Here is a brief interview with Werner Vogels on Amazon and SOA which has some important take aways particularly around designing for simplicity, maintaining customer focus, being business driven and technology agnosticism. Amazon has evolved from a single server, single database environment to a multi-server database platform serving millions of customers. Along the way they discovered that a service oriented architecture provided the flexibility and agility to support their business goals. Amazon didn’t attempt to retrofit a set of technologies or an architecture approach into their business they actually found that such an approach helped them to grow their business. To facilitate the magnitudes of scale and reliability they moved from a centralized mainframe platform to a one built on distributed components. Nothing new but always nice to heat about the practicality of SOA solving real world problems.

Google Checkout API - O’Reilly XML Blog

Google Inc. revealed the launch of Google Checkout, a checkout process that makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure for Google users. It offers an easy and trusted checkout option that enables shoppers to purchase from participating stores with a single Google login. Bypassing their traditional beta releases(years in beta stage) this time Google came up with fully functional and tested version because consumers would be unwilling to trust their bank accounts and credit cards to a beta version. It will serve as a centralized authorization service for customer purchases, promising the transaction security with industry-standard SSL technology.

Hmmm… I guess when you run out of innovative ideas, just do the next best thing…

Dupli-Vate!

NOTE: The title relates to a recent comment I made in follow-up to a recent post.

Google Inc. revealed the launch of Google Checkout, a checkout process that makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure for Google users. It offers an easy and trusted checkout option that enables shoppers to purchase from participating stores with a single Google login. Bypassing their traditional beta releases(years in beta stage) this time Google came up with fully functional and tested version because consumers would be unwilling to trust their bank accounts and credit cards to a beta version. It will serve as a centralized authorization service for customer purchases, promising the transaction security with industry-standard SSL technology.

[len:QOTD] On Innocence and Corruption - O’Reilly XML Blog

If nationalism is a disease, the cure is not to catch it. Be happy about what you have and are. That way is contentment and enlightenment. But as soon as it becomes the metric for dividing those beneath you from those like you, it dissolves that well-being and spreads like the flu, with every breath and everything you touch.

Oh, and ‘N’ stands for Next. As in “Quote of the Next Day”.

Smile and know that you love me. :D

Some people argue that although the Semantic Web technologies are all in place, the world isn’t ready for the Semantic Web vision yet; that we’re still a couple of years away from fully embracing and adopting Semantic Web principles and attitudes.

Perhaps, though, the opposite is closer to the truth: that some of the biggest and best projects on the web today are based on Semantic Web principles - they just don’t happen to be using Semantic Web technologies.

It could be argued that Semantic Web models are exploding on to the web in spite of the technology, not because of it. Maybe we are using older, more limited technologies because of our lack of understanding and desire to learn complex new languages.

Current web applications that could be cited as Semantic Web proofs of concept are…

The last few months I’ve been doing some consulting for Allette Systems on their software engineering procedures, based on some ideas I’ve been developing for Topologi. The idea is to first figure out what the state of the art is for Java coding (development environment, best practises and related topics), then to use that as the goal for tooling up other development environments for other languages to the same level: JavaScript, C++, XHTML, XML, XML Schemas, CSS, and XSLT.

Such topics as: automatic code checkers, test runners, build systems, diagramming, profilers, metrics, and so on.

Java is particularly rich in great tools: Eclipse, Findbugs, JLint, and so on. Just yesterday I found 4 potential bugs in 10 minutes of an 9early) code review using JLint to check for potential null references. But languages like JavaScript are traditionally and perhaps intrinsically poor. Moving to a more more mature and transparent software development process involves being able to demonstrate to customers and management why they should believe some software meets the desired functionality and quality.

Now sure we also have an ISO 9126 program in place, so that we can make sure we concentrate on the important issues in each project. And sure an ongoing risk management process. But as Java’s tooling has improved, it has only served to more sharply show JavaScript (and XLST’s) poor tooling.

The big thing that I have discovered so far out of this effort is the Selenium test system for JavaScript. It looks like revolutionizing the testing of JavaScript. So far in our testing, it works brilliantly for simple pages. But for AJAX pages which open different windows, there are persistant problems connected to JavaScript’s anti-spyware single-origin visibility rules. (We have to add some hidden buttons to pages to allow communication with popup windows and their data. Not so neat, but workable.) In a way, Selenium is JavaScript what JUnit is to Java. And if Java needs JUnit, then JavaScript needs Selenium more!

Ruminations on Turning 43 - O’Reilly XML Blog

Corruption is made of innocence.

’nuff said.

It’s not exactly one of those birthdays that jumps out as you as being the epitome of red letter days. Now 42 was pretty interesting - it was the answer to the universe, even if the question only made sense in a distinctly odd base. It’s certainly not “The Big Four-O”, not even the rather milquetoaste 44 with its repeating integers. On the other hand, its a prime number, numbers which will occur with decreasing frequency as I get older. Whether such is indicative of odd phenomena, branch points in life, or are simply difficult to categorize in the grand scheme of things, I figure the year should be a strange one.

The last year prime year, when I was 37, was remarkable for several things. My youngest daughter was born on March 3, 2000, which meant that her third birthday was on 03/03/03. Not surprisingly, she’s showing a fascination with numbers and science and patterns at six - she thinks like me, alas, which means she’ll spend the next several years trying to figure out why the rules that everyone else takes for granted exist, and as such, find it far more difficult to readily fit in because she’ll have to understand the rationale for such rules in a world that is remarkably irrational.

I know, I know … when you talk about a series, it usually implies that the articles will be somewhat closer together than the ones for my Understanding XForms series has been. Mea culpa. The last couple of months have been busy, but a desire to wrap up my Firefox book (another mea culpa, if it comes to that) has combined with being fairly deeply immersed in the vagaries of XForms on Firefox to prompt me to write the third installment in this series. Take a look at the links at the end of the article for the previous installments. Please note in all of these that the assumption being made that the examples given here, if run in Mozilla Firefox, need the Xforms extension available at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/download.html. However, the examples should (in general) run in most contemporary XForms enabled browsers (a topic I’ll be discussing a couple of columns from now).

