Previous entries: href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5924">day one, href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5937">day two,
day three.

Hotel room. 11.30am, Thursday

Struggling to recover from the meeting-fest that was yesterday.

My first encounter was with Justsystems, a very successful Japanese
company who are trying to enter the US and European markets with an
XML product. Their xfy
(pronounced ex-fie) product is really more a platform for creating
editing environments for compound XML documents.

We were shown some very impressive demonstrations of live,
view-based, editing of underlying XML documents. They’ve created a
language called VCD, which is a bit like XSLT, except it also includes
constructs to express how editing in a live view affects the source
document.

I was very impressed with the technology, but their key task I
think is to put it into a product such that people have a use for it.
As a platform, like Eclipse, it is promising, but it’s not yet a
product. And the worry from their point of view ought to be that
platforms themselves are reaching commodity pricing points, if not
free already.

After that, long meetings discussing href="http://www.xtech-conference.org/">XTech 2005, and after that
a long, um, “meeting” in the bar and a great Lebanese restaurant with
Simon St.Laurent, Len Bullard and Jelks Cabaniss. Len was relating
lots of history from the SGML days, proving once again that there’s
nothing new under the sun.

After that we dragged ourselves off to a party where old hands in
the XML world struggled with an electric ukalele. Ducked out early as
the time zone difference started to hurt too badly.

This morning I had the pleasure of chairing two excellent talks.
Tony Byrne from CMSWatch delivered a professional and polished summary
of the state of content management in enterprises. The punchline was
really that content management was more a discipline than a matter of
choosing such-and-such a vendor’s tools.

The second talk was Allison Bloodworth from the University of
California, Berkeley, presenting on a project to unify the various
calendars created in UCB. It was a great example of merging
user-centered design with “document engineering”, a formulation of XML
document design created by Bob Glushko. Again, well polished and
presented.

We’re down to the last few presentations now, so not long to go.

Ukalele-playing markup experts, apply here.

Related link: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/11/AtomInnovation

Last week Tim Bray writes on his weblog I recently proposed to the IETF Atom Working Group that we might be nearly finished. Some people think that’s a mistake because, as they point out, Atom doesn’t have much more in the way of features than RSS. He goes on to explain why he disagrees and relates the Atom work to his work on XML itself.

He concludes with an excellent observation that all standards groups should heed.

The worst thing the Atom WG could possibly do would be to spend another year or two trying to invent wonderful new syndication goodies. What on earth would give us the idea that we’re smart enough to predict what features the world is going to want? Our job is to write down what we already know works, to do it as cleanly and clearly as possible in as few pages as possible, then get out of the way.

You don’t think this can change the world? Just watch.

What are your thoughts on Atom’s End-Game?

Related link: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

A few weeks ago I talked about my virus problem. After a lot of vague attempts to squash the critter, I’ve come up with a solution.

To hell with Windows, I’m using Linux now.

On Tuesday night, after struggling through several cycles of repairing, reinstalling, and finally restoring Windows XP, I quite painlessly installed Ubuntu Linux.

The machine is now humming along happily.

There have been some technical support issues with the wife, but for the most part everything is happy.

With the help of my friends Edd and Matt, I was able to set up the various doo-dads to bridge my internal-facing network card to the DSL modem, so I feel comfortable with the firewall and NAT setup.

I do foresee a time in the not-so-distant future when I will need Windows again. At that time I plan to buy a new hard drive and install it on there.

Have you made the switch?

Previous entries: day one, day two.

Hotel lounge. Wednesday, 10am

Lurking in the lounge after breakfast, I was greeted by Robin
Cover, Bede himself. The last time I met him was at XML Europe in
Paris four and a half years ago, at which point I was in considerable
awe. Cover has done an amazing job of chronicling XML and SGML over
the years, and it was great to meet somebody who puts my history as an
XML commentator into its rightful context. That is, I’m still the new
boy.

But maybe not quite so new as I used to feel. When I first arrived
in the XML world I felt, along with Simon St.Laurent, somewhat of an
incomer and a young turk. It’s taken a depressingly short time for us
to become part of the establishment itself, of course. Instead of
angry young men we’re a bit more the grumpy old ones.

Meeting rooms. 11am

Mike Champion is talking about XML and pain. Specifically, is the
pain worth the gain? Various facts that using XML for RPC is about
ten times slower than binary method such as Java RMI. He reckons the
bottlenecks for XML processing include well-formedness chechking,
Unicode conversion, character-by-character processing and node object
construction. And that’s before you even hit schema validation.
The issue isn’t text formats against binary formats, he says, but a
matter of XML’s particular constraints.

Not everyone’s suffering the pain, says Champion, but some
significant ones are: wireless industry, enterprise transaction
processing, and users of SOAP-based messaging. So how to relieve some
the pain for these folks? Well, Moore’s law doesn’t apply to
cellphone batteries or wireless bandwidth, so we can count out just
sittng and waiting. Compression’s out, because it doesn’t work for
small documents and adds a considerable processing overhead. Maybe
just write better code? Well, while XML parsers can get much faster,
that doesn’t help bandwidth reduction anyway.

