You may read my posts on XML.Com and believed that because I blog here I may know a thing or two about XML. Or you may think I am just a lucky idiot. The truth is a little of both!

One of the really convenient features introduced in XSLT 2.0 is Grouping. It is a typical second-generation change in a programming language: Not essential for the language itself (grouping can be done by hand using techniques such as the Muenchian Method), but required by many users and thus a useful addition to the language.

XQuery so far lacked support for grouping, with the same results as in XSLT 1.0: Grouping is cumbersome to implement and potentially slow when not implemented right. The recently published first XQuery 1.1 draft makes only few changes to XQuery 1.0, among them a Group By clause for FLWOR expressions. This should make the language quite a bit more useful, because grouping is such a frequently needed feature.

The other notable addition to XQuery 1.1 is the Window clause for FLWOR expressions. Windows come in two flavors, either tumbling or sliding windows. Windows clauses are somewhat similar to grouping, because they allow specific iterations over the binding sequence (not by grouping the items into new items, though, but by grouping them into windows, which always contain consecutive items). Windows are not that hard to understand when you look at the tumbling window examples and sliding window examples provided in the draft.

So far, XQuery 1.1 looks like a really small and useful set of changes to XQuery 1.0, which is good. Let’s just hope it does not share the fate of XSLT 1.1, which was abandoned and never really made it into implementations. Are there any other changes which should be part of XQuery 1.1? The XQuery 1.1 Requirements list quite a few, including functions for date formatting, numeric formatting, and error processing and recovery. It will be interesting to see how these requirements will be addressed in future versions of the XQuery 1.1 draft.

CherryPy 3.1 is out and there are some exciting new features. The first exciting piece is the Web Site Process Bus. Robert Brewer had come up with an idea to create a generic server management API to help make management tools and libraries for Python servers standardized. Essentially, this is like WSGI for managing Python web servers. The next big feature is cherryd, which allows you easily run a CherryPy server as a daemon. Paste had a similar feature and it made managing Python web applications feel more like managing a tradtional web server. Also, the set of changes for CherryPy 3.1 make it possible to run CherryPy on Google’s App Engine. If you’ve never checked out CherryPy, take it for a spin. Congrats to Robert and the rest of the CherryPy team!

My saga on problems with GMail continue. Despite of the -ve feedback (”GMail is working fine“, “GMail is awesome‘, “Not sure why you are complaining GMail?” etc) to my posts, I continue to see the problems with GMail. I am not alone on the planet, lot of people are in the same boat(You can read the problems with GMail here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). The problems are frequent and particularly when they release new features. Some times I feel that Gmail is rushing to release the features without proper testing. May be they think that it is OK to roll out the features with bugs as it is in beta. Until now it was my guess only, but it turned out to be a fact. Sergey Solyanik who worked on GMail revealed some interesting facts on Google procuts and culture after leaving Google.

In the last year, and slick as it is, there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.

It seems Google culture is focused on introducing the cool features, not focusing on quality. Does Google think that since it is free for the user to use, quality does not matter? Well, it may be free to use, but Google is making money off of it by placing ads.

The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values “coolness” tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

Incidentally his journey from Microsoft to Google was not as good as he thought and took U turn back to Microsoft. Also he explained why Microsoft is better than Google to progress in the career.

The Google Manager is a very interesting phenomenon. On one hand, they usually have a LOT of people from different businesses reporting to them, and are perennially very busy.
On the other hand, in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they were doing. The better manager that I had collected feedback from my peers and gave it to me. There was no other (observable by me) impact on Google. The worse manager that I had did not do even that, so for me as a manager he was a complete no-op. I asked quite a few other engineers from senior to senior staff levels that had spent far more time at Google than I, and they didn’t know either. I am not making this up!
At Microsoft, the role of a manager is far more obvious. A dev lead is responsible for the success of the feature and the health of the feature team. A dev manager is responsible for the success of the product and the culture of the dev team. A PUM is responsible for the success of the business, and interoperation of the three teams that work on the product.

Isn’t it bad for a company like Google not focusing on the quality?

Update: Slashdot is also discussing this from a different prospective “Some Developers Leaving Google For Microsoft” and on:

Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] — PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared — culturally — to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.

The W3C just published a new TAG Finding called Associating Resources with Namespaces. Here’s the abstract:

This Finding addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.) can be associated with a namespace.

I don’t quite understand why the TAG findings are hidden on some badly named Web page. Some of them are pretty interesting documents, and yet they are not published on the W3C Technical Reports page, and the W3C Home Page does not link to them or publish news snippets about new findings. I think these documents should be easier to find.

Technically speaking, the finding talks about how to create namespace description documents, so that namespace names can point to helpful resources, rather than being abstract identifiers. The TAG finding breifly describes possible languages for namespace description documents (RDDL 1.0 and 2.0 and GRDDL), and describes a vocabulary of terms for describing the nature of resources being linked to in a namespace description, and what the purposes of these resources are. The definitions of these terms, though, are one-liners with little guidance to what that concept is supposed to represent.

What I am missing most (and what we were concentrating on when we were defining our own format for namespace descriptions in an e-government scenario) is the ability to associate namespace descriptions themselves, and make assertions such namespace x depends on namespace y. Or rather simple but really helpful pieces of information (in particular for developers) such as namespace x is usually associated with one of these two namespace prefixes, here is where you can find test data, or here is where you can find some example data.

have you ever heard of tree trauma, infoset ignorance, model myopia, or RDF rage? if not, and you are interested in these and other XML-related ailments, you might want to read about XML fevers:

The Extensible Markup Language (XML), which just celebrated its 10^th birthday, is one of the big success stories of the Web. Apart from basic Web technologies (URIs, HTTP, and HTML) and the advanced scripting driving the Web 2.0 wave, XML is by far the most successful and ubiquitous Web technology. With great power, however, comes great responsibility, so while XML’s success is well earned as the first truly universal standard for structured data, it must now deal with numerous problems that have grown up around it. These are not entirely the fault of XML itself, but instead can be attributed to exaggerated claims and ideas of what XML is and what it can do.

if you are using XML or think about using XML or work with people who are using XML or think about working with people who are using XML, you might be interested in our XML Fever article in the current issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM). here are your options:

• ACM digital library (HTML & PDF)
• CACM online version (some online reading application)
• preprint version (HTML only)

the official citation for this article is Erik Wilde and Robert J. Glushko. XML Fever. Communications of the ACM, 51(7):40-46, July 2008.

One of the areas of web design that is often neglected is the accessibility of your content by impaired users. Because various technologies are used to aid those users who are impaired, you should make sure that your content is usable / readable if it’s ever read aloud.

The developers over of the BBC site Programmes have supported semantically marked up data ( in the form of Microformats ) from day one. Now comes word that because of certain decisions made during the design of hCalendar and its use of the abbr, they are removing hCalendar support from the Programmes web site. Other Microformats being used will remain ( rel & hCard ). However, developer Michael Smethurst has hinted that the Programmes team might migrate over to RDFa and remove all Microformats. This is the first instance that I have heard of where a team will be moving away from Microformats and possibly embracing RDFa.

I wonder if this will become more and more of a common occurrence. As companies begin to look at technologies to apply semantics to their data, I doubt that they will want to chose a technology that limits their audience.

Now, the Microformats community could change the hCalendar. However, I’m not sure I have enough faith in the Microformats community to come to an agreement on this topic. In my short time following the various Microformats mailing lists, I quickly became disillusioned with the community and administrators. I witnessed several instances of heavy handed administration, including the banning of users. Frequently, no real reason was given and I was left w/ the impression that it wasn’t much of a community after all.

I was an early fan of Microformats, but cases like this certainly make a compelling argument for the use of RDFa. Perhaps the most interesting quote from Michaels post was the fact that this decision was made by the developers themselves and not sent down via some edict:

And probably also best to note that this is not a decision that has come down from on high by the BBC equivalent of suits. The /programmes team has been concerned about this issue for a few months now and it’s good to get some clarity here.

Last week, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) published a set of beta-stage recommendations for compound documents, called Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE). This set of specifications has been published as version 0.9 and has been released for public review and comments (ironically, the press release is a PDF blob).

The problem of compound documents (how to specify that a set of URI-identified resources together form one compound resource) has been around for a while, and never has been solved properly. There are various proposals from different application areas, such as XLink (not quite for compound documents, but it could be used for this purpose as well), METS (using and extending XLink), and DIDL. I am certainly missing some other technologies here, please let me know what they are. The problem is that none of these languages ever caught on, mostly because none of them tried to be general. XLink focused on navigation, METS on libraries, and DIDL on multimedia.

However, it would be good to have a general and simple language for compound documents. If designed well, it could even be easily extended to be used for application-specific scenarios such as those covered by XLink, METS, and DIDL.

The problem is, OAI-ORE will not be it. Instead of designing a simple data model and a simple language for it, they settled for RDF. None of the documents contains any explanation as to why RDF was chosen over a simpler XML-based model. There even is a document that talks about how to implement OAI-ORE in Atom, and all it does is showing how to embed RDF into Atom. Which means that for processing such an Atom feed you need an Atom toolkit as well as an RDF toolkit. As a side note: the terms in the Atom categories are URIs, which does not really follow Atom’s idea of terms as strings.

Generally, it is disappointing to see that a problem as important and manageable as compound documents, which still is an open problem looking for a good solution, has been approached on the wrong level. It is of course possible to come up with an RDF-based solution for that problem, but this unnecessarily introduces technology layers which for this particular problem are not required.

This means that the quest for a general and XML-based format for compound document descriptions is still on, and OAI-ORE is not a real contender in this race. Well, maybe it still could be one if the abstract data model also got a representation in plain XML. Unfortunately, the model is not as abstract as its name implies, it is a rather concrete definition of an RDF vocabulary, which will make it quite a bit harder to come up with a good and isomorphic XML representation. The effort might be worth it, however, the installed base of XML is significantly bigger than that of RDF.

Big news in the ability for XForms to run under non-Firefox browsers. By the end of June there will be a new IBM/webBackplane XForms client library that will allow XForms 1.1 applications to run under IE.

Here is the link to the Google Code web site:

http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-xforms

By September they plan support Safari.

The plan is to build a smoother on-ramp to get AJAX/JavaScript people to use the XForms specification. To get a fast start they will be working with some of the Mark Birbeck’s FormsPlayer code base. The team plans to use the newer AJAXSLT XPath libraries from Google.

This is a big development and it is not a coincidence that they are hosting it on Google code. They are hoping to partner with Google in the future to bring desktop-quality applications to the web.

I am sure that we will be hearing more about this in the near future.

XML is ten years old this year, which by any measure should be treated as a not insignificant milestone. When I started covering the technology as a writer back in late 1997, each article or book that I wrote had to indicate that this was the eXtensible Markup Language (the X was sexier than E, apparently) and that the language in turn was something that could be used to describe documents and possibly other things, as experimentation with the emerging XML parsers began to illustrate.

Edd Dumbill was the key driving force in getting XML.com off the ground for O’Reilly, with the site seen as being the entre into a radical new technology that would likely change the way we make web pages and do a few other things, but the decision to set up such a website was also something of a risk - there were other technologies that were more exciting, and for every person who understood the potential of the language, there were dozens, make that hundreds of otherwise technically competent people who saw XML as being a flash in the pan.

Balisage is probably not a term on everyone’s tongue. Its original usage comes from the Navy - for a ship to travel “balisage” means that they are using special dimmed lights for navigation while in enemy territory, a term also known as Silent Running. It has, however, acquired a second meaning more appropriate to computer science in general and XML in particular. Balisage is the use of XML to enable document processing without “giving away” data to a proprietary application’s format. Balisage in this sense is somewhat edgy and subversive, striking at the boundaries where Open Source and Open Standards meet to form Open Data.