Update: Credit where credit is due. From Mike Champions comments below, we discover,

Uhh, this really wasn’t my doing. Nithya is the XSLT Program Manger and has worked hard to make the case for XSLT2, Soumitra Sengupta was the Product Unit Manger who made the hard call to pull the plug on XQuery in .NET 2.0, and Anders is the one who laid down the party line that XLinq will not even try to compete with XSLT for loosely-structured doc scenarios that XSLT handles well.

Thanks for the info, Mike! And thanks to each one of these folks who have helped bring ALL of this into reality. It is MUCH appreciated :)

[Original Post]
mikechampion’s weblog : Why does the world need another XML API?

XSLT definitely won’t go away. The Microsoft XML team was promoting XQuery as a “better XSLT than XSLT 2.0″ a few years ago (before I came, don’t hurt me!), and got set straight by the large and vocal XSLT user community on why this is not going to fly. While it may be true in some abstract way that XQuery or XLinq might logically be able to do everything that XSLT does, as a practical matter it won’t. Most obviously, XSLT a “real” standard and supported on most platforms; if you need to write XML processing code with a high confidence that it can be made to work on the client and the server, on Windows, OS X, Linux, etc., and easily co-exist with application logic written in C , C#, Java, or a scripting languge, then XSLT is probably just the ticket. Even if you are committed to the .NET platform and could take an XLinq dependency, there are jobs that are simply easier to do in XSLT than XLinq, especially when the XML data being processed is loosely structured and deeply nested. XSLT’s recursive template matching paradigm is very well suited for that kind of data, and XLinq has not been designed with that type of data in mind

I’ve emphasized and made bold a portion of the above text *NOT* as a form of gloating (although, it brings a smile to my face to know that I was and am a part of the mentioned “large and vocal XSLT user community on why this is not going to fly” :D) and instead as a focal point to help bring focus to the fact that in the space of less than 2 years, the presence of Mike Champion on Microsoft campus has created an enourmous impact on the support and development of XML technologies that the community is desirous of, finding ways to get the “message” into the hands that matter most… e.g. The one’s making the decisions as to the ultimate technical direction and underlying technologies that will be supported, and those that will not.

Worth noting,

4Gore.org :: It’s No Longer a Question of Truth. It’s a Question of “What Must We Do?”

“I certainly believe Gore should run.
“He is by far the best candidate for president in 50 years, addressing the most important issue in a century.”
Lawrence Lessig - From a private email thread dated May 30th, 2006

At the above linked location, you will find reference to the above quote, an overview of my own feelings on this matter, as well, and most importantly, a simple reflection on the importance of EVERYONE seeing “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I invite each and every one of you that read this, to visit the above link, and gain access to theatre locations and show times playing “An Inconvenient Truth”, as well as trailer and a link to a web-based forum in which you can discuss these issues.

This is REALLY important stuff. I appreciate the time you spend researching and studying this topic for yourself.

Thanks in advance!

Synchronizing calendar events between the web and the desktop

In a recent post to the LiveClip mailing list, Matt Augustine, Software Design Engineer on the Concept Development Team at Microsoft writes,

Today I presented a demo at the Supernova conference in the “Decentralizing Data” workshop, moderated by Tantek Celik. The demo shows how to leverage Live Clipboard and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) to synchronize calendars in both directions between a web application (Upcoming.org) and a desktop application (Microsoft Outlook). It makes use of a new technique, pushing client SSE feed state to the server via HTTP POST, to circumvent the difficulties of feed cross-subscription in firewalled environments. It also shows a tentative representation of SSE feed references in the Live Clipboard XML format.

If you are interested in seeing this demo, please view the screen cast at http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/screencast/LiveClipSSE/LiveClipSSE.html

The next 5 minutes or so of your life spent watching this screencast will go a LONG way into gaining a greater understanding of how using LiveClipboard and SSE can help make your web applications a TON more useful for your customers.

Thanks for the demo, Matt!

Opera 9.0 Final released - Desktop Team - by Desktop Team

Hi All
We just released Opera 9.0 Final on opera.com!
Thanks to all for helping us test the product.

Hey cool! A little “out from nowhere comes the final release”, but still cool.

With this in mind, and the fact that they announced they would include support for XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0, and given Opera is a standards-focused company,

A + B =

XSLT processing failed!

Huh? Why would it fail? I’m using fully compliant XML and XSLT/XPath 1.0.

Lets see what the error console says,

XSLT - http://browserbasedxml.com/SessionConfig.xsl
attribute at line 13, column 40
Error: invalid expression: document(my:UserAgentInvalidDoc)
Call to undefined function: document

> Call to undefined function: document < ?

Hmmmm....

We will not stop work now that 9.0 is out and we do continue to fix issues. Stay tuned, the show goes on

Okay… well, I guess a few commercials to pay the bills is understandable.

For now, I guess we stay-tuned, and use XMLHttpRequest scripted transformations to gain access to the data we want to transform.

But Opera, no document function?

Ouch! That one hurts!

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Hire Joe Gregorio

Joe Gregorio has a blog post simply titled Hire Me where he writes

As of 10 O’Clock this morning I am no longer employed; being laid off tends to do that to you. The good news is that I can catch up on all those projects around the house, my backlog of XML.com articles, my editing of the next draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol, etc. I can even start blogging about the industry I was working in and the company I was working for, but only after I fulfill the requirements of my severance package.

As positive as that all sounds I do have a mortgage and a family, and they like to eat, so I need to find gainful employment.

Please hire me.

If you are unable to hire me please do me a favor and link to this entry.

My resume in PDF format. An HTML version will appear shortly.

