Biography
Blog
Don't show me problems show me answers, and don't show me them either!
May 06 2008
A couple of years back I had a very surprising experience with a junior programmer, who had just joined our team. I had asked him to work on some code until there were no more JUnit errors. A few hours... read moreMay 02 2008
Now that ODF and OOXML are both set to be on the ISO/IEC books, it is useful to consider what the next productive steps are. For genuine ODF Supporters who are concerned that ODF has languished a little out of... read moreApril 29 2008
Patrick Durusau has fun on his site with a posting satirizing the strategies of some opponents and proponents of OOXML at ISO as Beavis (for the the former) and Butt-head (for the latter.) Wikipedia has a good explanation of the... read moreApril 16 2008
Open Geospatial Consortium has put out Google's KML as one of their industrial standards. Congratulations to all concerned! KML is an XML language focused on geographic visualization, including annotation of maps and images. Geographic visualization includes not only the presentation... read moreApril 10 2008
One feature of modern US capitalism is that successful companies are ones which can obtain a market domination in one sector, then extract value-adds from it, attempting to get a locked-in (i.e. non-market) revenue base in other sectors. Microsoft Windows... read moreFake blog from SC34 meeting in Norway
April 10 2008
I couldn't attend the latest SC34 meeting physically in Oslo (I corresponded by email on some WG1 issues relating to Schematron and maintenance), but the public documents from the meeting have now been released at the SC34 website, in particular... read moreImproving bad breath and wind control
April 09 2008
Musicians who buy synthesizer wind controllers, such as a Yamaha WX-* or an Akai E*I, are often soon disappointed, not because of the controller's quality or their possibilities, but because they just don't work well with conventional MIDI synthesizer modules. Now that VST and other plugins are common, there has… read moreA non-standard guide to standards behaviour
April 01 2008
Patrick's forward-looking post mortem is worth a read by everyone involved in standards over the last year.... read moreApril 01 2008
[UPDATE] I thought I'd give some graphs for the results of the ballot-changes of DIS 29500 mark II: however, I don't expect we will know the final results until early this week (This is results as they seem on Tuesday.)... read moreWhere are the JCP documents kept?
April 01 2008
The Java Community Process is the mechanism Sun set up to develop and evolve Java "in Internet time". It brings together "a cross-section of both major stakeholders and other members of the Java community". A group of experts make the... read moreFirst impressions of Open XML: revisited
March 27 2008
There have been so much disinformation put out about the limited review time for OpenXML, that it might be salutory for people to revisit a review of the Open XML draft I put on this blog dated Thursday May 25,... read moreReaping what you sow: How a standard for Java would have made it stronger today
March 27 2008
Three programmers gathered at the next cubicle to mine yesterday, clucking and snorting as is their want. I looked over to ask what was going on. "A bug in Java" they said. The problem was with ZIP files, specifically some... read moreInstalling Solaris on desktop PC
March 26 2008
I have been pretty disappointed in the new operating system distros I have been trying out recently. In the last three to six months there has been: A horrible install of a new Mac where the Expose feature caused windows... read moreA little laugh, then something not so funny
March 25 2008
Readers may care to amuse themselves with this double think: Arnaud Le Hors Clarifiation about ASF and OOXML in which he says In case anybody misunderstood my blog entry “Let’s be clear: The Apache Software Foundation does NOT support OOXML“,... read moreMarch 25 2008
Patrick Durusau has a few more items on his website. Always worth a read for anyone interested in getting more than the party lines. Here is some of his latest TOC: Who Loses if OpenXML Loses? Thoughts on what OpenDocument... read more