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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And to all of you… Thanks for reading!
—

[Story Follows Below]

Google Code - Updates: New GData API: Google Base

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

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

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

NOTE-TO-GOOGLE: Two things,

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

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

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

2) Who made the post?

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

Update: And I quote,

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

Signed,

The Phantom.

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

It’s a trap!

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the follow-up, Phantom!
—

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

XSL-FO 2.0 Workshop 2006

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

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

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

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

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Intern Experiences

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

Dare continues,

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

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

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

From the original article on MSDN we discover,

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

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

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

Well, I guess LOTS is relative.

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

SourceForge.net: saxon-help

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

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

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

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

WOOOOHOOOOO!!! :D

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

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

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

As an interesting side-note,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the file release notes:

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

The main new results:

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

SWEET! Thanks Dimitre! :D

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

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

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

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

Google Talk

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

It’s about damn time! But wait…

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

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

Or maybe that recipe just makes a lot of cookies?

Like

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

of them ;)

That’s probably it, huh?!

Nope. err, I mean, yeah, probably.

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

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

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

As per my follow-up,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks Mike!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a related note: that really bites! ;)

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

My only response to this is,

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of the normal people have not.

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

With this in mind, the reason why,

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

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

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

If they don’t,

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!
—

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

Dimitre Novatchev’s Blog

Hello, World!

I am Dimitre Novatchev — your host in this blog.

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

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

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

WOOHOOOOO!!!!! :D

WELCOME DIMITRE!!!

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

I thought you would appreciate Uche’s latest Developer Works javascript using