grander than what I’ve seen in Berlin, Rouen, and
Tokyo–something befitting an immensely rich and self-pampering
country.

Why not present public transportation as an indulgence? Backed up with
the right resources, such a campaign might succeed. Who would want to
spend an hour driving himself to the office when he could sit in
luxury while someone else does the work?

This means buses (because stringing track is an expensive investment
that doesn’t pay off in the short term) that have comfortable seats
facing individualized media centers that offer news and educational
videos. Shuttles would run short routes on a frequent basis, and
customers would get to know their drivers. Comfortable waiting
stations would contain electronic maps showing the best way to get to
any local destination, and would show the exact location of each
vehicle as it makes its way through town–because people taking public
transportation like to have information in return for what they feel
is a loss of control.

Counter-terrorism

Ultimately, of course, one can eliminate terror only by offering, to
the wide strata of poor and angry people whose environments give rise
to terrorists, a life better than that offered by the terrorists
themselves. Since the terrorists offer nothing but violence,
destitution, and grinding oppression, I can’t quite see why the rulers
of this world find it so hard to come up with a competing proposal.
But in the mean time we need to do something to improve our vigilance.

This past September, student Nathaniel Heatwole planted several
dangerous objects on commercial airplanes and notified the proper
authorities. They reacted with alacrity by fixing the problem a month
later, then arresting Heatwole for lack of better ideas of what to
do. And in Britain, Ryan Parry of the tabloid Daily Mirror obtained
easy access to Buckingham Palace, including the room where George
W. Bush is staying.

I can accept the argument that what these people did was both
dangerous and unnecessary, but we should examine the incidents for
possible merits. After all, we’re a competitive society with the
fervent belief that competition–along with accountability–brings out
the best in people and institutions. So let’s institutionalize
breaches of security, and accountability for them.

I wouldn’t reward someone for bringing actual weapons into airplanes,
nuclear facilities, state capital buildings, etc. But we could
encourage proxy violations, such as smuggling in inert metal rods
without being detected. Special, harmless, substances with certain
resemblances to weapons could be sold to people who want to try their
hand at the big sweepstakes. And institutions could be required by law
to set aside part of their budgets to actually pay bonuses when people
succeed in getting these materials past security.

It’s hard to say what institutions should join the initiative, because
you often don’t know you’re a soft target until you become one. But
every institution that was required to pay someone when its security
was breached would sure as hell spend money to improve security. This
initiative in fact would leverage the risk-based security philosophy
recently espoused by security expert
Bruce Schneier.

Health care

Turn over the country’s health care system to Fidel Castro, who has
presided for forty years over one of the world’s best health care
systems, one that recently
discovered
an important new vaccine for meningitis and pneumonia. Castro, could
perhaps be induced to make a swap and give up being dictator of one
country in order to become health care tsar of another, much larger
one.

The digital divide

Access to online information is increasingly determining one’s ability
to understand the world politically, gain access to educational
materials, get a job, and even keep in touch with far-flung relatives
in societies where people are increasingly separated by thousands of
miles.

As with the other issues in this article, much ink and screen space
has been spent on debates over how much help the public needs and how
much the government should do. I will suggest one modest initiative
here that I think all could agree on.

Remember bookmobiles, those libraries on wheels that (even today, in
some places) bring reading materials to neighborhoods where people
don’t have the time or transportation facilities to reach traditional
libraries? We should do the same with Internet access.

Every day, at a predictable time, a datamobile would show up in a
neighborhood. Sporting a satellite dish on the roof, it would offer
high-speed Internet access to terminals inside the datamobile as well
as a wireless LAN hub that would make such access available to people
in surrounding homes.

In the short term, the datamobiles would help people get the
information they need for one day–perhaps throwing in a VoIP phone
call or two–and make them comfortable using the Internet. But the
initiative would be good for the long term too. It would create demand
for more permanent and available solutions. Perhaps neighborhoods
would band together to string wire, and people who thought they
couldn’t afford computers would scrape together the means to buy them.

Well, that’s it for my proposed campaign planks this year. Admittedly,
some presidential candidates may offer a platform that is easier to
implement, but I don’t think they’ll offer one that does more for
us. Anyway, I have to hold out the hope for a 2004 campaign that
consists of more than sound bites about gay marriage.