It’s perhaps appropriate then that the former Extreme XML conference, long known as the hardest core of XML moots, should take on the name of one of the central tenets of the Open Data movement. Balisage brings together some of the foremost minds in the areas of content management, semantics and ontology, information processing, application development and security to explore how best to build on the shape of this emerging technology. The shift in name also reflects a broader shift going on in the field, as people realize that while XML is core to most of what they are discussing, it is what is being done with XML (and with the harmonics of that activity) that is becoming most important, not the format itself.

If you are interested in seeing how XForms can be used as a development environment, I would suggest you check out the new Orbeon XForms Builder:

http://www.orbeon.com/forms/builder

This is a great example of “Eating your own dogfood” where a development tool is used to build other development tools.

Orbeon is a great organization because their forms products run not just inside FireFox using the XForms extension but on any web browser. They do this by running on the web server and translating the specification of the XForms application into HTML and JavaScript. So you can start your development with FireFox and deploy when you need IE support.

We want to contrast the Orbeon approach with the traditional “build yet-another Eclipse extension”. With the Orbeon solution you don’t need to download any client, no custom installers and all your forms can be stored on a central file server, versioned and shared. XForms can be your future IDE.

So my hats of to the guys at Orbeon for this great milestone. Hopefully we will have more XForms-tools-to-build-XForms in the near future…like a metadata registry (hint hint).

As I pointed out in my post regarding Norm Walsh leaving Sun to join Mark Logic,

And lastly, if the back channel rumor mills are correct, my guess is that this isn’t the last big-name XML luminary we’ll see moving over to Mark Logic. Time will tell… ;-) I’ll write a new entry related to this topic if/when it seems appropriate to do so.

It seems my “sources” were spot on,

Building on its influential predecessor chicagocrime.org, EveryBlock takes the local-data mashup to new levels. Founder and hacker Adrian Holovaty talks about the philosophy and technology behind EveryBlock, the untapped potential of address-specific news, open data, and life after Google Maps.

Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)–Convergence is about breaking down islands of information based on traditional disciplines or professional categories or those created by the traditional organization of the architecture, engineering, construction, transportation, and utility and telecommunications industries. The convergence of architectural and engineering design, location, and 3D visualization and simulation technologies developed is resulting in a framework for interoperability across the lifecycle of building and infrastructure including design, construction, and operation and maintenance.

The business drivers for this transformative technology advance are productivity and efficiency in the construction and facilities management industry, and improving the performance of facilities over their full life-cycle. The goal is seamless access to architectural, engineering design, and geospatial data inside, outside, and under a facility.

Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)–Ambient crowds are the new distributed computing platform. Smart mobs are fashioning new architectures for social networking. Armed with cell phones and mobile gaming devices, they are the new business model for location-based services. Seditious crowds are creating havoc in urban theaters of war and at global economic forums. Crowds of shoppers, endowed with smart chip credit cards and RFID tagged merchandise are trailed by long-lasting data shadows that follow them ubiquitously.

Embedded in urban infrastructure and in the very products we consume, new technologies are emerging to enable cities to think about—and process—the people that pulse through them, with a burgeoning code-space being developed to capture the actions and interactions of individuals within large dynamic crowds. This presentation will focus on our recent research work in developing models of crowd behavior and their application to theory-building and scenario evaluation in the contexts just described.

We have developed a reusable modeling platform for constructing large simulations of individual and collective behavior in dense urban environments. The simulations are developed with individual agents, equipped with geospatial AI that allows them to perceive and react to their evolving surroundings with an incredible level of behavioral realism. These agents are also capable of social and antisocial interactions. The simulation architecture is coupled to Geographic Information Systems, allowing for a suite of geospatial analytics and data-mining to be performed, across a wide array of scenarios. Moreover, the models have been developed as realistic 4D immersive environments with unprecedented levels of graphical realism.

From O’Reilly Where 2.0, San Jose, CA, Tuesday, May 29th, 2007.

Brain.Save() - We are pleased to bring you new features in .NET 3.5 SP1

Syndication OM for the Atom Publishing Protocol. We added strongly-typed OM for all of the constructs defined in the Atom Publishing Protocol specification (like ServiceDocument and Workspaces) and put them in the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace.

So as Jeff Barr recently pointed out over on the Amazon Web Services blog,

Amazon Web Services Blog: Redundant Disk Storage Across Multiple EC2

XML Hacker M. David Peterson has put together a really interesting article.

As part of his work at 3rd and Urban, he has implemented redundant, fault-tolerant, read-write disk storage on Amazon EC2 using a number of open source tools and applications including LVM, DRBD, NFS, Heartbeat, and VTUN.

Mark notes that "the primary focus of this paper is to present both a detailed overview
as well as a working code base that will enable you to begin designing,
building, testing, and deploying your EC2-based applications using a
generalized persistent storage foundation, doing so today in both lieu
of and in preparation for release of Amazon Web Services offering in
this same space."

The article provides complete implementation details and links to source code for the scripts that Mark developed.

You can read the article, and you can also follow progress via the discussion group.

– Jeff;

Firstly, and most importantly, as pointed out in the first portion of this article,

So I got a ping from William Candillon yesterday on IM, but I wasn’t around so am just now getting in sync with him today. He and I had a discussion about a year or so back regarding a potential internship with Dana Florescu, you know, the primary mastermind behind the XQuery language. Well, fast forward to a year or so later and it turns out that through a collaborative cross-organizational effort, the following folks,

Cezar Andrei
Vinayak Borkar
Matthias Brantner
Nicolae Brinza
William Candillon
Dana Florescu
David Graf
Donald Kossmann
Tim Kraska
Dan Muresan
Sorin Nasoi
Daniel Turcanu
Markos Zaharioudakis

… got together and created,

As per a post to the Amazon Web Services forums earlier this evening,

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Lower Data Transfer Costs

Posted By: Kathrin@AWS
Created in: Forum: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)
Posted: Apr 22, 2008 7:40 PM MDT
Dear Amazon Web Services developers,
We’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we’re pleased to announce that we’re lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008. You’ll notice below that we’ve reduced price at every existing usage tier of transfer out, as well as added an additional tier for the heaviest users.

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.

The result of this pricing change is that all customers will see a reduction in the price of transfer out. For example, a customer transferring 50TB a month will save 16% and a customer transferring 500TB a month will save 26% on transfer with the new pricing. Please see http://aws.amazon.com for full pricing information for each service.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

*SWEEEEET!* :D While everything else around us seems to be going the opposite direction, it’s nice to see Amazon is continuing to find ways to make their services more affordable for us little guys and the big boys alike.

Thanks, Amazon!

The IETF has promoted the next revision of XML standard to recommendation status. Among the improvements for Xml 2.0 are no more schemas, reduced processing frameworks, an expansion of namespaces, and automatic transformation of tags to other formats such as jsOff, CSV, Sql, and a compressed binary form based on two’s compliment.

Patrick’s forward-looking post mortem is worth a read by everyone involved in standards over the last year.

Update: via a recent follow-up comment from Rick Jelliffe, we have ourselves our QOTD,

If DIS 29500 mark II has been accepted, then the narrowness of the victory needs to be something that Ecma and Microsoft take very seriously: standards maintenance needs to be a budgeted, normal cost of doing business. They should be aware that they are being thrown a lifeline, to some extent. If this becomes a one-off publicity stunt, as is the dire warning of MS’ competitors (and therefore, their own publicity stunts!), and timely, real maintenance is not performed, I would expect OOXML would be de-standardized at ISO.

[Original Post]
Open XML appears to clear ISO standard vote | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday.

Some of you may have noticed that I decided a while back to ignore the whole OOXML/DIS 29500 debate here on XML.com. Two reasons: 1) Too much cost, not enough gain. 2) Rick Jelliffe had things covered from top to bottom, someone *MUCH* more qualified and capable than I to provide a proper perspective of what was going on and what it all meant.

I’m just getting back to Salt Lake City after spending the last 4 days in Seattle/Redmond at the Microsoft Technology Summit. Had a *GREAT* time, meeting, for the first time, a few folks that I’ve known through email and/or user groups/mailing lists and/or industry reputation (the good kind ;-) for quite some time. I hope to do a proper summary of the entire MTS08 event before the weekend comes to an end, but in the mean time…

[UPDATE] I thought I’d give some graphs for the results of the ballot-changes of DIS 29500 mark II. These are the results as at Wednesday, and I think they are the finals. (There is one non-P NB whose vote I am not sure of: I have shown it as abstain though it could be accept.)

Here is a graph of all the votes case, showing the change from the initial ballot until now (as far as it is publicly known). This is based on all the NBs who voted. (However, this is not the count that is used to determine success…)

At ISO/IEC JTC1, national standards bodies (called NBs) nominate what kind of participation they are interested, for each of the multiple subject-oriented Steering Committees (SCs). They can nominate in two classes: Participating Members (P-members) are supposed to maintain an active interest, attend meetings, and vote on all the standard drafts that come up. Observing Members (O-members) can vote, but they don’t have any obligations to show up to SC meetings.

Here is a graph of all the votes case, showing the change from the initial ballot until now (as far as it is publicly known). This is based on the NBs who are O or P members (However, this is not the count that is used to determine success…)

Here is the vote when you just look at the P members (as far as it is known.) Note that “abstain” votes have a very particular meaning in ISO: it does not mean “reject” or “protest”, it means that the voting body could not decide, or is happy let the consensus of other NBs determine. There is no shame or difficulty with an NB voting abstain. (At earlier stages of drafts, there are “No with comments” votes: these often are “conditional yes” votes, which can explain how a “reject” vote can become an “accept” vote. At the current stage, however, no means no.)

Finally, now we have seen the big picture, we come to the real numbers that count. There is a negative test and a positive test. First, no more than 1/4 of all NBs who vote can be negative (ignoring abstains). This has not been reached (i.e. not enough rejections: the all-nation acceptances are over 75% on the following graph.)

Then there is a positive test: at least 2/3 of all P members who vote should vote for acceptance (ignoring abstains again). This has been reached (i.e. enough acceptances: the P-nation acceptances are over 66.7% on this graph.)

So OOXML has been accepted, seemingly by 24 to 8, which is enough of a margin to avoid “hanging chad” clawback games.

It is clear that most NBs think DIS 29500 mark II makes a credible and acceptable or useful standard, but there is a substantial and active minority that does not.

If there was any single issue with EC2 that was harder to overcome than any other — at least mentally if not physically and/or technically — is was that of not having access to a static IP that you could rely upon being there regardless of what machine it was mapped to.

That has now changed…

Amazon.com: Homepage: Amazon Web Services

We are excited to announce Elastic IP addresses and Availability Zones, two features that were among the top requests of Amazon EC2 developers. These new capabilities allow developers to achieve greater reliability and redundancy for their applications in the cloud, especially hosting websites. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses can be dynamically remapped on the fly to point to any Amazon EC2 instance. Also available is the ability to launch instances in multiple Availability Zones, each with its own reliable, physically independent infrastructure, which allows developers to build fault resilient web applications through simple API calls.

Of course if there was any other single issue that was the source of significant pain and/or worry it was that of not having the ability to guarantee against single (hardware) server meltdown, or in other words, there was no ensure that if you have multiple instances running that these same instances were not running on the same physical piece of hardware. As per above, that has now changed as well.

*SWEET*! :D Thanks, AWS!