I’m not a hiring manager which means I can’t hire Joe, so I’m doing the next best thing and linking to his entry and resume. If you work at Microsoft and are interested in a guy who is quite knowlegable about building RESTful services, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone better qualified than Joe Gregorio.

After spending some “quality” time with the Atom Publishing Protocol spec, I have come to respect both Joe and Bill (de hÓra) even more than I did before I found myself wrapped around this gripping work.

Yes, I used the word “gripping” in the same sentence as “spec.” The APP spec is well thought through, meticulous where it needs to be, and not where it doesn’t. I have come to believe that well written specifications that fill a MUCH NEEDED area of technological advancement speak VOLUMES in regards to the individuals who wrote them. So do poorly written specs, regardless of the their need in the technology space. The volumes they speak, however, are not quite the same as the first set of folks.

Add to this the fact that by convincing a Joe Gregorio to commit himself to a life on Redmond campus would turn more than a few heads. And a lot of those heads are folks in whom taking Microsoft more seriously would bring more than just a *HIGHLY* qualified and *HIGHLY* capable hacker into your midst. It would bring a sense of “Okay, maybe things ARE really changing on campus. Hmmmm….”

In a company who is building their new foundation on “wiring the web with web feeds” I can’t think of one other person (who is available) on this planet who could possibly help bring this focus, into focus, faster than Joe Gregorio.

Please do us all a favor and convince Joe to come work for you!

Thanks in advance!

The Mojikyo font set is the mother of all character sets: or rather, a font set. It is available free for non-commercial distribution and for a fee for commercial use, and tries to have as many variant characters as possible: the opposite approach to Unicode’s Han unification.

The Wikipedia entry for Mojikyo is sparse but OK. It also has a link to the download page at MS for GB18030 support. (GB18030 is the PRC equivalent to Unicode, or at least their equivalent to UTF-8: the encoding system is different to UTF-8 but byte based, and the code points are different to Unicode, but transcodable.)

Embedding Glyph Idenfifiers in XML Documents (EGIX) is a good PDF article by Christian Wittern that can help explain some approaches to overcoming Unicode’s limitations for Han ideographs (kanji). (Tim Bray’s blog also has an item on an unrelated set of problems related to non-ASCII characters this week too.)

Christian also has a general intro to writing systems and Unicode, preparatory for the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) P5 chapter 25 Representation of non-standard characters and glyphs.

I am not sure what the equivalent markup in Office Open XML or ODF is. I presume OOX has it, because the ability to define your own private characters (or, at least, glyphs) has long been a feature of East Asian word processors. ODF is still imature in several areas of internationalization: the Egyptian standards body commented on the lack of Arabic support in the voting at ISO. But internationalization is a slow business. It will take years before privately defined characters support, such as allowed by EGIX or TEI or even Unicode Ideographic Description Sequences, becomes ubuiquitous, because it really requires platform support: Java, .NET, libxml and the dynamic languages.

Sometimes I joke in seminars “What do you call someone who believes that everyone should follow his standard but he should have to follow no-one else’s?”, Answer: an American. This is a cheap joke with suprising success, but icebreaks for a more serious discussion on vendor and developer attitude to standards; the quaint pioneer mythology that some Americans seem prone to, versus the desparate cooperativeness of the Australians, versus the desire for community of Europeans, versus the need for a level playing field from the Asian countries who see America as the periphery now. Of course, all stereotypes; reflecting on these stereotypes lets anyone thoughful think “Am I being like that stereotype American or like that stereotype European?“, so not valueless.

In a recent exchange, Linus Torvalds blasts specifications; he is plausible but overbroad, and sadly “American”.

With the initial caveat that his remarks really seem to be on the issue of kernel programming, and I’d leave that area to him, I think his remarks are mistaken, misleading and simplistic when applied to the wider world of software For a start, his argument is based on either abstract specifications or running code, when in real life you may have both. And, most importantly, you may (or may not) have access to a community as well. Worst, Torvald has a running assumption that a specification tells you how to implement something rather than (some of) what you want to achieve. Standards certainly strive very hard to avoid implementation-specific expressions, and standards seem to be what Linus is targetting at least in his examples.

Personally, I don’t care much for technologies that are controlled by one stakeholder, once they reach a position of niche dominance to the extent of discouraging new entrants. Microsoft or Linus. (I am terribly uncomfortable with having to be the driver for Schematron in a similar vein, I am a bad driver.)

I hope so! [NOTE: No, this is not the mentioned announcement regarding An Inconvenient Truth. Once I have the servers, DNS, S3, etc… all stabilized, then I will make that announcement. But the last thing I want to do is announce this in the middle of a MAJOR server transition… This is an EXTREMELY imortant topic, and it needs to be launched without a hitch… I’m preparing for that exact scenario as we speak…

In the mean time….

[ANOUNCEMENT]

Viberavetions Community Development Blogs, Forums, and File and Photo Sharing Server is Now Live! :D

http://dev.viberavetions.com/community/

Below you will find a copy of the post I just added to the CommunityServer-based development blogs, forums, etc… in which will become this projects intial home base as far as giving each of us who desires to get involved the ability to communicate with one another, discuss ideas, ask questions (Len… I have a full overview that I am writing that speaks to each of your bullet-point questions. I hope to get that done today, but it may not be until tomorrow, whis is dependent upon on how the transition to the new servers, and S3 goes…), etc….

But to get things set off with a bang, I figured the best thing to do is to give you an application to play with,

http://pypod.net/console/index.html [NOTE: Because of the permissions level necessary for this app to run, you need to access this link from within IE (obviously on a Windows box… This WILL run via Mono, but not yet. More details on this subject @ below/mentioned post.

NOTE: If you are not a developer, and even more so, unfamiliar with the Python programming language (.NET 2.0 experience, any language, would certainly help as well), then this application is NOT FOR YOU. Wait, let me rephrase… you can install it all you want… it may not make any sense to you when an IronPython (Beta 8-based… need to make an announcement regarding this as well)-based Console app appears in front of you, but please don’t let this deter you from installing and running this if you feel so inclined.