What solutions haven’t been thought of before?

i got the opportunity to attend
ApacheCon 2003 in Las
Vegas (Vegas baby! <g>) two weeks ago. i thought i’d blog my notes so that
you could get a feel for what was presented and how it was received. given
BEA’s growing commitment to open-source and Apache, i was looking forward to an
interesting conference (and i wasn’t disappointed). oh, there’s also an
official conference
wiki you can check
out too

Stefano Mazzocchi, How the Apache
Software Foundation Works - plenary

this was a (quite good) overview of how the ASF (Apache Software Foundation)
works for those people who aren’t already members. topics covered include:

• lazy consensus
  in order to streamline decision making and to prevent gridlock and bureaucracy,
  the ASF has method of voting on decisions that ignores all abstaining members.
  then, if someone votes no “-1“, they can’t just use that as a veto.
  they must supply a reason for their objection as well as help to resolve it.
  the goal is to provide a measure of oversight and input, while at the same time
  keeping things vital and dynamic. i think some other standards groups could
  learn a lot from this model
• project types
  when people think about Apache projects, they tend to think about the software
  projects (Apache, Ant, XmlBeans, etc), but there are “auxiliary” projects as
  well. their web-site, wikis, CVS servers, email archives, bug-tracking and
  distributions and download sites. each one of these is critical to the smooth
  functioning of the ASF, and without them the ASF wouldn’t be nearly as capable
• the Incubator
  created a year ago, this is where new projects being proposed for inclusion
  into Apache go while the members of that project get “well integrated” into the
  ASF. there are no hard and fast rules about how long a project remains there,
  but the steps involved are outlined
  here.
  there are several projects currently
  in the Incubator,
  and one that’s made it all
  the way through and into Apache
• a new license
  Apache is working on a new license. under development for more then 2
  years, they hope it will be ready soon. there are a number of goals for the
  new license, like dealing with patent issues better, trademarks, and others. if
  you’re going to participate in Apache or use Apache software, you should be
  aware of what’s coming
• security
  mentioned by Stefano, this was a reoccurring issue raised at several sessions
  throughout Monday. like spam, security is being viewed as a critical
  issue within the ASF. the security perception of a given project is seen as a
  litmus test issue of viability

John Fowler,
Looking Ahead: Challenges for Open Software - keynote

i was a bit worried when this talk started that it was going to be a pure
marketing pitch for Sun because one of the first slides was a list of Sun’s
“strategic initiatives”. but that slide to the contrary, it was a pretty good
deck

• trust
  huge problem for everyone. internet scams, intrusions, viruses (some mandatory
  Sun digs at Microsoft’s expense) are costing billions a year worldwide (USD).
  he predicts total losses per year to exceed 10 billion USD very soon
• connectivity
  cost of connecting is dropping, overall network bandwidth is going up. this is
  leading to a world where everything will be connected, all of the time
• PRC
  announcement
  Sun just announced at COMDEX (going on here in Vegas at the same time) that the
  Peoples Republic of China will be standardizing on the Sun desktop
• AMD
  announcement
  Sun also announced at COMDEX a deal with AMD where they will bee making a line
  of low-cost hardware using AMD chips
• myth busting
  perimeter defenses aren’t the answer. there are a number of reasons for this:
  1. the enemy is probably inside the firewall (he works for/with you)
  2. misconfigured hardware
  3. misconfigured software
  4. poorly defined roles and process
• identity management
  relying on password based authentication alone is bad. it’s way to easy to
  guess someone’s password (for example, he uses the name of his dog as his
  password for online banking. but he’s got two dogs, so it’s twice as hard as it
  might be <g>). the answer is to use multi-factor authentication, like using
  both a password and a “token” of some kind (security card, etc.)
• application security
  it’s not just friendly apps vs. hostile apps. it’s safe apps vs. unsafe apps,
  and an unsafe app isn’t just a hostile app, but a flawed app. there’s no one
  answer here, but a host of strategies need to be applied, like sandboxing,
  strict access control, etc
• data security
  encompassing everything from access control to disaster recovery, data security
  is critical to the modern enterprise. typically, it’s process failure and
  misconfigured (or hard to configure) software that leads to breaches in data
  security
• other stuff
  compatibility, intellectual property and security in
  general were among the other topics discussed