I have recently accepted the position as Site Editor for the XML.com site, becoming responsible for the content appearing throughout the site as well as helping to guide functionality and look and feel for this particular portion (and to a certain extent the other sites in the O’Reilly Network). Having contributed to xml.com for several years, I feel honored to get a chance now to steer the editorial direction of the site, but I also need help doing it.

What I’m looking for right now, more than anything, are bloggers interested and passionate about XML and who would like the forum of XML.com to share these ideas. Given the breadth of the XML field at this point, what I’m looking for in terms of skills or expertise is equally broad; specialists (and generalists) in:

• XML Data Technologies (XQuery, LINQ, XForms, etc.)
• Semantic Web, both formal (RDF Stack) and informal (micoformats, folksonomies, and so forth)
• User Interface, User Experience and RIA Components (AJAX, XUL, Silverlight, Flex, CDF/WICD, etc.)
• Publishing and Syndication (AtomPub, Office Formats, DocBook, DITA)
• SOA Services (SOAP, WSDL, Messaging and Marshalling, ESB, etc.)
• XML Data Modeling (Schema design, taxonomies, methodologies)

These are currently unpaid positions, though we’re working on plans to change that, but the site is widely recognized as being one of the pre-eminent authorities on XML technologies on the web, and we hope to provide as much editorial freedom as possible to all of our bloggers.

So if you are interested in writing a regular blog on the hottest trends in XML, give me a shout at kurt@oreilly.com with what you’d like to do and, if you have any, some samples of writings on the web.

So I’ve been invited to attend the Microsoft Technology Summit in Redmond next week which, from what I understand, is focused as an interactive conversation between MSFT technology/product owners and a group of ~50 or so technologists from around the industry. As per a recent email I received regarding the event,

Please plan to openly discuss your views and opinions. While having respect and tolerance for others opinions, we encourage you to be vocal and open with your opinions. The MTS is a non-NDA summit, so we also encourage blogging, web posting, etc.

I’ll most definitely be blogging the experience as the week progresses and as such am definitely keen to hear from community members any questions you’d like to have answered, topics you’d like to see discussed, opinions you’d like to express, etc. In this regard, please feel free to leave either a comment below or email me directly.

Also, if you’re in Redmond next week and would like to get together for lunch and/or in the evening after any of the planned events (they end between 9:30 and 10:30 each night) please let me know! I arrive on Tuesday afternoon and leave Saturday afternoon. The event ends @ ~noon on Friday, so I’ve got a solid day to play. Will probably head downtown to hit some shows Friday night, so if you’re into that kind thing and you’re free on Friday night, hit me up! :D

Update: In case any of you are interested in the topics/speakers such that you can guage what type of questions/comments/etc. to make, the conference agenda follows (I wanted to gain verification that publishing this list was kosher, thus the reason I didn’t supply this until now.)

Well, some people argue that iPhone is not a smart phone because of the absence of enterprise email service. I don’t want to debate whether iPhone is a smart phone or not, but leaving enterprise email, it was much better than a smart phone because of the ultimate browsing experience and worlds best touch interface. And to answer those who say iPhone is not a smart phone, Apple today added enterprise connectivity to iPhone software stack and sent a strong message to RIM that it intends to compete with Blackberry for the Smartphone’s market share. Shares of RIM dipped 3% following Apple’s announcement, to $98.71 (March 6th,2008)

Finally iPhone lovers can check their enterprise email on their favorite toy. Thanks to Steve Jobs and his team for bringing the enterprise connectivity to the iPhone. iPhone is reaching out to the enterprise community with push email, push calendar, push contacts, global address list, Cisco IPsec VPN, auth and certs, enterprise class WiFi (WPA2 / 802.1x), security policies, enterprise configuration tools, and the remote wipe. Indeed these are very good features for enterprise and these are the one missed in iPhone(enterprise point of view) in the past. When iPhone announced, looking at the price tag, I wrote that the price is in the range of enterprise without enterprise features, but I was wrong. Without enterprise features it attracted the crowd and surpassed the expectations. Now with the enterprise connectivity, it is going to go beyond the expectations.

The only question that I have is - is it going to meet/beat the expectations of Blackberry audience or is it going to tumble as Motorola Q. When Motorola launched Q, they had the big expectations of taking over Blackberry. But we know what happened. Blackberry uses their own push technology which is robust and secure, but Motorola relied on Microsoft Exchange email push(ActiveSync) technology and they even bought Good Technology to achieve this. I am not sure whether it is a failure on Exchange side or Q side, but it failed miserably to capture the Blackberry market. In fact Blackberry is adding new customers every quarter significantly.

In today’s press conference, Phil Schiller, Apple SVP said:
“Our customers have asked us to build in MS Exchange right into the iPhone — we have licensed ActiveSync for the iPhone.
Microsoft has come up with a much more advanced architecture, where the iPhone can work directly with the Exchange server in a more reliable and affordable way. We’re building Exchange support so you get push email, push calendaring, push contacts, global address lists, and the ability to remote wipe it.”

Even iPhone uses the same Exchange push technology that Motorola used for Q. But knowing Apple’s state of art software/hardware strategies, I believe that they do lot better than Motorola. At the same time, there is no indication of adding Lotus Notes email to the iPhone software stack in the near feature. Though Microsoft exchange is leading over the Lotus Notes in enterprise email, Lotus Notes has its presence. Blackberry supports both the emails and targets the whole enterprise. With just Exchange email, iPhone may not beat Blackberry completely, but it definitely shakes the Blackberry.

What do you think? Will it beat Blackberry?

Thanks to Dr. Kiran Mudiam for pointing out the Good technology.

I’m @ Bungee Labs today, tonight (*ALL NIGHT*) and into tomorrow morning as a judge for the Bungee Connect WideLens Intern DevFest. I plan to keep this post updated with progress from the event — action shot pics and comments from the joy, anger, laughter, frustration, etc. that takes place in the world of competitive application development. There are nine CS students from across the planet here in Orem, UT. Four of them gain a spot as an intern here @ Bungee Labs this summer, so the stakes are high.

Pics of the potential interns follow, led by a pic of the VP of Community here @ Bungee Labs, Alex Barnett,

As per http://hacking.4lessig.org/,

Draft Lessig *HACKFEST EXTRAVAGANZA*

Who: Anyone who believes in the movement to Draft Lessig into Congress and would like to help bring this to fruition.

What: *HACKFEST EXTRAVAGANZA*

Where: irc://irc.freenode.net#draftlessig

When: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, February 22nd, 23rd, and 24th

Why: You decide why you believe it’s important to participate. That’s what living in a Free Culture is all about — or in other words, the freedom to make your own choices — correct?

Agenda

• Friday, February 22nd, 2008 @ 8 A.M. Mountain, 11 A.M. Eastern, 7 A.M. Pacific, 3 P.M. GMT

Planning what needs to be done and then starting in on that plan.



• Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 @ same as above

Evaluating status and adjusting priorities and focus and then continuing forward with the revised plan.



• Sunday, February 24th, 2008 @ same as above

Evaluating status and adjusting priorities and focus and then continuing forward with the revised plan. Evaluating the end result, and determining next steps.

NOTE: While the official start times each day are specified, this is primarily as a marker as to when the planning and evaluation for each new day will take place. The hackin’, as usual, will be going 24 hours a day. :D

Basement Tapes: Open Source Cinema on blip.tv

Did I do the math correctly? No. But the genereal idea is in place.

Dear Amazon SQS Developers,

We wanted to let you know about some changes we are making to Amazon SQS, based on customer feedback and watching the way customers are using the service. One thing we’ve heard consistently is that customers want to be able to use SQS along with our other services (e.g. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3), but need SQS to be less expensive for this to be more feasible. We looked at our architecture and feature set, and found a way to make a few, targeted changes, by deprecating a few infrequently used requests, which allow us to operate the service much more efficiently. Simultaneously, we are introducing a new pricing structure that replaces the previous per-messages-sent charge ($0.10/1,000 messages) with a new per-request fee ($0.01/10,000 requests, including all Amazon SQS operations). The net result is that the new pricing will result in significantly lower charges for most developers being billed for SQS.

Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty significant. Nice!

More details @ the AWS/SQS page.

As per the description in the newly created Facebook group of the same titled-name,

It’s been 3 1/4 years too many since Chris Sells hosted the last SellsCon @ the beautiful Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, WA. It’s about time we SellsGeeks band together and demand our rights to have our brains properly nourished with the type of brain nourishment that only a SellsCon can provide.

If you haven’t experienced a SellsCon before, then here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor. If you have, then you don’t need any encouragement from me: You know exactly what I mean when I state that there’s no tech conference like a SellsCon. None of this fluffy-puffy corporate sponsored mumjo-jumbo. Just the best and the brightest converging together into the same place for a couple days to make sense of all the crap that get’s blasted in your face at all the other conferences (Okay, except for OSCON (and, of course, any other O’Reilly hosted/sponsored conference ;-)).

Now, before I get myself in any (more!) trouble: This isn’t something that is absolutely, without a doubt going to happen. This is just an attempt to get enough people to come together to ensure Chris is made fully aware just how badly we want to attend/participate in another SellsCon, and what better way to do that than to stick our names on an easy-to-locate list that Chris can then look at and go: “Okay, I’m convinced.”

That said: I invited Chris to join the group. And he did. So if nothing else, at least he’s interested in the idea. :D

Are you in?

Push Button Paradise | Blog Archive | WebPath wants to be free (BSD licensed, specifically)

The focus of WebPath was rapid development and providing an experimental platform. There remains tons of potential work left to do on it…watch this space for continued discussion. I’d like to call out special thanks to the Yahoo! management for supporting me on this, and to Douglas Crockford for turning me on to Top Down Operator Precedence parsers. Have a look at the code. You might be pleasantly surprised at how small and simple a basic XPath 2 engine can be.

Nice! I wonder if it runs via IronPython? That would *ROCK*! And if no,

So, who’s up for some XPath hacking?

ME! :D

The Editor’s Disposition of Comments is quite an important document in the standards development process at ISO. After National Bodies submit their initial positions and comments on a late draft standard, the editor of the standard puts together a document to try to satisfy the various comments. Even though the Disposition of Comments document is not official, in the sense that anything in it is automatically accepted, it is usually the starting point for comment resolution, and, given that most comments are uncontroversial, is often the end-point too.

Monday 14th Jan was the self-imposed deadline for the circulation of the IDS 29500 Editor’s Disposition of comments. (The comments and disposition documents have been leaked to the web, with no tears from anyone.) Here is my rough characterization of them:

The Editor (Rex Jaeschke on behalf of ECMA TC45) has accepted the lion’s share. There is a small chunk of comments that are out of scope (typically concerning IPR or procedural comments.) There is a small chunk which the Editor has decided are issues for the maintenance phase, not the fast-track process: these are typically how comments like “ODF has feature X, why doesn’t OOXML support it?” There is another chunk of issues where the Editor disagrees with the substance of the comment, but wants to address the issue by adding clarifying or helpful text to the specification: for example, the issue of bitmasks is handled by giving examplars of how to handle them in XSD, RELAX NG, Schematron, DTLL and XSLT.. And finally, another chunk where the Editor disagrees, and gives the rationale for the disagreement. These are typically where the comments cross ECMA’s line in the sand: that no currently valid OOXML document should become invalid.

Of course, even in the comments where the Editor agrees with the comment, there may be some cases where the Ballot Resolution Meetinig next month decides to do something different from the Editor’s recommendation.

So how does it compare with the touchstone issues I isuggested in Your Country’s Comments Rated!?