A TON more info is below… But I think its important we push hard and fast with this, so if you’re cool with that… then buckle up… This is going to be some fun :D

Oh I remember… That’s something you SHOULD do such that we don’t continually reinvent the wheel, building from that in which has come before us, embracing the good stuff, and extending into better…

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Adobe Comments on PDF in Office Brouhaha and Microsoft Responds

Microsoft has demonstrated a practice of using its monopoly power to undermine cross platform technologies and constrain innovation that threatens its monopolies. Microsoft’s approach has been to “embrace and extend” standards that do not come from Microsoft. Adobe’s concern is that Microsoft will fragment and possibly degrade existing and established standards, including PDF, while using its monopoly power to introduce Microsoft-controlled alternatives - such as XPS. The long-term impact of this kind of behavior is that consumers are ultimately left with fewer choices.

Huh??? How does one

“constrain innovation”

via

“embrace[ing] and extend[ing]” standards”

??? [Maybe its just me, but I always considered “embrace and extend” and “innovation” in the same general sense of “you can’t innovate, unless you build from what already exists… otherwise it wouldn’t be all that innovative, ESPECIALLY if you simply create something that already exists… Then again… me and the other kids? We’ve never been much alike… ;)]

Well, maybe I should rephrase my above opening point to instead read,

Did you know there are ISO standards for the following: PDF, HTML and Dublin Core Metadata?

Document management — Electronic document file format for long-term preservation — Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4, Information technology — Document description and processing languages — HyperText Markup Language (HTML) (which has a User’s Guide), and Information and documentation — The Dublin Core metadata element set.

The PDF and the HTML are profiles of the well-known standards, suitable for organizations wishing for a conservative subset suitable for archiving, interchange and complience. ISO is quite a good forum for this kind of standards making: it leaves the originating organization free to innovate while meeting the needs of users for a fixed base format.

I’ve been wearing my entrepeneurial hat of late, and I have no doubt that its skewed my perceptions somewhat, but I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon that’s occurring somewhat out of the main spotlight of the media circus that’s the tech industry. In the mid-to-late 1990s, while it was possible to start companies out of a garage, and SOHO offices became something of the rage, most such companies so started were either services oriented companies that were intended to remain relatively focused on the local communities, or they were companies with plans to grow to be the next Microsoft in ten years. One or two man custom development did of course occur - software’s only real requirements is that you need to have a machine handy - but in most cases, such customization involved a large company subcontracting out to smaller ones.

Lately, however, this is changing, a change driven largely I suspect by the open source development model, but driven in a way somewhat different than the “New World Order” folks of yesteryear predicted. The virtual corporation as envisioned earlier (and expounded upon in such lengths by Wired Magazine) was predicated upon the notion that programmers, graphical designers, and other “creative” types would end up as glorious freelancers, independent entrepeneurs in control of their own destinies, the vanguard of the move towards the new frontiers of business.

If you look at your watch, and if necessary do the time conversion math, you will note that it is now 7:10 PM in Salt Lake City. According to my previous post, I should be inside the theatre now. Instead, I am just getting back from the 4:55 PM showing. As it turns out, the 7:00pm show was sold out when I went to purchase my ticket. However, after chatting with a few folks that worked there, if theres was a spot available at 7:00, they would certainly not find any issue with me filling that spot. They both didn’t seem to think that if I were to simply show up, there would be any real trouble for me to find a way inside.

In fact, my plan was to see the 4:55 show, and by word of a bit more “advice” just stick around for the 7:00pm show and discussion that I spoke of earlier.

Instead I am writing this post. Midway through the film I debated whether it would be better to be involved in the discussion, or to come back and just finish out the mentioned paper, and get this project launched.

When the show ended, I don’t think I even remembered there was a discussion as part of the 7:00pm showing. I was and am *THAT* determined to finish out this project (its actually three separate, but related sites).

Beyond sleeping and eating, whether finishing these out is *convenient* or *inconvenient*, I am determined to finish and launch. There is nothing else I am going to do until they are complete.

When you hear from me next… They will be ready.

Horrific blog by an ex Microsoftie on possible reasons for Vista’s slippages. Comments such as An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies) are enough to set any software developer’s hair on fire.

But the silver lining is that if Microsoft by some amazing effort does manage to deliver Vista after the current death march, it is only because they were one wafer short of too much. Which does not make Vista just right like Goldilocks’ third bear; it makes it just wrong. The silver lining is that MS will have reached the end of the road for monolithic systems, and will have to re-architect for the OS after Vista.

But if Vista is so complex that it cannot have a future, why would anyone adopt it? Is that really what all the Windows Live stuff is about, having a good Plan B in place in case Plan A implodes?

Kimbro Staken has a good blog on 10 things to change in your thinking when building REST XML.

I think I am onside with all his points. But then the question arises, how do we do this without becoming completely unconstrained?. Regular readers will be able to guess what I’d say: it begins with S and isnt Semantics and is a Standard.

Sun meistergeek Jonathan Schwartz has a good blog Why Open Standards Matter; its permalink name is why odf matters which gives the flavour.

But the question comes up: does adopting or supporting a standard entail tracking changes or evolutions to the standard? I say yes, it must. The world evolves. And as it does, the value of the original standard diminishes. Because the benefit of a standard is largely the network effects, from easier documentability (because the standard acts as a base-level documentation), from multiple implementations, from interoperability, from ubiquity, and so on: in ISO terms from agreement.

But a company that keeps to an old standard while the rest of the world moves on, evolving and improving the standard, is in fact involved in disagreement! They dilute the usefulness the evolved standard but also the usefulness of their own implementation, by inactivity.

Salt Lake Film Society: Now Showing

SPECIAL SCREENINGS & EVENTS
KCPW Logo”An Inconvenient Truth” opening-night screening and Panel Discussion. Panel Discussion will be recorded for broadcast and is sponsored by KCPW Community Radio.