Howard M. Lewis Ship, Beginning
Tapestry: Java Web Components - session

the goal of Tapestry is to create an O-O framework for building web-sites.
having not played with Tapestry myself, i don’t know how well it succeeds on
its goals (of which there are many), but it seems pretty interesting

one think i liked about what i saw was the fact that Tapestry enforced a
separation between layout (HTML) and code (Java). this allows you to use
whichever HTML design tool you prefer to edit the UI template, unlike JSP pages
where WYSIWYG tools must play many, many tricks to deliver a similar experience

here’s a list of goals and attributes of Tapestry based on the presentation

• O-O centric
• 100% component based
• best practices rolled into framework
• team friendly
• simple, consistent and efficient

one interesting question was about a painfully slow development experience one
of the developers was having. it turns out that Tapestry has a cache which can
take a long time to heat up. in production, this is fine, but if you’re
developing content, the time taken to reheat the cache after each edit can be
pretty painful. there’s a way to disable this that you can find in the FAQ. i
looked but didn’t see it, but i probably just missed it…

Onno Kluyt, Java Community Process - session (plus a sandwich)

Onno Kluyt is Sun’s Director of the Java Community
Process. in addition to providing lunch for everyone, he gave a
presentation on the Java Community Process. he talked about the membership of
the JCP, like the fact that there are now more individual members then
corporations, and about how the JCP evolves, like the fact that
JSR 215 is in final
approval (it should be approved within the next week or so)

it was interesting to hear about the upcoming mods to the JCP process brought
on by JSR 215. one change has to do with transparency. from now on, JSRs will
be made public during community-review, instead of just at public-review. the
reason was for this is that the feedback being produced was excellent, but it
was coming too late to be used. by public-review, the spec is pretty much
baked. now, feedback will come in time to have real impact

there are some other changes coming as well. you can read about the whole thing
online. according to Onno, these changes will take effect in the Jan/Feb
timeframe

and then the battery on his PowerBook died, and since he didn’t have his power
supply, his presentation became “old school”, where he had to make points by
simply speaking. very retro <g>

one rather interesting question that came at the end had to do with the use of
NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) within the JCP. several people in the audience
objected to their use, and pointed out that the ASF does not use them. Onno
replied that NDAs would always be used in the JCP, the reason being is that
corporate participants would be unwilling to disclose their reasons for seeking
changes to a JSR if they know that any competitor would have access to their
comments. if you think about it, this issue illustrates one of the key
differences between a standards process at Apache (if you can call Apache a
standards body) and at the JCP. interesting…

Bruce Snyder, The State of
Apache
Geronimo - session

this was a “must see” presentation for me, what with working for
BEA and all. and it seems like i wasn’t the only
one who felt that way, as this presentation was packed

first thing discussed was “why another Open Source Java App Server?”. there
were several reasons given for this; no current open-source JAS is provided
via a BSD derived license, there are already several pieces of the puzzle
being provided by Apache projects, and no open-source JAS is currently J2EE
certified

next up was a review of status of the various pieces. i hope i didn’t miss a
piece while taking notes (unfortunately the presentation given wasn’t exactly
the same as the one on the conference disk, so i’m doing this all from my
notes). here goes:

• EJB support - stateless session beans and stateful
  session beans are working, entity beans are almost working (they got
  them working later in the conference) and message driven beans are
  coming
• Tomcat -
  they support the latest version of Tomcat, and one of their
  key goals in this area is to be able to drop at least part of the bean
  container directly into a running Tomcat installation to allow developers to
  play with EJBs without a huge upfront setup cost. then, if you want the whole
  thing, you can install the whole thing
• JCA - they’ve got
  JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture) working outbound, and inbound is in
  progress
• deployment - it’s working, but it’s not yet pluggable. the plan is
  to support deployment via JSR
  88, which is the JSR defining the J2EE Application Deployment APIs
• management - this is working via JMX, and the plan is to extend it
  to support JSR 77 too,
  which is the JSR defining a vendor-neutral standard for J2EE Management. they
  are also planning all sorts of additional features, like “hot system”
  management and an abstraction that makes it very easy to build and deploy POJOs
  (Plain Old Java Objects)
• web services - the answer here is
  Axis. they are in the process of
  integrating Axis so that it will be the basis for all web services support in
  Geronimo
• security - they have a pluggable model for both authN and
  authZ (authentication and authorization) based on JACC (Java
  Authorization Contract for Containers). the plan is to allow all security
  vendors to plug in. one scenario that they are keen on supported is
  single-signon within an enterprise
• transaction management - they’ve got a simple, heuristic TM working
  now, but they know this isn’t production ready. the plan is to support
  JTA/JTS
  by integrating with JOTM, but they
  haven’t started this yet