The particular touchstone issues I see are that spreadsheet dates need to be able to go before 1900, that DEVMODE issues need to be worked through more, that the retirement of VML needs to be handled now, and that there needs to be a better story for MathML.

Lets see the suggested resolutions for each of them

• Spreadsheet dates to go back before 1900 (and can use ISO 8601 date format),
• DEVMODE concerns printer-dependent data which may be binary: the editor suggests some minimal changes to say “information” rather than “data structure” and to show how the system would work with some future XML-based print structure, but leaves the issue of a standard format to maintenance and justifies the need for these printer-dependent data chunks on the need to package information in legacy documents:
• VML is being withdrawn from the places it is used in the specification, which now use DrawingML (e.g. for backgrounds in WordpocessingML); (furthermore, this provides a level of modularity that theoretically allows some kind of use of SVG for drawing, though I don’t expect this would be a popular option unless Office supports it.)
• For Maths, the Editor recommends allowing alternative formats in particular recommending MathML: this is not to replace the OOXML Maths, but in the context of “rehydration” which is where you want to round-trip through systems that don’t support your full language, so they use some lesser one (such as a graphic) as a fallback, but the systems maintain the text of a higher-level format. This is probably good for MathML adoption, but also for professional maths systems developers.

Finally, what about that issue I have been tracking that I think is a crazy edge-case blown out of proportion: the AutospaceLikeWord95? Well, now we have a few pages of documentation about a tiddly bit of extra space between digits and full-width characters (as used by Japanese); in fact we have much more complete documentation of typesetting behaviour that should not be implemented compared to what should be implemented! It doesn’t do any harm to have this documented, except that it is a distraction from more substantive issues and has notoriously been used as evidence that DIS29500 cannot be implemented.

A friend of mine here in the Salt Lake City area is in need of the best and brightest C# and Flex developers who either live in the Salt Lake City area or who are willing to relocate. From what I understand these are full time positions. If you have the proper skillset and have interest please contact me directly and I will forward your contact info on appropriately.

Thanks!

The countdown begins**…

—

The unification of XML and SQL relational data has taken another significant step forward recently with the introduction of significant new XML functionality in mySQL, the world’s most popular open source database. In versions 5.1 and 6.0, mySQL adds the ability to retrieve tables (and JOINS) as XML results, to retrieve SQL schemas as XML files, to both select content via a subset of XPath and to update content using similar functions, and the like, as related recently in an article on the mySQL site: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/xml-in-mysql5.1-6.0.html .

Changeset 4436

Timestamp:
12/14/07 12:13:21 (2 hours ago)

Author:
xmlhacker

Message:
the cat is out of the bag ;-)

… and that cat’s got some *TEETH* …

Two recent entries, one in the form of a blog entry from Dare Obasanjo, the other in the form of a post to the FeedSync list from Steven Lees, both in the last 24 hours,

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Transforms SQL Server into an Atom Store

This is sick. With Astoria I can expose my relational database or even a local just an XML file using a RESTful interface that utilizes the Atom Publishing Protocol or JSON. I am somewhat amused that one of the options is placing a RESTful interface over a SOAP Web Service. My, how times have changed…

It is pretty cool that Microsoft is the first major database vendor to bring the dream of the Atom store to fruition. I also like that one of the side effects of this is that there is now an AtomPub client library for .NET Framework.

Of course, I’m sure there will be many who will contend that GData, and therefore Google were the first to bring the “dream” of an Atom store to fruition my bad. Dare stated “first major database vendor“, which as far as I know is a true and fair statement. That said, I’m leaving in my props to Joe Gregorio cuz’ he deserves both the credit and attention, regardless of the fact that he isn’t a major DB vendor either. and to be completely honest, Joe Gregorio not only brought forward the original dream of the Atom store, but was the originating dreamer that brought AtomPub into existence, quietly building both the client and server pieces of this dream while at the same time acting as the (lead?) editor on a two man *ROCKSTAR* team, and backed by some of the brightest minds in the industry to ensure that the final result was what it needed to be. But let’s try and set aside differences in perspective for now and take a look at what Steven Lees has to say,

Here is a quick summary of my impressions of the Kyoto meeting.

Japan is so cheap to eat and stay in hotels! As long as you avoid touristic places.

Kyoto is so beautiful.

A real changing of the guard at SC34, with new Secretarat Manager, Convenor, and changes to the heads of WG1 and WG3. These are some of the people I really enjoyed seeing at meetings, and often quite eccentric or wonderful, so I hope they will still participate.

We now have a fulltime professional Secretariat Manager. It seems she is crackimg the whip to get things tightened up. For example, under the new rules I will have to be a delegate from Australia again, not independent.

DSDL is ticking along OK. We worked through some of the very last issues for some of the specs. After the horror year of 2007, we all hope things will settle down.

We are going to have a new version of Schematron. This will include the various features requested over the last few years, notably a better import mechanism, XSLT2 support, and so on. I am pretty sure I want to fold in code for ISO DSRL, ISO CRDL and ISO DTLL to the skeleton implementation, which will give a lot more capabilities. We are looking at standardizing a streaming version of Schematron as Part 6 of DSDL.

I had been tasked with trying to contact PKWARE about a possible ISO standard for ZIP. They did not reply to me, but the OOXML editor said he was in contact with them, so I expect there will be some progress there soon. That is one advantage of having the big boys at the table.

One feature of this set of meetings is the increasingly strong desire by the chairmen to prevent any wandering off into off-topic matters. This is of course because of the impending BRM which loomed over many people’s minds (but not me!) which looks like being a very disciplined affair, indeed.

It was great to see many new nations participate: we had two delegations from Africa, a delegation from India, more Europeans. Very often the delegations included a professional from the standards body, rather than a technical person, so I think they were familiarizing themselves with the lay of the land preparatory to the BRM. There are already more delegates registered for the BRM than can fit in the theatre provided (120) so it looks like the larger NBs will have to trim out excessive delegates. But lots of smart people will be looking at lots of issues. ECMA TC45 had their meeting the week before SC34, and it seems they have been ploughing through the issues.

A bit of a Bungee Labs theme as of late, and for good reason: I have about this >< much time at the moment to do not a whole lot more than eat, sleep, code, repeat, and while that doesn’t answer why I’ve bin on a Bungee Binger, as per the title of this post, any way I can find to save both time, money, and the stress of worrying about whether or not I’m going to make any given deadline is something I’m going to be paying attention to. As such, my attention has been directed towards any aspect of my developer toolbag which holds potential of providing a faster, more efficient, and more productive way to get from Join Point A to Point Cut B, and in this regard, I have some advice,

When your concerns are founded upon finding every possible way to weave into any given paragraph the key phrases and terminology used in Aspect Oriented Programming, chances are quite good you should consider taking a *NICE LONG* vacation as far away from the keyboard and computer screen as you can possibly get. And it’s for this very reason I am finding the latest offering from Bungee Labs oh so very appealing to these liquid crystallized eye balls of mine,

I am glad to see that Adobe’s PDF 1.7 has been accepted as an ISO standard, IS 32000:2008. It still needs to have a few hundred comments resolved and folded back into the final text, but the initial ballot was a success and I suppose early next year the spec will go online at ISO’s free site. It has gone through very fast, and I congratulate all concerned.

For my opinion on why an ISO standard for PDF is a good thing, see yesterday’s blog All interfaces by market dominators should be QA-ed, ZRAND standards!

There have already been smaller subsets of PDF available: PDF/A for archiving and PDF/X for exchange, both subsets of PDF 1.4. (The links are to pages that are really good examples for what governments and guidance organizations need to provide, to help people select between multiple standards.)

I am sure ISO PDF will help reduce that apoplexy that some people are being encouraged to have concerning OOXML, because it shows that there can be multiple standards (even for the same thing: three ISO standards for PDF alone, and counting!) as long as they don’t contradict (which has a very strict meaning in ISO usage: standard A cannot say X is a Z while standard B says X is a Z). And it shows that proprietary technologies can be standardized. And it shows that there is a difference in the (good) openness for getting good documentation and (coutner-productive) openness in arbitrarily changing a standard on ideological/aesthetic lines so that it no longer reflects the existing, deployed technology. And it shows that standardizations is a positive step forward for the community to manage market-dominating technologies (I mean standardization in the sense of being published as a ISO standard, which does not imply being adopted by any nation as a required format by regulation.)

They have 205 comments. It would be interested to see how this compares to the size of the spec, and compare it to OOXML. (I was pleased to see that some ISO PDF people measure the size of their document in total surface area of printed page frames rather than just raw page count: this is a little bit more sophisticated than dumb page count, but still only an unsound indicator for serious comparisons of standard size or complexity.) I couldn’t find a draft fast, but I read that in ISO format it takes fewer pages than the Adobe format: but taking th eAdobe 1.7 of 1310 pages as a roug guide, that gives an issue rate of 1 issue per 6.4 pages, compared to the OOXML rate of about 1 issue per 8 pages (assuming about 750 unique issues for OOXML). The numbers are not precise, but they are about the same! The only difference is that the OOXML changes tend to be broader (conformance, organization) and more disruptive (since people expect XML to be readable in the most general sense, while they don’t expect this of PDF.)

One of the most interesting documents about how Adobe/AIIM created the draft ahead of standarization is here. It is strikingly similar to how the OOXML draft was created, but note that among the national body complaints about OOXML include several concerning the use of “shall” and “should” (I raised this issue with my national body, and it was included in the Australian comments.) Conformance language is important: a standard is not really a document that is a specification suitable for a programmer to implement directly, but it is something that may be used in contracts (or called up by regulations) so it needs to be clear about what it requires and what it doesn’t require (clarity is more essential than completeness, if you know what I mean.)

ISO 32000 is based on the PD 1.7 spec, available here. The document ISO 32000 - Summary of Changes describes how the format was made.

The 205 ballot comments and their resolutions will not be publicly available, I expect, according to the usual ISO requirements. The mechanism for participation in standards development is to seriously join in, not criticize from armchairs: openness does not mean a free-for-all. People who suggest that somehow we can have Slashdotters directing standards are not realistic.

It will be interesting to see which other market dominators sniff the wind. Standardization through ISO of market-dominating technologies is good for everyone. The technology is already entrenched, so it does not entrench things further, but it provides a better basis for substitution (good for user choice and competitors) and interoperability (good for user choice and the dominator company and peripheral developers): everyone wins. They need to do this voluntarily before regulators use closed standards as evidence in anti-trust procedings.

I don’t see the people complaining on OOXML about proprietary technologies being standardized, the ISO fast-tracking procedure, the use of vendor consortia to largely rubber-stamp a pre-existing text, the kinds of error-rates, and the presence of actual users, vendors and stakeholders’ representatives on committees, complaining about ISO PDF. But all the things are present there. What is the difference? (Flamers: don’t sidestep by mentioning other supposed flaws in DIS 29500, that is not what I was asking, thanks.)

For those of you interested in generating high quality PDFs from web content using CSS, a Google Tech Talk on the subject given by Hakon Lie and myself is now available for your viewing pleasure. Alternatively, if you are in Boston next Tuesday evening, why not drop in for the XML 2007 lightning rounds, where I’ll be talking about printing with CSS for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

From two different sources this week comes the news that ISO and IEC have found there is no substance that they can find to the scare tactics on IPR in the OOXML draft IDIS 29500.

This came to me first in an email from a Standards Australia official, then also in Alex Brown’s BRM FAQ which says

4.1 Will IPR issues be discussed at the BRM?

No. IPR issues in this process are the exclusive preserve of the ITTF. IPR decisions have previously been delegated by all the ISO and IEC members (NBs) to the CEOs of IEC and ISO, and they in turn have examined them and found no outstanding problems. NBs seeking reassurance in such matters must pursue them through other avenues than the BRM.