Broadway, Fri 6/16, 7:00 PM screening

Tickets on sale now at the Broadway box office. Regular adult admission price of $7.75, no discounts or passes for this screening.

This is *THE MOST IMPORTANT* thing you can do at 7:00 PM tomorrow night. Please be there. You need to see this film, and you need to be a part of this discussion.

Please be there tomorrow night for the 7:00PM showing, or if this doesn’t work there is a 12:05, 12:45, 2:50, 4:00, 4:55, 6:00, as well as 9:30 and 10:05

Seriously.

Please. We all need to see this film and, if possible, discuss the issues and what it is we can do to start making the necessary changes such that we can have even the smallest of hope of having much of a planet left at the end of this century. It’s weird to think of it like this, but its a very realistic proposition that our children will still be alive at the turn of the next century.

Well, I guess that all depends…

Please come see this movie tomorrow.

Here is the Trax schedule. The theatre is One and One Third (1 1/3) blocks from the Gallivan Center stop.

Here is a map with a pushpin note marking the Broadway Theatre (111 E. 300 S., SLC, UT)

Here are the showtimes again,

12:05, 12:45, 2:50, 4:00, 4:55, 6:00, 7:00PM, 9:30 and 10:05

Sometime. Anytime. Tell your boss your sick. Tell your boss to contact me if he/she has a problem with letting you off work. If all else fails, quit. I promise, the heat you receive from your boss is nothing like the heat you may end up dealing with in the not too distant future. I’m not trying to be sarcastic, or funny. Please just come see it, no matter what.

Thanks!

NOTE: After viewing this film and participating in tomorrows discussion I will be walking the three blocks back to my home, writing the final pieces of a paper I have been writing, and launching a new project as the result. This may be the most important project I am ever a part of during the course of my entire life.

I guess we’ll find out.

Until then…

DISCLAIMER: This is not an anti-label project. This is a pro-Artist/Musician and pro-Fans of these same Artists/Musicians. There is nothing about this that suggests that the labels can’t be a part of this… In fact we hope that MANY, if not ALL of them embrace these ideas, while gaining a real-world understanding of just how much power exists when the ideals of a free culture are embraced and built upon.
—

[NOTE: Please see Russ Miles modified version of this post @ http://www.russmiles.com/home/2006/6/15/an-announcement-and-a-call-for-participation-all-in-one.html . While the core areas are the same the “story behind” is from his perspective/style and adds some cool side points that are not a part of this post.]

ANNOUNCEMENT and CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:

Last July Russ Miles and myself began to brainstorm on some ideas on how we could take podcasting, create some tools and such, and create a new medium in which artists and musicians could develop, collaborate, and distribute both their music and their message in ways that would allow these same folks to quit their day job at Kinko’s (I know, HORRIBLE cliché… but hey, I grew up in Seattle during the grunge scene… A lot of the folks I knew DID work at Kinko’s! ;) And become full time musicians without having this mean signing with a major label to make this possible.

At first we were somewhat limited with our overall vision. Then Russ had a breakthrough:

[QUICK-UPDATE] : Russ (Miles), in whom is the co-idea-developer of this mentioned project, will be home around 5pm UK time at which point we plan to launch our posts regarding the announcement at the same time. Sorry for the hold up, but this is something we developed together in the early stages, and then began to invite a few of our hacking friends to join us, which things just blossomed from there… None-the-less, we both want to be a part of the official announcement, so @ around 5pm London/UK expect to see the mentioned announcement.
–

[Original Post]
These are the last seven news articles posted to the RIAA web site front page.

Recording Industry Association of America

�
New Legislation In The House: Satellite Radio Services Must Play By Same Rules As Other Digital Music Firms

�
RIAA Identifies 12 Piracy “Hot Spot” Cities

�
RIAA Expresses Appreciation For U.S. Government Efforts To Improve The Protection Of Music In Global Markets, Calls For Tough Action Against Russia

�
Music, Movie Industries Target Theft On Internal Campus Networks

�
New Bipartisan Senate Bill Levels Digital Music Playing Field, Assures Satellite Firms Play By Same Rules As Others

�
RIAA Releases 2005 Latin Music Shipment Numbers

�
Annual U.S.-China Trade Meeting Yields Promising Outcome

Five out of Seven of these articles are specific to RIAA’s ongoing attempts to control the flow of music through the channels in which they own. But if bleeding means leading, then what we have on our hands goes beyond scrapes and bruises, and leads directly into SEVERE hemorrhaging thats well on its way to hypovolemic shock being listed as the “cause of death.”

Okay, fair enough…

Update: A HUGE thanks to Daniel for providing some EXTREMELY beneficial information and a list of links that at face value confirm what I assumed was probably the case… This is another case, similar to the recent O’ReillyGate incident in which standard, legal, and ethicial business practices continued to take place during a time when ANYTHING that even remotely smells like an attempt to “own” and idea, or a phrase, term, etc… both looks and quacks just the same.

I’m all for DuckTyping, but StereoTyping is something that I think we all can state is not the kind of trait we should seek after in life. To each of our defense, we want to live in a free culture…. bottom line.

This is a good thing.

We just need to come to a greater understanding, myself included, of what a “Free Culture” really looks, smells, and quacks like, and find a way to realize,

“There’s one!”

“err wait…

The Extensibility Manifesto is not the latest Robert Ludlum novel but a movement, spearheaded by respected industry figure Dale Waldt, well-known as a publisher of the <!TAG> newsletter for many years in the 90s: <!TAG> was what the SGML industry did for information before XML.COM came along. The Extensibility Manifest shares a lot of the mindset of The Agile Manifesto, for example the need to protect against over-engineering and out-of-controlness.

I’ve been happy to sign up to it, because I think it addresses some really practical gotchas. At first glimpse, the ten points to the manifesto may seem a little managerspeak-ish: how much leveraging can a poor boy take, after all? But it is aimed at mananagers, who can use it to check their XML production processes, practices and environment.