Other possible solutions include hardware acceleration, format
simplifications (e.g. SOAP’s forbidding of DTDs), and binary XML
serialisations. The latter is the main avenue for investigation among
corporations and the W3C right now. There seems to be no obvious
solution with binary formats; often the most efficient solutions seem
to place higher constraints such as the requirement to have shared
schemas.

Where does Champion sit on this? He says “I come up firmly on the
side of waffling, I’m afraid.” Convenience always comes at a
performance cost, and convenience always wins.
Unfortunately this means that there is real pain in niches that XML
really does have application to. The dilemma is that is XML is needed
in these areas, but the overhead is unacceptable.

Champion did make some recommendations, including not to deny that
there’s a problem, and to take advantage of appropriate tools for the
job. Finally, beware of premature standardisation: “Leave evolution
to Darwin, not Berners-Lee”.

Incendiaries, scammed drink tokens and hangover cures…

Continued from Monday’s report.

Marriott Wardman Park, Washington D.C. Tuesday, 10am

Ducking into the keynote hall I hear the speaker say “value
proposition” and “web services” in quick succession, and so decide
breakfast is probably the better option. May I be forgiven.

Last night I experienced what may yet turn out to be the most
phenomenal surprise of the conference. Len Bullard! Those who follow
XML-DEV will know Len as a prolific and provocative contributor to the
XML community and who, up until this week, had not made a personal
appearance. A sighting of Len Bullard is rarer than one of XML’s
international man of mystery, James Clark.

Len himself was a little bemused by his iconic status, I think,
especially as Simon St.Laurent prostrated himself at Len’s feet at the
speakers’ reception.

Gathering a bunch of the usual suspects we roamed down Connecticut
to a Japanese restaurant, the Sake Club, and had a great meal. Much
talk of the US election, and much indulgence in the excellent sake
samplers.

No surprise on our return to hit the bar and find DocBook’s Norm
Walsh snug in a corner. After an hour or so of overconfident
declamation about punctuation and XML schemas we tottered off to
bed.

All of which goes a small way to explain why I preferred breakfast
over web services.

11am

While looking for a bandwidth fix I bump into Steve Pepper of Ontopia, chief evangelist of the topic maps world. He tells me they’ve joined in the W3C now and are working with Semantic Web Best Practices group, in particular on RDF and topic maps integration. If that works out, maybe we can send them to address the Middle East situation.

Three hours until my talk. I discovered the erudite and wonderful Wendell Piez is to chair my session, so I am now obliged to be interesting.

5pm

Just been to talk with Microsoft’s Jean Paoli, along with
co-conspirators Simon St.Laurent and Kendall Clark. Paoli
was awarded the “XML Cup” earlier, along with XML’s own Venerable Bede, Robin Cover. A passionate and expressive Frenchman, Paoli urges us that it’s time to declare victory with XML and publicly express that we’ve done what we said we would. An interesting point, as I think he’s right, although most of us still gaze on what is yet to do, or what we don’t terribly like.

Whether it’s pleasing in its implementation or not, it is the case that there’s a well-deployed style, schema and transport mechanism for XML, and this means a lot for connecting systems together. Maybe we should, as Paoli suggested, have a party.

Restaurant recommendations, plaudits and hate mail.

This week I’m attending the href="http://www.xmlconference.org/">XML 2004 conference in
Washington, D.C. And you, dear reader, will get the benefit of my
thoughts and experiences over the course of the next few days. As
well as XML-focused coverage, I’ll be sharing some random Linux and
technology-centered observations along the way.

York, UK. Monday, 6am

Struggle outside with suitcase to get in taxi. Surprisingly warm.
Driver has an XDA smartphone. Upon enquiring, I find out he likes it
because the soft-buttons are big enough for his fingers to press
easily. “I find it useful” he says, and I’m left wondering if he’s
had to try hard to justify the purchase to his wife.

On the way he tells me how the train company I’m about to use has
a bad record for the airport run. I’ve never had any problems I say,
and reassure us both.

Now on the train to the airport, I pull out the laptop and start
some work. Marvel at href="http://usefulinc.com/edd/notes/UbuntuOnSonyVaioTRSeries">how
sweetly the little Sony TR1 runs href="http://www.ubuntulinux.org/">Ubuntu, and write an excited
blog entry about the href="http://www.xtech-conference.org/">XTech 2005 conference,
which I chair.

I’m going to be talking about href="http://usefulinc.com/doap">DOAP at XML 2004. I’ve talked
about the project several times before now, and it’s getting some
pleasing take-up and interest from software distributors. I don’t yet
know whether my audience will be die-hard XML geeks, semantic web
wonks or those with a more general interest, so I expect I’ll be
adapting my presentation on the fly.

Manchester airport, UK. Monday, 9.05am

A snack breakfast and duty-free shop later, I get into the business
lounge in Terminal 1. Pleasantly surprised to find, via the nifty href="http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/">NetworkManager
system, that there’s free wireless access here. Pretty unusual for
the UK!