Now it is good to be clear here: if you want OOXML to be a specification that allows complete reverse engineering of MS Office 2007, then you will find a lot of shortcomings with DIS 29500, particularly in that it just ignores things happening outside the XML such as in media files. However, that is explicitly not the purpose of DIS 29500: its purpose is to document a file format which is the native format of Office 2007 and has been designed to expose as XML all the information previously carried in MS’ closed, binary and/or proprietary formats (with some antiquitites and bugs cleaned up, and with some recent parts as befits a living standard.) The worries about IPR often relate to these non-DIS29500 aspects, which belong to some other debate (though certainly not to no debate.)

Apparently not anymore.

Microsoft XML Team’s WebLog : Chris Lovett Interview

As for XSLT 2.0 - we’ve heard from customers and understand the improvements in XSLT 2.0 over XSLT 1.0, but right now we’re in the middle of a big strategic investment in LINQ and EDM for the future of the data programming platform which we think will create major improvements in programming against all types of data.

Some advice to those of you considering upgrading to VS.NET 2008: Don’t waste your time.

Oh, and regarding,

But we are always re-evaluating our technology investments so if your readers want to ramp up their volume on XSLT 2.0 please ask them to drop us a line with their comments.

Drop you a line? Some advice to those who think it might actually make a difference: I’ve tried that. As already mentioned, don’t waste your time.

NOTE-TO-SELF: When folks you have reason to trust such as Mike Champion and Alex Barnett start leaving any given team @ MSFT, take this as a sign: Don’t waste your time trying to get through to the Neanderthals they used to report to. Quite obviously they no longer report to these fools for a reason.

DISCLAIMER: I have no clue why Mike or Alex left the Microsoft XML team. I only know that when they left all the goodness they brought to the XML team left with them.

Trust is hard thing to earn, Microsoft. No doubt I’m not the only one on this planet who no longer feels trust is something you are worthy of. At least not as it relates to the XML team. Fortunately for the rest of us we have better options. e.g. Saxonica and Oxygen. And no doubt with MSFT no longer “threatening” to release an XSLT 2.0 processor and tools to support that processor there are others with a clear vision of the future who will step in and begin building more/better/faster processors, more/better/faster tools, and ultimately leave MSFT realizing that losing people’s trust is really a bad business decision to make, though I doubt you’re going to hear Dr. Kay or George Christian Bina complaining anytime soon as their business opportunities just got a whole lot bigger.

Folks, if you want the best XML processing and development tools on the planet, don’t bother wasting your time OR your money w/ MSFT. Look elsewhere. At least that’s my opinion. No doubt you have your own.

… Bitch, Moan, Cry, and in other forms make a complete and total fool of yourself in public.

But it’s worth it…

Desktop Team - by Desktop Team

Added support for the XSLT document() function (poke to xmlhacker ;-) )

*YES*!!! :D

So here’s the thing: I haven’t made it any secret here on XML.com and elsewhere that I am a *HUGE* fan of Opera. In fact, the only thing that has kept me from proclaiming Opera as the undisputed winner** in the Browser Wars is the fact that they’ve been missing support for some key pieces of the XSLT spec. That has now changed, and while there are bound to be bugs (this is a weekly build), I am now making it official,

Opera is the *KING* of the Web Browser world. Nothing else even comes close.

Believe it! ;-)

Thank you, Opera!!! :D

Next Up: The Top 10 Reasons Why Opera Is The Best Browser On The Planet.

** In fact, they’ve been the undisputed winner since about 1997. How and why they don’t pwnz the browser market is a complete and total mystery to me. My new task in life: To help change that by evangelizing each and every product that comes from the *KING* of the Web Browser company: Opera. If you haven’t already, please download Opera (stable, beta, latest weekly w/ document() function support) and when it asks if you would like to make it your default browser > Say *YES!*.

Update: Phreakin’ beautiful,

What’s even more beautiful is that Opera’s XSLT error reporting tool is so good, I was able to pin point a silly little mistake in my code that was preventing the above link from transforming correctly (had the output set to ‘xml’, but was using the HTML public identifier literal. Changing the output method from xml to html fixed the problem.) Of course, you might wonder why this little error didn’t get caught by some of the other browsers, and the answer is quite simple,

Opera is a *STANDARDS COMPLIANT* browser company. They write their code to comply with the rules specified in the related standards doc. And yes, it really is that simple.

Thanks for the kick a$$ *STANDARDS COMPLIANT* browser and browser dev/debugging tools, Opera!!! :D

I have two public speaking engagements in Sydney this week at the Open Standards ‘07 Conference. This is a conference mainly concerned with data interchange standards to allow open systems, in particular XML of course: so sessions on HL7, UBL, EDI, this year with a good focus on government as well as business standards.

On Wednesday I have a half-day tutorial Office Document Standards which will be an under-the-hood look at OOXML and ODF.

And on Friday 2:30 I have a paper The Drive to Openness: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Systems, which looks at the drivers for openness and the connection with the need for transparency and better governance.

So if you are there, please feel free to have a chat!

Open Handset Alliance

Android™ will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications. On November 12, we will release an early look at the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow developers to build rich mobile applications.

Open
Android was built from the ground-up to enable developers to create compelling mobile applications that take full advantage of all a handset has to offer. It is built to be truly open. For example, an application could call upon any of the phone’s core functionality such as making calls, sending text messages, or using the camera, allowing developers to create richer and more cohesive experiences for users. Android is built on the open Linux Kernel. Furthermore, it utilizes a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment. Android will be open source; it can be liberally extended to incorporate new cutting edge technologies as they emerge. The platform will continue to evolve as the developer community works together to build innovative mobile applications.

All applications are created equal
Android does not differentiate between the phone’s core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone’s capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone’s homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.

Breaking down application boundaries
Android breaks down the barriers to building new and innovative applications. For example, a developer can combine information from the web with data on an individual’s mobile phone — such as the user’s contacts, calendar, or geographic location — to provide a more relevant user experience. With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect.

Fast & easy application development
Android provides access to a wide range of useful libraries and tools that can be used to build rich applications. For example, Android enables developers to obtain the location of the device, and allow devices to communicate with one another enabling rich peer-to-peer social applications. In addition, Android includes a full set of tools that have been built from the ground up alongside the platform providing developers with high productivity and deep insight into their applications.

Just came across what seems like an interesting podcast,

OAuth with Larry Halff, Eran Hammer-Lahav and Chris Messina - Bungee Connect Developer Network

Overview
Three of the minds behind the OAuth initiative, Chris Messina, Larry Halff and Eran Hammer-Lahav, join us to tell us about this emerging “open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.“
54:32, 25 MB

Nice! Am listening to it now and it definitely seems worth a listen.

Update: Yo Alex: You’re right, I do need a haircut.

/me is adding “get a damn! haircut” to my task list for the day. ;-)

So I’m not sure if I should claim the title as my *BEST TITLE EVER* or one of life’s most embarrassing moments.

Guess time will tell, ;-) and in the mean time: Having a few spare cycles now that CMJ is over and the death march to the Nov. 1st amp.fm private beta release is at worst a brisk walk/jog in the park as far as feature completion is concerned (the Jan. 1st, 2008 @ 12:00:01 public release is a different matter all together, but even that isn’t going to be anything like that last 8 months have been), I took a few moments to catch up on my most favorite product and company of all time,

Saxon and Saxonica

In the below linked post to the Saxon-Help mailing list you will find a link to the resources file that contains the following overview of the new Java API called “snappy” which, as Dr. Kay points out, “… is closely modelled on the successful .NET API.”

*SWEET*! Well, sweet from the perspective that my brothers and sisters in software development in which use Java as their primary development environment can now understand just how good we .NET developers have had it over the last 20 or so months since Dr. Kay first introduced the Saxon on .NET product. To each of you, I can assure you of one thing,

Snappy’s gunna’ *ROCK YOUR WORLD*!

Thanks, Dr. Kay!

Details follow.

So a lot has been written about Blip Messaging here on XML.com, but not a lot of action has been seen. Last week @ the College Music Journal Festival in NYC the world got its first taste of what Blip Messaging is all about,

The above image showcases an overlay of blip messages on top of Google Maps/SOHO/Manhattan that highlights the CMJ-related shows and venues taking place the night of the 16th, a selection from a list that included 1060+ bands playing at 60+ venues over the course of the entire week. It also represents the “communicate”[1] page for Ume, a band headed by Lauren Larson, wife of Eric Larson who plays bass (their long time friend Jeff on drums) who played “The Tank” on Thursday night. A *ROCKSTAR* hacker as well as musician, Eric works with us @ amp.fm, spending a good portion of his time the week before building a text-messaging based blip search engine (e.g. text “Ume” to shows@amp.fm and get all of Ume’s shows (time(s), location(s), etc. in response) that we demoed during the trade show as well.

So then what’s this all have to do with XML?

So this last week was spent in New York City @ the College Music Journal Music Marathon for the pre-launch of The Viberavetions Project (( sonic|radar )) rage.fm amp.fm which in and of itself was an *AMAZING*, successful experience. More on that to come.

In the mean time,

Amazon.comAmazon S3 / Amazon S3 SLA

Effective Date: October 1, 2007

This Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement (”SLA”) is a policy governing the use of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (”Amazon S3″) under the terms of the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement (the “AWS Agreement”) between Amazon Web Services, LLC (”AWS”, “us” or “we”) and users of AWS’ services (”you”). This SLA applies separately to each account using Amazon S3. Unless otherwise provided herein, this SLA is subject to the terms of the AWS Agreement and capitalized terms will have the meaning specified in the AWS Agreement. We reserve the right to change the terms of this SLA in accordance with the AWS Agreement.
Service Commitment

AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon S3 available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle (the “Service Commitment”). In the event Amazon S3 does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described below.

Adam Bosworth’s Weblog: Building and Blogging again

Well, as some seem to know, I’ve left Google. And now that I’ve left, that old entrepreneurial fever has struck me again and I’m off working on a startup. Google is a wonderful company and I had a great time there and had a lot of fun building something I really believe in, Google Health, which I think has a great potential to change the way consumers manage their health when it launches. Still, for me, it is time to start a new company and I’m off and running.

So here’s a crazy thought: When Adam Bosworth left Microsoft to join BEA MSFT’s stock became stagnant. When he left BEA to join Google, BEA began to show health problems of its own. I’m not suggesting there is a direct connection (though if you were lucky enough to have Adam Bosworth as an employee losing him is certainly not something you would want to have happen) between AB and the value of any given companies stock, but there is certainly going to be an indirect connection, and even more so I wonder if his departure from any given company can be seen as a barometer of sorts as to overall health of that company, signaling change is coming in the near term future?

Absolutely no clue, but it will be interesting to watch what happens over the next 12-18 months with Google’s stock and its overall health in general.

Oh, also, it seems he’s looking for some smart folks to join him,

All that being said, Smart engineers welcome!! :)

Oh yeah, what am I building? Actually, I’m going to keep that to myself for a bit. Come work with me and you can find out, but otherwise, you’ll need to wait.

NOTE-TO-WWW: If you are currently in a position in which leaving your current situation seems feasible, and you think you have what it takes to work side-by-side with one the best hackers the world has ever known: SEND HIM YOUR RESUME BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE TAKES YOUR SPOT!