Turn the points into questions or a checklist. So “1. Schemas and data have a mutual obligation to the simplest structure possible, achievable by continual reassessment of the two by their creators and rigorous justification for every modification.” becomes

• How are we making sure our schemas and data have the simplest structure possible?
• Do we have a process or procedure in place for reassessment of structures (refactoring, etc)?
• Do we have a process or procedure in place to state, adjudicate and log justifications?

These are all very practical questions, and address the evil triplets of early XML deployment: incompleteness, inflexibility, and over-engineering.

My company, Topologi, has been fairly quiet this last year both because of my indisposition and because we have been re-aligning our developments to fit in with the Extensibility Manifesto. A point like 5. Effective sampling and analysis upfront reduces risk and improves implementation schedules clearly raises the question “How do we do efficient sampling and analysis?”: the metrics I recently blogged about fit in there, clearly (as do Topologi’s utiliites.) Like the Agile Manifesto, the Extensibility Manifesto is a kind of meta-benchmark: you don’t get certified according to it (like ISO 9000) but an organization can adopt it as way to prove that XML processes align with business requirements.

The paper and online versions of the ISO Schematron standard are now available from ISO for CHF120 and from ANSI for US$98. I believe it is being translated into Japanese as a JIS standard and will be cloned as a British Industrial Standard.

I’d like to thank everyone involved at ISO SC34, notably Ken Holman, Martin Bryan, Murata Makoto, Yushi Komachi, James Clark, Alex Brown, Eric van der Vlist, Lynn Price, and Charles Goldfarb. Special mention to my far-thinking sponsors at Academia Sinica, Taipei, for letting me developer the ideas and implementation, in particular Dr Simon Lin and Prof. C.C.Hsieh. Thanks also to various patient bosses or business partners at Geotempo, Topologi and Allette Systems.

After almost a year with little news, it seems not a day goes by without someone from a large government organization or Fortune 500 company dropping me a line saying that they use Schematron: millions of documents. Schematron has been ticking away as a grassroots phenomenon: indeed AFAIK every implementation of it is Open Source. But Schematron’s strength is not comprehensiveness but that it is a simple layer to allow validation using XPaths without requiring programming knowledge (e.g. XSLT skills). XPaths really are fantastic.

According to a comment left on a recent post from Oleg Tkachenko by someone claiming to be Mike Champion (I can only assume (claim == reality)),

Signs on the Sand: XSLT2/XPath2/XQuery1 fresh CRs

We are actively working on XSLT2 however, and there will be CTP releases starting in roughly the Orcas timeframe. It’s not clear how it will ultimately be released.

Dear XSLT Community,

Smile and know that Microsoft loves you.

Unless its a fake… Then please continue forward with your belief that Microsoft doesn’t love you until further notice. :)

NOTE: Click through for some interesting comments regarding the relationship between LINQ and XSLT (or better said, the answer to the question “Does LINQ replace XSLT”)

Also, I’m pretty sure that Mike’s follow-up comment (comments are listed newest to oldest) should read,

In the meantime, there’s SAXON, which *now* runs in the .NET environment.

Which if you’ve been living in a cave up until now, is a true statement.

Eliminating final is a nice article by Elliotte Rusty Harold. It is in interesting exercise to take his arguments about arguments to method calls and apply them to the slightly higher level of web interfaces and loosely-coupled applications (including applictions distributed over time). What technology fits in to this level like no other? Schematron.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Robert Scoble: First Corporate Face Transplant?

At the end of the day, who wants to work at the kind of company that is worried that it’s employees will become too popular and may get stolen away? Microsoft isn’t that kind of company and that’s one of the reasons it is a great place to work. If a company is so worried about employees becoming too visible then it probably has deeper personnel problems than just worrying about losing a few bloggers.

Amen to that!

I’ve been looking for ways to connect web developers with XML since I first got involved in XML, and this year’s XML 2006 conference is offering a whole track designed to do just that.

Famed science fiction author CM Kornbluth wrote one of his most famous stories, The Marching Morons, in 1951, as a commentary about both the general populace (and its collective lack of intelligence) and the ruling elite and THEIR collective lack of intelligence. If you have never read it, you’re missing out on one of the seminal works of the era, but I find that over time it also seems to be a remarkably prescient look at the US leadership.

Computer languages evolve across an interesting number of vectors, and not always in ways that the original designers had planned. For every high level, top-down decision to implement new features and capabilities, there are interesting bits of best practices, useful libraries, and design patterns that can, subtly and sometimes not so subtly, change the course of direction of a language in critical ways.

AJAX is a good case in point - I’m in the process of writing on AJAX for a book, and occasionally I have to step out of my own preconceived notions of where the language (principally refering to JavaScript here and not the XML side) has been and look at where the language is going in terms of its own long and winding path. Certainly Ruby has been influencing things by bundling in interesting JavaScript components on the server side, but I think a more interesting case in point is the use of a set of libraries - collected together as prototype.js - that are rapidly reshaping how we use the language, especially in the context of web browsers.

So at the beginning of the week I learned of the new 7.2 release of Oxygen. For those unaware I am a HUGE fan of Oxygen, as is Kurt, Sylvain, Russ, and TONS of other folks in whom I have worked with or in whom I know for various reasons feel the exact same way that I do.

So its not surprising for me to get pretty excited with each new release, as I have come to expect nothing but a fantastic list of features from George and company to come along for the new release ride.

This time around is definitely no different, but the one feature that I am EXTREMELY excited about is:

… dada dum da

IP Democracy

Net Neutrality Amendment Defeated on House Floor

The net neutrality amendment introduced by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) was tonight soundly defeated in the House vote on the Barton telecom reform bill. Despite signs that public opinion and press sentiment were rapidly shifting in favor of net neutrality regulations, the House voted down the amendment 152 to 269, handing the cable and telco lobbies a big victory.