I checked in 3.5 hours early for my flight to Washington. The
security man observed quite a few people had been early. For my part,
it’s concern that there may be additional security rigours so soon
after the election. I’m already looking forward to my first
fingerprinting on entering the US.

Glancing at other laptops seen on the journey, I noticed a marked
prediliction among business people for spreadsheets. This backs up a
theory of mine I’ve been developing since I noted a colleague from href="http://www.bridgeheadinternational.com/">Bridgehead virtually lived in
Excel. Everything from the expected financials right down to project
planning happened in a spreadsheet for him.

For a certain type of person at least, spreadsheets are like the
TODO.txt files that hackers use to organise their lives,
pace Danny O’Brien. Excel is the basic vi, grep and
sed of such businesspeople’s lives.

I’ve never been able to face forcing my thoughts into a grid — one
reason I’ve been finding Tomboy such fun — but it
seems like plenty of people find it a comfortable place to be.

Contempt, vitriol and dinner invitations please.

<dc:identifier rdf:resource="http://collection.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/results.jsp?view=detail&id=13430"
    xlink:arcrole="http://www.natlib.govt.nz/dr/role#AccessFormat"
    xlink:role="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/html"
    xlink:title="View: Achilles carries Penthesilea through Doubtful Sound"
    xlink:type="simple"/>

<dcterms:hasFormat rdf:resource="http://collection.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/images/thumbs/2001-2010/2003_39_4.jpg"
    xlink:arcrole="http://www.natlib.govt.nz/dr/role#Thumbnail"
    xlink:role="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/jpeg"
    xlink:title="Thumbnail: Achilles carries Penthesilea through Doubtful Sound"
    xlink:type="simple"/>

Are there any other new uses of XLink, especially within RDF/XML?

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

My friends have been talking about Skype, the new internet telephony service. Calls between Skype clients are free, and client software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I downloaded the Mac OS X client last night. It installed easily, in true Mac fashion. Within minutes I received a call from my friend and colleague Edd Dumbill — the first time we’ve actually ever heard each others’ voices.

He came through loud and clear, even on the iBook’s tiny built-in speakers. And although the iBook has no audio in port, Edd reports that the built-in mic produced decent sound on his end of the connection across the pond.

If I were planning to use Skype more than occasionally, I would certainly be investing in a USB headset or handset.

Ultimately I expect to be using Skype mostly to have some fun chatting with some of my imaginary friends on the internet. With its conferencing feature, Skype will also make for some interesting group chats.

And with its “SkypeOut” feature — allowing you to call a regular telephone line from Skype for a low rate of € 0.017 per minute — I may find a practical use for Skype on those rare occasions when I do need to call a regular phone from the road.

I haven’t been interested in VoIP technology until now. I’m still not saying it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I can see the advantages.

Do you Skype?

Related link: http://livingindryden.org/

I’ve learned a lot in a year of blogging about Dryden, a town of 13,000 people in upstate New York. The lessons aren’t quite what I expected.

I started out after a local election that we’d lost, thinking that a more locally-focused source of information might make it easier for people to figure out what was happening in their town and make informed decisions. I think my lack of political experience was crucial at that point, since it helped me choose to do something different from the average campaign flier. My technical skills got me through the many hurdles of creating a tolerably presentable web site. Sheer orneriness has helped keep me posting to it every single day.

I wasn’t sure when I started out that there would be enough information to post every day. There certainly aren’t articles in the local paper about Dryden every day, though every other is a reasonable average, and limiting myself to what the Ithaca Journal finds worth printing wouldn’t have been very exciting. (Covering it and linking its archives does make it easier to find in Google, at least!)

As it turns out, there is vastly more happening in Dryden than I can possibly cover. I don’t have to fall into neighborhood gossip to find news. Local governments, schools, and organizations are usually up to something. People are building energy-efficient houses, repairing trails, starting businesses, and doing all kinds of fascinating things, once you learn where to look. For genuinely slow days, there are always history and photography. The stories and the people are fascinating and often complicated.

Writing about the community has also pulled me out of my house and deeper into the community. I’ve met many times more people locally in the last year than I’d met in my previous five years of living here. My mental rolodex is long since exploded. I’ve joined the Historical Society and the Town’s Democratic Committee, and wound up the Chair of the Democratic Committee. Blogging always seems to end up making people participants, and that definitely has happened to me. It sure wasn’t what I expected as I was setting up Movable Type!

I’ve written about this project before, and I’m still looking for other people doing similar things. I’m still contemplating the link between blogging and politics, and still suspect that link can be richest when we blog the things immediately around us - things we’re close enough to see, feel, and do, filled with people we get to know.

Is focusing on a small community an appropriate way to blog politically?

A couple of true geeks recently went on a hiking trip, and brought along essential reading in the form of my Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) book :) The attached photo shows that ESB is not only capable of scaling to 12,550 feet, it also bridges the continental divide.

In case you can’t make it out - That sign they are leaning against is what marks “Pawnee Pass” at the continental divide, with Arapaho National Forest at one side and Roosevelt National Forest on the other side.

Now what I want to know is, who was taking the picture?
Dave