PLEASE NOTE: Regarding the title: iSorry. ;-)

So anyway, Sylvain arrived here in the U.S. of A. on the 13th,

… and the two of us have been heads down ever since preparing to release this at that. The day before his arrival I paid a visit to my local Apple Store to pick up his development machine. As such, he too is now discovering just how wonderful development life on a Mac can be.

Of course as wonderful as life can be there is one thing that has really irked me: The lack of a good tabbed shell/terminal client. What surprised me is that no matter how hard I looked it didn’t seem like anybody either noticed and/or cared enough to do anything about it. But as Sylvain just discovered, apparently I was wrong,

iTerm

iTerm is a full featured terminal emulation program written for OS X using Cocoa. We are aiming at providing users with best command line experience under OS X. The letter i represents a native Apple look and feel of the program interface, and an emphasis on complete international support. iTerm was merged from two projects, CTerminal and TerminalX, both of which were based on JTerminal project. The current version is still in beta stage. It is however very much functional and usable.

SWEET! I feel like I just rediscovered Firefox!

Thanks, iTerm developers! :D

On Sept. 7, the US House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation to overhaul the US patent system by a vote of 220 to 175. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 (H.R. 1908), authored by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., seeks to try to restore some balance to the patent system in the face of radical changes in information technology by introducing a number of changes increasingly sought by the software industry in particular:

Update: via a suggestion from olli, I’ve added a post to the Opera forums which contains a poll asking whether or not Opera should provide support for the document() function in the next release of Opera, code named Kestrel. I would encourage anyone and everyone with interest to add their vote to the poll.

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=203214&t=1188904973&page=1

Thanks in advance!

[ Original Post ]
via a recent post I made to XSL-List,

via http://snapshot.opera.com/mac/m950a1.html (as well as all of the other platform changelogs),

Fixed numerous inconsistencies and specification violations in the SVG, DOM, WML, Web Forms 2.0, XPath, and XSLT implementations

“XSLT document() function will no longer cause an XSLT processing error if it is not called”

Okay, so I’m not sure that sentence makes any sense, so I’ve dug a little deeper.

@ irc://irc.opera.com/weekly

—
04:34 xmlhacker Hey All: Firstly, congratulations on getting Kestrel alpha out the door! Secondly, as part of the changelogs “XSLT document() function will no longer cause an XSLT processing error if it is not called” which, technically speaking I suppose, is true. If you don’t use document() function it won’t throw an error. However if you do, it still does. I’m running on Mac/Tiger > Simple oversight for an early alpha release?

04:40 olli xmlhacker: i asked one of da geeks here and he said: I believe it doesn’t throw an error when it’s not used. IT does throw an error when invoked
04:41 olli this means that if you test first if it’s supported and then use it if that’s true it no longer causes an error where it previously did

04:43 xmlhacker olli: got it. Thanks for the insight! So can someone @Opera clarify one way or another if document() function support will make it into Kestrel?

04:45 olli xmlhacker: maybe
—

And there ya have it folks. Of course there are those who will write off Opera as being a completely useless browser for client-side XSLT processing. But anyone who knows me knows one very important “quality”: I don’t give up.

I’ll report back once the battle has been won. (let’s hope that report comes sometime before the end of this decade ;-)
—

And just to add a bit more to this: Come on Opera! Are you a W3C web standards company or not? It’s not like you’re being asked to implement a deep down architectural change like XPath 2.0. This is an HTTP GET! That’s it! You’re a web browser company, you should be able to figure out how to do one of those, shouldn’t you?

Or is making a half a$$ed attempt at supporting web standards you may or may not have any interest in something we should just come to expect from this point forward?

Fedora Commons - About - News

Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

Nice! Congratulations, Fedora Commons!

The press release continues,

I don’t normally like using this column for promoting my other projects, but I’m weighing this against the fact that I actually have some interesting news to pass on. Thus, my apologies for the self-aggrandizements - I think you may find it worth it.

First, I have recently significantly upgraded the XForms.org portal. While I still support the forum, the role of the portal has expanded to become a general resource for anyone working within the XSLT, XForms, or XQuery space, and I’m expanding this into the Semantic Web realm as well. From XForms.org, you can find relevant blogs from the web, news articles, job listings, and linked resources, and I shall soon be adding calendar listing s of conferences and other events. I’ve also simplified the interface, such that commonly requested features such as the most recent aggregate blogs are available with one click in a simple interface, and specialized listings are no more than two clicks away.

Summer is flying by and as we usher in fall, we wanted to give all New Englanders a heads-up that we are having a second Ignite Boston. The second Ignite Boston will take place on Thursday, September 6, from 6 to 10pm at Hurricane O’Reillys. Yes that is right, Hurricane O’Reillys. No, it’s not Tim’s office after FOO Camp. We’ve picked a venue that is more acoustically-oriented and should allow everyone to hear what is going on.

And we are planning to mix-up the format a little bit. There will be some short “launches,” followed by lightening talks, and a couple of other ideas that we will inform you of in the coming weeks. Let’s show our tech colleagues around the country that Boston/Cambridge have a vibrant tech community that gets involved in talking about cool new technologies and ideas. Not to mention that it is a social event to get to know other developers in the area.

If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O’Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win.

If you are interested in connecting with some of the folks who attended the first Ignite Boston, we have a social network set up for this purpose. You can reach our Crowdvine network here.

Another reason we wanted to announce this event this early, is so those of you who would like speak for five minutes on something cool, new, or exciting you can get into the queue sooner rather than later. Please submit your idea/s here:

Presentation Guidelines

• Be no longer than 5 minutes.
• Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!).
• Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint, Keynote/has remote control, and PDF] with standard AV equipment.

To submit a proposal.

For anyone that’s never been to Ignite, you may find it useful to see a talk or two. Here’s a link to a good example [but poor audio quality] from the first Ignite Boston talks.

Technorati Tags: Boston, Cambridge, Event, Geeks, Ignite, O’Reilly Media, Speakers

Update: *EXCELLENT* follow-up post from Wladimir in which he closes with the following,

I guess I need to thank Danny for so many great articles in such a short time. On the other hand, maybe instead I should remind him that denial-of-service attacks are illegal, even in the USA.

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions as to what that last sentence is referring to, though I will point out the fact that no matter who you are or what you believe justifies your actions, while blocking ads is not a crime, DOS attacks and other forms of Internet harrasment and vandalism most certainly are.

If you are guilty of any such crimes, please don’t turn yourself into the authorities (our prisons are filled with too many people who shouldn’t be there in the first place), but please stop, think, and then find ways to get over whatever it is you are hung up on in a peaceful manner.

Thanks! Our Internet will be a better place if you are willing to consider the above request.

Update: Wladimir Palant, the *WONDERFUL* developer behind the *WONDERFUL* tool AdBlock Plus recently left the following comment that I thought the rest of you would find interesting,

Thank you for this article, it is real fun to read it. Btw, the numbers you were asking about - I don’t have exact numbers either but it seems that no more than 2% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed. Which makes this campaign as ridiculous as ever.

Of course one can only assume that after all of this attention, the number of AdBlock Plus users have increased, but not so much as to drastically change the above percentage to the point where any of the legitimate sites on the net in which use ad revenue as their primary support are going to be noticeably effected. In fact if you think about it, it’s quite possible that, while ever-so-slightly, the reduced cost in bandwidth savings from those who have no interest in the ads being displayed will *more* that offset any potential loss in ad revenue.

In fact, if you *really* think about it, if all of the people in which had no desire nor willingness to click on the ads presented on your site were to install AdBlock Plus there’s an ever-so-slighter (is slighter a word? Probably not, but today let’s make it an honorary word just for fun ;-) possibility that the net result will be that of increasing your cash flow instead of decreasing it.

Okay, maybe thats a bit of stretch, but if nothing else it’s definitely something to consider. Of course if it turns out this theory were to actually hold any water you would have none other than Wladimir Palant to thank for your decreased cost structure and therefore increase in monthly revenue. And according to the following forum entry from about this time last year (which was in response to a question regarding Wladimir’s preferred charity), here’s how you can thank him for your new found cash cow, ;-)

I don’t favor any organization, feel free to choose the one you like

Edit: On the other hand… I do favor one organization: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html

Seems reasonable to me. :D

Thanks, Wladimir!

Update: NOTE: For those of you who first read this update at the top of my last post, here it is again but this time at the top of the correct post! ;-)

—
I *LOVE* this comment from an article linked to from Yours Truly (a handle, not a self reference ;-),

Upon clicking the link to http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/ I was met with a blank page. Interesting, I thought to myself. Let’s check this out in more detail… I bet they want me to wipe the dust off my Internet Explorer and access their site that way. Admit defeat? Go back to using Internet Explorer? Hardly. I simply opened a new tab in Firefox and went to Google. In the Google search field I entered the search term: site:whyfirefoxisblocked.com and then loaded the conveniently offered “cached” version of the page in question. It loaded smoothly in my AdBlockPlus-enabled copy of Firefox.

Absolutely *CLASSIC*! :D Thanks for the laugh, Yours Truly! Of course the real test would be to do the same for the site that you would have been redirected from, but two things,

1) Why waste any more of your valuable time.
2) The spirit of your hack is most certainly in place, which leads to one very important observation,

As mentioned already: Don’t Fight the Internet! There’s fame (the good kind) and fortune and good times for all in whom find ways to embrace the way the web *truly* works, not the way you think it should work. And if anything this is the point of the entire post.

Update: Based on the evidence that has been mounting up in my inbox and in comments I’ve done a quick research project and have come to the same obvious conclusion that everyone else has: That the content that follows that now has a strike through is more than likely a completely bogus attempt at justification. My apologies to each of you that were simply following Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, and other links for proliferating the garbage that is being fed from this guy.

Oh, and Danny, (AKA Jack Lewis),

You know what, nevermind. Why even waste any more of my time.

No wait, I’m sorry, I do have something else to say: You are not a victim of terrorism. You’re a victim of yourself.

Best of luck to you.

Oh, and one other thing: If you are bothered by the ads on this or any other site and would rather read this or any other *FREE* content without being bothered by ads you find annoying: I’ve heard that Ad Block Plus is pretty good. Of course you’ll need Firefox if you don’t already have it, but if you’re interested in my opinion, Firefox is as good as a browser gets.

In fact, maybe even better.

Enjoy your ad free Firefox browsing days, everyone! The content here on O’ReillyNet is free to read however you might choose in whatever browser you might choose. If you choose to reprint it (beyond that which can be considered fair use) please do so under the terms of the Creative Commons by-nc-sa. Otherwise, do what you want. That’s your right.

And as always, thanks for reading! :D

Update: via a comment from Danny Carlton,

It’s my site, and if i want to control how people view it, I’m not letting a bunch of terrorists force me into changing that–and when you attempt to change someone’s behavior by threat of harm, you are a terrorist. The vile, obscene emails and phone calls, they attempts to shut down my server with DOS attacks and bandwidth eating programs, are all acts of terrorism, and it’s really interesting how many people who seem to get offended at being called “thieves” have no problems acting like terrorists.

Folks, I don’t care who you are or what it is you think you’re accomplishing, as far as I’m concerned anyone who involves themselves in this type of activity is absolutely as Danny specifies,

A criminal.

That’s absolutely shameful to do that kind of crap. You mind not be a criminal for blocking ads placed in the content you read, but you’re certainly a criminal if you take part in any of the crimes mentioned above.

Whoever is involved with the above: STOP!

It’s not funny. It’s not cool. And it certainly isn’t justified. It’s stupid. It’s illegal. And it needs to stop.

[Original Post]

Don’t fight the Internet! I promise, you’ll lose.

Why FireFox is Blocked

The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.