In a wistful-sounding statement, Rep. Markey said

… DUMB!

Here’s the dealio… The telco companies believe that they are in a power position.

In some ways they are… But not as much as they would like us all to believe.

Fortunately, with companies like Amazon who have MUCH MORE control over the internet lines as they relate to ecommerce, have given us, the little guy, an advantage, as with S3 we can all maintain a FULL internet presence, and expect that no matter who we are we will be able to gain access to the same customer base as everyone else.

There’s also a significant amount of momentum in the wireless space, with companies like Intel investing into WiMax technologies.

Of course, who owns the WiMax-based networks is yet to be determined, so whether or not this becomes an arrow in the quiver of the little guy or the telco’s is really anyones guess at this stage.

So, for now anyway… We have S3, and my guess is that before too long we will see GDrive and LiveDrive enter the race to host the data side of our web-based applications.

And, of course, theres always the unknown.

And with that, I leave you once again with Eminem to help cheer on the ranks to never give up no matter how defeated you think you might be.

In many cases, the truth is just the opposite.

DISCLAIMER: The title is not my fault. I was born this way. Blame either God or my parents.

Now that we have that settled :)

darcusblog � Blog Archive � It’s not (just) about about file formats

It’s a rather pathetic state of affairs when Microsoft will end up implementing the vision of the OpenOffice bibliographic project (of which I am co-project lead) before OOo!

Agreed. And in no way does it surprise me.

What does surprise me (a little) is to hear this from Bruce, who then follows up with:

Glad to see the National Toilet Map is producing XHTML. The incontinent are best to avoid my suburb Darlinghurst. If you cannot, or you are out of Internet access and the map is not cached in your browser (and many homeless people are out of caches), then please go to the West of the suburb before continuing., Away from my place. Thank you.

A welcome initiative from the Swing boys is the start of a community project JSR 296, a simple Swing Application Framework.

Han’s Muller’s presentation on this at Java One recently mentions its goal of simplicity, including in that design decision that there should be “no GUI definition schema”. But looking at the examples, we see something called a ResourceMap that chains together properties and resources. The result as far as I can see is a hierarchical-name text format that allows declaration of properties in groups. Err, isnt this also what XML syntax can be used for?

Why they are needed when we have SwiXML (and others less Swing-coupled XML User Interface Languages) beats me. I think Hans is spot on in starting JSR 296, we need a simple application framework for desktop Java/Swing, and he is right that we need to be able to minimize coding by declarative grouping of properties. But a lot of this is already invented, and XML is objectively a better format that property lists; I hope the JCP leads them away from NIH and towards the adoption of SwiXML as their base technology.

I’ve started a FAQ for people implementing ISO Schematron, to go along with the maillist, wiki and the public draft specs. The final URL isnt sorted yet.

I’ve had quite a few reports this week of organizations using Schematron. The latest is that the UK police use it to validate all the criminal records from 46 different forces, according to a post on the maillist. We are just starting to see the use of Schematron by standards committees, who are probably basking in the naughtiness of using RELAX NG (which really has become popular with committees who don’t want to compromise the idiomaticness of their XML languages, even the ones who would prefer XSD.)

I think Schematron has a really bright future, because of the rise of highly generic markup languages that use attribute values for semantic categorization. For these kind of languages, you need a grammar that works on attribute values, if you want to be able to constrain the information. So RELAX NG is usuable, but Schematron excells in this use. You might call these meta-schemas or architectural forms. For example, you could use Schematron abstract patterns to say “A conforming document must have at least 4 Dublin Core metadata elements”, then have instances of that abstract pattern to cope with ODF, Office Open XML, and XHTML.

Schematron is the only XML schema language I am aware of that has a built-in idea of schemas for information independent of the representation (abstract patterns). As XML becomes ubiquitous, and whenever standards efforts faulter due to commercial rivalries and differences of vision, there will be a need for validation of the information requirements independent of the structure. In fact, this is not a future requirement: many organizations will choose to homologate and consolidate schemas across their organization based on convenience and low-hanging-fruitfulness only, but not to go all the way to insisting only one common vocabulary or schema: organizations with 1000 data sources may find it easier to adopt 10 schemas rather than go all the way to a single schema. There will be a structure difference, and there may be semantic incompatabilities too. Abstract patterns in Schematron provide a mechanism for exposing, requiring and documenting the commonalities between different document types.

Open XML Package Explorer

Release V1.0.0.0 Production

Jun-09-20061 Files

Description

The initial version of Package Explorer as found on OpenXmlDeveloper.org. Browse packages and subpackages using specialized viewer classes.

Seems to work as expected, providing a nice clean way to look at all the XML wonderfulness inside of an Open XML document package (e.g. .docx)

One word to the wise… Either pay better attention than I did when I chose the default installation location, or choose a different location. It doesn’t show up in your “Start > Program Files” menu by default, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to change this. I know this because after digging through my “C:\Program Files” folder, I couldn’t find an obvious “that’s the folder right there” signs of application life, so I chose to uninstall it then reinstall it to discover that the application developer chose to use his name + “Package Explorer” which is fine (personal promotion is often a primary factor in developing OSS projects and theres certainly nothing wrong with personal promotion), just not obvious when you have to go folder diving when the application doesn’t show up in “Start > Program Files”.

Beyond this simple little annoyance, this seems like a MUST HAVE utility for the Open XML software developer, or for those interested at looking inside an OpenXML package file to examine the files via a nice clean tree control + view window implementation.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have worked with Bruce D’Arcus in the past, and we are once again teaming up on some more work that I’m pretty excited about. We have been trading emails over the last few weeks, and since his return from South America a week ago the email volume and overall results has been increasing and improving respectively.

This morning he shot me a ping and asked if I could look into whether or not his recently discovered reference to an APA.xsl file was, in fact, something that was accessible to the end user, and if so, what did it look like.