other tidbits: they are currently in the Apache Incubator (or “probation for
newbies” as they called it <g>), their target for release of their first
version is one year from when they started (Aug 6th), and they invite people
to get involved

and of course, they got a question about the current dust-up between them and
JBoss. there reply was “no comment”, but for those of you interested in
learning about what’s going on, this is the
“letter
that the JBoss Group’s lawyers sent to the ASF. it’s interesting reading,
and (IMO) shows that our entire IP rights system is, without a doubt, totally
and completely fucked-up

i should also mention that during the presentation, for all the individual area
status reports, a different person stood up to deliver the status, said person
being the owner/driver for that area. it was really quite impressive. and
wandering around the resort, where you saw one of them, you usually saw a whole
group of them, talking, hacking, laughing. David Bau and i spoke with them
over some beers Monday evening, and you can tell that they are all very proud
of what they’ve accomplished so far, and hungry to do a lot more. this is a
project to watch for sure

David Bau, Inside
Apache
XMLBeans - session

before you read my notes on this presentation, i need to proffer a disclaimer.
not like i’m a real journalist or anything, but still. ok, here goes:
David Bau is a very good friend of mine, has worked for me off and on
over the last 8 years (wow, has it really been that long David?), and was
working for me all during the development of XMLBeans, which was done here at
BEA where he (and i) continue to work. i think that XMLBeans is one of the
coolest things i’ve ever had the chance to be involved with (not like i wrote
any of the code or anything, i’m just a PHM) and i’m sure this colors my
judgment. ok, end of disclaimer

so what is XMLBeans? it’s a system for allowing Java developers complete object
support for XML instances whose type is defined by
XML Schema. in other words, if
someone has defined an XML type-system using XML Schema, and you want to read or
write XML types within that system, XMLBeans is the answer. and unlike many
XML-to-Java systems out there, it supports 100% of XML Schema and 100% of the
XML infoset (that’s all the information that can be represented by a given XML
instance). let me say that again, 100%. period. end of story. stick a
fork in it <g>

early on in the design of XMLBeans, David decided that in order to really make
the power of XML Schema available to the Java developer, you really needed a
100% solution. anything less led to this horrible system where developers would
need to inspect the schema of an instance they wanted to read/write, and then
pick the system that allowed them full access to that type. the world would be
so much better a place if the developer needed to learn just one thing, and
could use that whenever needed. so that’s what he and the guys built

ok, enough of the high-level, what is XMLBeans? well, it’s really 3
things:

• schema compiler - this is used to turn XML Schema type definitions
  into early-bound type system objects. so for example, if someone has defined a
  purchase order in XML Schema, the XMLBeans schema compiler will produce
  a set of Java interfaces that correspond to the schema type system along with
  some internal data structures that allow it to support those Java interfaces
  natively
• early-bound runtime - this is the backing implementation for the
  Java interfaces that the schema compiler generates. it understands the XML type
  system defined by the compiled XML Schema, and in turn uses the core runtime
  as the final backing store
• core (late-bound) runtime - this is the XML store within XMLBeans.
  this is the only part that can be used separately, if desired, to allow a
  cursor style programming model directly against the loaded/generated XML. so
  if you wanted to build a generic XML processing engine, the XMLBeans core would
  be a solid foundation to build upon

XMLBeans are currently in the Apache Incubator, and hope to get out of
incubation soon. and they are looking for help, so if you’re interested, get
involved! v1 is complete and usable today, and v2 work is just starting

Steven Noels, Introducing
Apache Cocoon - session

i have to admit, this was the last presentation i attended on Monday, and i was
getting pretty tired. so my not taking really suffered at this point. you’ll
see…

Cocoon is a web-publishing framework for portals. and it’s really, really big.
it has a pipeline architecture, and runs inside Java web-servers as a servlet

and at that point, my brain froze for the day, and it was time to close the
laptop and crack a cold one. sorry for the short-shrift on this presentation. i
spoke with Steven a couple of times during the day, and he’s a really smart guy

observations and extra-curricular activities

wireless power
that’s right, what we need is wireless power. otherwise a laptop just can’t
make it through the day. since we’ll probably be waiting a long time for this
little innovation to show up, it’d be great if conf