Here’s the thing: If people are going out of their way to block ads via Ad Block Plus do you honestly believe they represent a significant percentage of the +/-2.5% of the people who actually ever click on web ads in the first place? Wait, hold up, I think you answer your own question in the next paragraph down, but first let me take a quick moment to point something out,

James Snell has just published an article on developWorks, which illustrates how to use the Atom Publishing Protocol to publish Common Alert Protocol (CPA) alerts. CAP defines a XML data model for specifying hazardous alerts and notifications. The article uses the Apache Abdera implementation of APP to indicate how to publish, modify and delete CAP alert documents.

via a recent link sent to the Vibe* internal mailing list from Russ, it seems Universal is going all retro on us with plans to “test” the DRM-free digital media business. Interesting enough, as Russ points out,

… although not on iTunes strangely enough, could just be a case of catchup.

That or a political move in attempt to break the lock iTunes currently has on the digital market.

From the same BBC News article linked to above,

Update: It just keeps getting better. Or is it worse? Guess that depends on your perspective. And with that, from a Wired News article from two days ago,

Crew Member: Previous AT&T Show Had “No Politics” Policy
By Eliot Van Buskirk August 13, 2007 | 10:26:44 AM Categories: AT&T

A crew member who worked on a show webcast by AT&T confirmed that there was a policy in place to remove artists’ political comments from shows before they were webcast.

“I can definitively say that at a previous event where AT&T was covering the show, the instructions were to shut it down if there was any swearing or if anybody starts getting political. Granted, they didn’t say to shut down any Anti-Bush comments or anything specific to any point of view or party, but ‘getting political’ was mentioned.”

The crew member went on to say that the order to mute political speech was issued by Davie Brown Entertainment, which had been hired by AT&T to produce the recordings.

Sure, the policy — which AT&T initially denied was in place — applies to all political speech, not just criticism of Bush. But most bands, when they get political, tend to lean pretty hard to the left (especially when they’re on the stage of Lollapalooza, which is trying to hang onto a rebellious, “alternative” reputation).

Randall L. Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, is also the Vice-Chairman of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and has motivation to shield Bush from criticism. And as some readers of this blog have pointed out, AT&T is free to do whatever it wants to the audio on its webcasts.

But one has to wonder whether the same political filtering policy applied to AT&T’s webcasts could eventually affect to the company’s portion of the internet backbone, in the absence of the net neutrality legislation it actively opposes.

PLEASE NOTE: I believe it’s important I point out the fact that I personally am not Anti-Bush. In fact, I voted for him in both 2000 and 2004. Did I make a mistake in doing so? Well, that’s neither here nor there as there’s nothing I can do to change the past, only learn from it. Even still, as per a post I made a year ago last February,

Last week the IETF announced that is had approved the Atom Publishing Protocol to be a Proposed Standard. If you’ve been waiting for things to get finalized this is it. In my somewhat limited understanding of the standards process, the last step is just a formality that will assign an RFC number and perhaps formatting of the specification document itself.

The Atom Publishing Protocol or simply APP, is the web services part of the Atom Working Group’s work. In summary, it’s a more advanced (and standardized) version of the Blogger/MetaWeblog APIs and its forms. It’s also a sterling example of RESTful API design.

The counterpart to APP is the Atom Syndication Format (ASF) that was approved last year as is now an official standard — RFC4287. The Atom Syndication Feed is similar in many respects to RSS, but shares the same semantics as APP and many enhancements and clarifications that an international standards process like IETF demand.

Congratulations and thanks go out to the working group that initiated and ushered this vital work along. That’s 5 years of work. An eternity in Internet time.

More from work group committee chair Tim Bray here and Sam Ruby (the man who made it all happen) is here.

In other news, glutton for punishment and looking for his next standards body process fix, APP specification author Joe Gregorio has submitted a draft for URI Templates that is based on the system implemented by OpenSearch API. [via DeWitt Clinton]

After many years where it wasn’t entirely clear what XML had to contribute to the Web, XML is finally becoming a key part of the Web’s infrastructure. I’m looking for stories to tell about this technical mixture, at XML 2007 and beyond.

So I’m sitting here at the O’Reilly both @ OSCON with James Turner of The Watering Hole fame and have convinced him to allow me to post a sneak preview of the strip set for publication in three weeks. So without further adieu I present the first pane of “A Little Knowledge”,

If you’re at OSCON, stop by the O’Reilly booth to see the rest. Otherwise > See ya in three weeks ;-)

Thanks for the preview, James!

Sarah McLachlan - World On Fire

Update: I should point out the above video is several years old, but I was reminded of it while visiting Swivel recently and felt like this was just the kind of information that needed to be broadcast on a more regular basis.

CHARITY	FOR	AMOUNT	TOTAL DONATION
Carolina for Kibera	• 12 room clinic and land deeds • Medicine for 5000 people for 6 months in Nairobi Kenya	• $22,500 • $7,500	$30,000
Comic Relief	• Running street children’s hospital in India for a year … Feeding 10 street children in Calcutta 3 meals daily for 1 year • Schooling for 100 street children in Tanzania • Education for 200 students in Ethiopia	• $11,050 • $3,000 • $2,500 • $400	$16,950
CARE USA	• Building of 6 wells in S.E Asia, Latin America & Africa • Helping 100 widows to develop income generating activities in Afghanistan • Sending 145 girls to school for one year in Afghanistan • Equipping 10 classrooms in Afghanistan • Training 10 teachers in Afghanistan	• $10,200 • $5,400 • $5,000 • $480 • $400	$21,480
DORCAS	• Total running costs of orphanage in South Africa • Improving the lives of 10 elderly people in Eastern Europe	• $16,500 • $3,500	$20,000
Engineers Without Borders - Canada	• To purchase and implement a Multi-Function Platform in Ghana • Christy Yaa: scholarships • Nana Yaa: scholarships	• $15,000 • $1,000 • $1,000	$17,000
Help the Aged	• Mobile Medical Unit (MMU) vehicle providing medical treatments	• $15,000	$15,000
Film Aid	• Entertainment & escapism for refugees	• $9,500	$9,500
War Child	• 70 former child soldiers to receive schooling & psychosocial support • 7 young people in Sierra Leone to receive job training • Education, shelter & food for orphans in Ethiopia	• $3,500 • $1,500 • $500	$5,500
Heifer International	• 1 heifer, 2 goats, 1 buffalo • 2 sheep, 4 goats, 2 llamas and 1 heifer • A pig • Chicks • Ducks	• $1,000 • $1,500 • $120 • $20 • $20 • $20	$2680
ITDG	• Scheme which would allow 300 families to remove smoke from their homes • 10 smoke hoods • 5 bicycle ambulances • Nuts & bolts to secure houses of monsoon victims • Sudanese irrigation	• $1,925 • $250 • $1,300 • $500 • $1025	$5000
Action Aid	• To aid and implement programs in Khlaipathar village, Orissa, India to encourage families to be able to stay together • 5000lbs potato seeds for planting vegetable gardens	• $5000 • $160	$5160
	TOTAL		$148,270

So what’s this have to do with XML?

XML frees information. The above information is free.

Either that, or not a damn thing. And that’s okay.

On a related note, I sure wish there were more rock stars on this planet like Sarah McLachlan, don’t you?

Signs on the Sand: Saxon, NET and XInclude

Saxon, famous XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor, supports XInclude since version 8.9. But in Java version only! When I first heard about it I thought “I have good XInclude implementation for .NET in Mvp.Xml library, let’s check out if Saxon on .NET works with XInclude.NET”. I did some testing only to find out that they didn’t play well together.

Turned out Saxon (or JAXP port to .NET, don’t remember) relies on somewhat rarely used in .NET XmlReader.GetAttribute(int) method (yes, accessing attribute by index), and XIncludingReader had a bug in this method.

Finally I fixed it and so XIncludingReader from recently released Mvp.Xml library v2.3 works fine with Saxon on .NET.

More goodness at the above linked post. Thanks, Oleg!

Update: Problem seems to be fixed. Thanks to whomever@O’Reilly did the fixing!

Update: So this is *DEFINITELY NOT* an issue with Google Reader, and instead an internal issue with the feed generation,

Atom 1.0:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '{', expecting ')' in /title/oreillynet/htdocs/blogs/xml/templates_c/%%0A^0A4^0A404241%%mt%3A225.php on line 6

RSS “2.0″:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '{', expecting ')' in /title/oreillynet/htdocs/blogs/xml/templates_c/%%0A^0A4^0A404241%%mt%3A225.php on line 6

My sincere apologies to the Google Reader team for suggesting in the title that this was a problem on their end. Quite obviously that is not the case. Title has been adjusted accordingly.

Also, I should emphasize the point that this is a problem I see *ALL TOO OFTEN* with MovableType. One *REALLY* strange issue I kept running into when working on Lawrence Lessig’s new blog was random characters (the %, &, and { characters were the most common) being saved in the template files for no obvious or apparent reason.

Any other MT users notice this as of late?

[Original Post]
via a recent tip from W^L+ (thanks, W^L+!),

Google Reader hasn’t shown any XML Blog posts since June 26th. I thought you were all on vacation.

Anyone else experiencing similar problems with Google Reader? Or is the problem (potentially) with one of the feeds generated by MovableType (the blogging software we use on O’ReillyNet Blogs)?

Thanks in advance for anyones and everyones help in tracking down the potential problem!

Update: It’s official,

Safari on Mac
Safari on Windows

Thanks again (everyone@)Apple!

[Original Post]
So a few weeks back Todd Ditchendorf brought to the surface, and I followed up with a report, the fact that Apple had added scripted transformations to the WebKit mix. At the bottom of that same follow-up report,

** Though I wonder if Safari has migrated any of the EXSLT functionality from libxslt, in particular the node-set() function? Anyone know off hand? If no, then Opera still has one leg up on Safari. Of course they still have one leg down on Safari as well. ;-)

Extending from a “request for support” from Romain Brestac, the above question then led to an open discussion in the WebKit Bugzilla interface regarding adding support for exslt:node-set(). Less than an hour later, Dave Hyatt (yes, *THAT* Dave Hyatt), followed-up with,

Tim Bray recently announced his publication of a new Apache module, mod_atom, which will make it possible to use the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) directly with the Apache HTTPD server. This is a pivotal achievement, and one that will rocket APP into daily use. APP uses Atom feed content and HTTP headers to build a publishing “blog” system, though its uses extend considerably beyond the normal scope for blogging and could very well be a staple of most data publishing systems within the next few years.

You know, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where an effort to standardize something Microsoft created was seen as a *GOOD* thing,

ECMA to create standard out of Microsoft rival to PDF

July 01, 2007 (IDG News Service) Standards body ECMA International has formed a technical committee to develop a standard built on Microsoft Corp.’s XML Paper Specification (XPS), a rival file format to Adobe Systems Inc.’s Portable Document Format (PDF).

According to ECMA’s Web site, the goal of the TC46-XPS Technical Committee is to create “a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format and XML-based page description language which is consistent with existing implementations of the format called the XML Paper Specification.”

When and why did that change?

Well, either way, good on ya Microsoft! I’m one of your *many* supporters in regards to keeping the transparency and openness rolling forward. Please do just that.

Oh, and thanks!

Lessig 2.0 — the site (Lessig Blog)

Update: ok, a little hiccup. But now we’re back, and so too are the thanks.

So that was fun :) Yesterdays launch of Lessig 2.0 turned into last nights and this mornings hack session to both fix and then build out a test suite to ensure that all of the old links were properly and permanently redirected to the new links.