I hadn’t realized that MS was using XSLT inside of Word 2007, so to see this question from Bruce, as you can imagine, got me pretty excited.

As it turns out, its not just the citation stuff, as they have implemented their entire Bibliography XML processing support in XSLT.

WooHoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D

Bruce agrees:

When it comes to the Semantic Web, you might call me a disillusioned advocate. I’ve been dipping in and out of the technologies for the last 5 years or so, but am increasingly frustrated by the lack of any visible progress.

This entry should be regarded as constructive criticism of the Semantic Web — I still believe in it, but need to bring the flaws (as I see them) in to the open, in the hope that discussion and communication is the first step towards resolving problems.

Push Button Paradise | Blog Archive | Ten things that would shake up the mobile industry overnight

If phone companies thought they could get away with it, you’d have this: “I’m sorry, all circuits to Domino’s Pizza are currently busy. Would you like to be connected to our preferred pizza provider instead?”

I’m just going to let Micah’s comment speak for itself. (see his follow-up comments to my question. (Update: at the above URI for his original comment plus a bit more.))

Thanks for bringing things into the “real world” light, Micah!

Peter Sefton’s recent blogs are some of the few sensible, non-partisan things I have read about Open XML and ODF in recent times. He has some really good, detailed posts on Word 2007 recently and lists.

Peter is far from an anti-Microsoft partisan: indeed, he is probably a poster boy for the kind of developers Microsoft needs to attract with Open XML and Word 2007. He is one of the key players in the free ICE Integrated Content Environment project.

Peter says “the big point that always seems to get missed when people talk about word processing formats” is “use styles.” Styles represent a sweet spot between crappy hodgepodge unusable office documents and retargetable information as allowed (with more effort) by XML with all its information-protection mechanisms like validation.

Peter’s comments on list interoperability with ODF and Open XML are, I think, a real litmus test for how seriously we should take either (or both) as formats.

In the late 80s I was a customer of James Gosling: I had UniPress Emacs on my AT&T Unix PC. This was way before Java. So I have a deal of affection and respect for him. I really loved UniPress Emacs.

But a recent interview with him makes me think he lives in a corner of reality fairly removed from mine. He claims the “people the open source movement” don’t provide any “coherent answer” as to why Java should be open sourced.

It can be summarized, or at least exemplified, in a single contraction: HTML.

The implementation of HTML in Java hasn’t changed in a decade and is now so far from acceptable even Java, whose design rationale above anything else is Write Once Read Anywhere, now just provides a kludge to embed a non-Java browser. Yet Java claims to be a web technology. What a load of bull. Swing’s development effort should be realigned around integrating public-contributed enhancements as a priority over new code.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed that I go through periods of intense writing and periods where the words seem to stumble reluctantly from my fingertips. The last month or so has been one of those latter periods, a time better spent planting the seeds rather than harvesting the grounds. No doubt I will move out of that period, I always have in the past, but if the posts seem fewer and farther between of late, t’is only that there are ideas coming to germination here (I hope).

The Canadian economy continues to hum along; I’ve become a net seeker after talent rather than a talent to be sought, and am discovering how thin on the ground good development talent has become. In British Columbia, the IT unemployment rate is roughly 1.75%, which is absurd - IT is by its nature a field where there are always people coming off assignments or just taking a break from the fairly intensive grind of producing software, so in many ways its healthiest state seems to be at about 4% unemployment. At 1.75%, projects are being cancelled because there aren’t enough competent programmers to be able to complete them, and competition for programmers begins to get extraordinarily silly.

Two quick pointers,

pschmid.net

Yesterday, I discussed how you can write some sample RibbonX code and insert it into a document or template. Today, I am going to talk about a tool that takes care of the insertion step for you. The tool is called the “Office 2007 Custom UI Editor” and is a free tool from Microsoft. You can download it from openxmldeveloper.org. The tool requires the .NET 2.0 Framework.

Patrick’s blog is a WEALTH of information in regards to code, tools, etc… as they relate to Office 2007 and Office Open XML.

There is also OpenXMLDeveloper.org which is flat out fantastic, and getting better by the day.

If you have a moment, and this interests you… I would DEFINITELY take the time to check out both of the above resources.

Sorry for stealing your whole post, Tim… But its WAY TOO GOOD and short enough to be considered, well… short enough to fit inside a single, quotable, paragraph. :)

ongoing � Credit 2.0™ Where It’s Due

James Governor grumbled at me about repeatedly crediting Hal Stern for the “Web 2.0 = Writeable Web” meme, specifically pointing out Read/Write Web by Rich McManus (which is excellent). He’s got a point, but if we’re going to start down that road, we’ll end up with Tim Berners-Lee, who has repeatedly made it clear that he always thought of the Web as a place to write, not just read. And if we’re going to talk about practice not theory, you’d end up looking at Dave Winer, who pushed RSS in everyone’s face and, more important, proved that a fast-writing ornery geek could gather an audience and wield influence by, you know, doing it. And as a geek myself, I’ve always liked James Snell’s chmod 777 web. Until this minute, I’d thought Hal was the first to nail the 2.0 connection; but now I think that James got there first (May vs. October 2005).

All VERY WELL SAID! Thanks for bringing things into perspective, Tim!

So regarding the blog title…

I left my apartment in downtown SLC yesterday morning with the intent of stopping by my local coffee house after running some errands.

I arrived in Park City 30 minutes later.

For your enjoyment, some pics from my much needed day off…

via a follow-up comment to his own (quite interesting in and of itself, I should add :) post, Jonathan Bruce add’s the following bit,

Jonathan Bruce’s WebLog: LINQ Conversation Continued…

I have just noticed that the always enjoyable ’screen-casts’ series has been updated on John Udell’s site: this time he delves into LINQ with its main proponent at Microsoft, Anders Hejlsberg. Check it out here

Worth every second of your day watching this, without a doubt!

Thanks for the link, Jonathan!