I need to spend some time both documenting and prettying up creating a human usable the interface, but my guess is that this isn’t the first time someone will want to automate the conversion and subsequent testing of moving from one URI scheme to another (e.g. 000123.shtml to /year/month/day/title.ext). At present time this is specific to MovableType, but it really doesn’t have to be. I’ll work on making it more generic, but in the mean time if you want to play around with the code base, the overview of how it works and links to the code follow below.

Enjoy!

I feel pretty lucky to have been given a chance to get to know Professor Lessig over the last year or so, helping out, even if ever so slightly, on various projects here and there, one in which you know about, and another that is just being finished up and readied for launch. While I can state that I was vaguely aware of something *big* looming on the horizon that required some design work and backend software development to be completed, until now I had no idea just how *BIG* *big* truly was,

Lawrence Lessig

I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

… Imagine someone devoted to free culture coming to believe that until free software supports free culture, free culture can’t succeed. So he devotes himself to building software. I am someone who believes that a free society — free of the “corruption” that defines our current society — is necessary for free culture, and much more. For that reason, I turn my energy elsewhere for now.

You don’t cure cancer with Band-Aid’s, and cancer is exactly what this country (referring to the United States of America) has been diagnosed with, though the diagnosis is more of an affirmation of a fact that has been oh so painfully known about for quite some time.

If you would have asked me yesterday: “Is the cancer that is the corruption that has taken over the very heart of this nation curable?” I would have stated,

“Well there’s always hope, but if yes, then I don’t know how or by what.”

While both the diagnosis and the outlook might be bleak, when you have a master surgeon such as Lawrence Lessig as your doctor, someone who has proven time and time again that if you are willing to put forth the required effort, miracles are truly possible, I can now re-adjust that same statement to read,

“I don’t know. But there’s one thing I do know: With Lawrence Lessig, *anything* is possible.”

I’d heard various stories of InDesign’s XML capabilities, especially at the CS2 release, but mostly they didn’t seem, er, compelling. Until now, anyway. I’m not sure Adobe aimed InDesign CS3 at people like me, but CS3’s capabilities seem to have just crossed the border into something I would use to combine publishing and structured documents. My guide? XML Publishing with InDesign CS2+, which we just published today.

Manolis Kelaidis just got a standing ovation for a TOC keynote after showing off a print book with connections to computer content. Combining old-fashioned print book creation with familiar Adobe InDesign layout with conductive inks and a huge amount of imagination, he managed to create a book that startled and amazed the audience.

Update: In a follow-up comment, Dave Johnson provides us with our quote of the day,

If only all browsers had the same XSLT support as IE … and IE worked like other browsers in every other respect ;)

I’ll just let that one speak for itself ;-) :D

[Original Post]
Todd Ditchendorf’s Blog. XML, Cocoa, JavaScript, Java. � Blog Archive � Safari 3, JavaScript, and XSLT

Safari 3 for Windows and Tiger is truly awesome news.

Just a feature note: Safari 2 has always supported client-side XSLT. But Safari 3 includes and implementation of the Mozilla-style JavaScript XSLT API… so now you can programatically execute XSLT transforms on the client via JS in Safari. Great news.

SWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTTT!!!! :D :D :D

Let’s see, so that just leaves Opera left holding the “why is there no support for [fill in missing Client-side XSLT feature, in this case the document() function ;-)” bag**, but something tells me that within a reasonable distance of time, Glenn will *FINALLY* get to see the light of day. ;-) Poor guy must be getting antsy, huh?!

Hang in there, Glenn! There’s hope still yet, and as I alluded, I have an itchin’ suspitchin’ the company behind my most favorite browser on the planet is going to pull through for us.

** Though I wonder if Safari has migrated any of the EXSLT functionality from libxslt, in particular the node-set() function? Anyone know off hand? If no, then Opera still has one leg up on Safari. Of course they still have one leg down on Safari as well. ;-)

The O’Reilly TOC conference is the first show I’ve gone to in a long time that’s completely explicitly about the work I do every day. I’d planned to float among sessions yesterday afternoon, but instead I found myself glued to my seat at the Print On Demand session.

Update: via a recent follow-up comment from Yaron Goland,

I have now sent full descriptions of our issues to the APP working group and the general consensus, led by Tim, was that what we are doing really doesn’t fit APP.

APP’s sweet spot is just different than Web3S’s. As I showed in my postings it is possible to expose Web3S data via APP but the results tend to be a bit, well, messy and don’t really fit the spirit of APP.

My expectation is that when we have data sources whose behavior fits well with APP we would want to expose them as APP. There is no universal solution to anything. It’s a question of the right tool for the right job.

In reading through the post’s mentioned above, my own take is that members of the AtomPub WG somewhat informally agreed w/ the outcome of the decision to implement Web3S the way they did, just not with the way it was initially presented to the world. In this regard it seems that the Third World^^{Wide Web} War was avoided, and the end of the Cold^^WWW War is at very least a plausible scenario.

Any active AtomPub WG dev-list members out there interested in providing your own summary of the events that took place?

[Original Post]
Summary: Web3S is Microsoft’s answer to a RESTful web publishing protocol. In many ways it attempts to tackle the same problems solved by the Atom Publishing Protocol. For various reasons** MSFT found APP to be insufficient for their needs. In a follow-up comment to Yaron Goland’s announcement regarding Web3S, Joe Gregorio asked,

“The spec was obviously still in the works when you were working on WebS3 and if you believed you had found real weaknesses with APP, which the ensuing discussion has shown that you didn’t, then why not bring attention to them before we shipped?”

to which Yaron responded with,

The Concordia Project is an effort to define an interoperability layer between the various security specifications and protocols. The project is represented by members from Liberty Alliance, OpenID, WS-Federation, CardSpace and SAML 2.0.

The first task for this group is to define some high level use cases in order to scope the body of work.

Congratulations to Alex (Barnett), Ted (Haeger), Lyle (Ball), Brad (Hintze), and *ALL* the folks who brought together the official launch of the Bungee Connect beta yesterday!

Bungee Connect - Beta Opening Day - Alex Barnett blog

Last night the Bungee Labs team invited the first group of developers to Bungee Connect, officially opening up the early access beta program. The initial group of early access customers is small, but we intend to ramp up quickly as we carefully monitor the system for performance and scaling, adding groups of 50 until all registered beta developers get their invites (we currently have around two thousand early access sign-ups ready to get their invites).

What excites me the most about all of this is the fact that Bungee Labs has not only developed the next generation “killer app” web services-focused browser-based client/server dev tool (wow, < that’s a mouthful!), but they have pioneered a new and innovative way for web developers like you and me to develop these apps to then deploy them to the masses w/o concern about what to do if that same app becomes the “next big thing” on the Internet. In other words, Bungee Labs via Bungee Connect is doing the same thing for web-based application development and deployment that Amazon has done with S3/EC2 for storing and serving up content.

Like I mentioned before: Things are about to get interesting.

As per the end of the Alex Barnett’s same linked post from above,

You can sign up for Bungee Connect early access beta through Bungee Labs site.

Apparently they are pushing things out in “groups of 50 until all registered beta developers get their invites”, such that they can properly monitor the stress load on the system, and adapt accordingly. Smart move. Of course, there are already ~2000 developers signed up for the early access beta, so if you haven’t already, now might be a good time to take up Alex on his invitation from above. From a personal level, I would *highly* recommend that you do just that. This is *KILLER* stuff!

No, I didn’t mean “Tree”…

via an IM ping from Russ,

via http://www.apple.com/appletv/tour.html?section=youtube

Search. Watch. Repeat.

Coming in June, you can watch YouTube videos in a whole new way — on the big screen. Enjoy thousands of free videos, including the top featured, most viewed, and top rated. New content will be added every day and the entire YouTube catalog will be available by the fall, so there’ll always be something cool to see.

So I just spent the last two days in San Jose at the Semantic Conference and had a *fabulous* time. I’ve known Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji now for nearly three years and yet this was the first time we have actually met in person.

I also had a chance to meet and speak with Eric Miller for the first time which was an absolutely fantastic experience as was meeting all of the good folks who collectively form Zepheira, the company Eric Miller recently founded, bringing together the best in the semantic web business to aid with the ushering in of Web v.Next() (AKA Web 3.0.) (Update: I wrote this in a rush this morning and should have elaborated a bit more in regards to what I was referring to. As such, what follows is the elaboration I should have provided. Hopefully this will make a bit more sense in regards to why I was excited by the overall experience of chatting with Eric. ) After reading John Borland’s article from the MIT Technology Review in March, a lot of things that had previously made little to no sense (in regards to their applicability to the web) suddenly made a lot more sense. Being able to chat with Eric in person about some of these same topics was quite an amazing experience! While I still can’t say that I have a full grasp of everything that relates to the semantic web, it was obvious to me after speaking with Eric that some of the things I have criticized in the past had more to do with simply misunderstanding what these technologies were all about, and less to do with them simply not being relevant.

Moving forward: To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what story these pictures tell but there are probably quite a few folks that many of you will recognize, so while it may not tell a story like the title suggests, they still may be of interest to many of you.

As such, enjoy!

QUICK-NOTE: I met a *TON* of really cool folks at the conference. A quick shout-out to each of you: Thanks for the good time! Do it again next year? I know I’ll be there for sure! :D

Update: via a recent email from David Carlisle (used with permission),

I recognized that name when it came up in the feed titles, Andy Kimball
used to post regularly to xsl-list and was largely responsible for
giving the impression that not everyone at MS was fully signed up to te
evil empire, and that there were in fact real people there and that
msxsl would eventually turn out to be a good thing…

David continues with a couple of links [1,2], the second of which links to the following,

Hi all,

I’m Andy Kimball, the Microsoft XSL developer. After today’s “nested
template abomination” discussion, I had a couple of comments. First,
Microsoft is committed to delivering a conformant XSLT processor. ….

[1] http://www.biglist.com/cgi-bin/wilma/wilma_glimpse/xsl-list?query=Andy+Kimball
[2] http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200003/msg00614.html

I have to stand by David’s comments. Andy is definitely one of the good guys. And if you have ever used any of MSFT’s XSLT processors (in particular MSXML and .NET 2.0 System.Xml.XslCompiledTransform) you know just as well as the rest of us…

Andy knows how to write *BLAZING FAST* code! Smart kid, that Andy Kimball ;-) :D

Thanks for the info, David!

[Original Post]
So the craziest email arrived in my inbox yesterday evening. It begins,

I’m not 100% sure that you are my old friend from the 90’s, given that you seem to go by M. David Peterson now, but I thought I’d email you and see. If you are Mark Peterson, who worked at Microsoft in the 90’s as an “Independent Contractor”, and knew a couple of guys named Andy Kimball and Brandon Hall, then let me know.

I’ve already responded to Andy to let him know that yes, in fact, it is I that is he (M. David Peterson == Mark David Peterson for those unaware.) The reason for writing this post, however, is to point out something I didn’t know until just now. Andy continues,

It would be quite a coincidence if indeed you were that Mark Peterson, as you seem to be very gung-ho on Xml and Xslt, which is my specialty.

He continues to describe his involvement with XML and XSLT at Microsoft.

- Member of the Core XML team for MSFT for almost 10 years.
- One of the developers of the MSXML processor.
- Ditto on the XSLT Processor in .NET 2.0
- Currently a member of the Linq To Xml team

ABSOLUTE CRAZINESS! Some background,

Update: Snippets from Bill Hilf interview @ http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/051707-hilf-microsoft-wont-sue-over.html

What we heard back after the Novell deal was “Give us more transparency. You say that there is IP involved, give us an understanding of what that is.”
…
… we have no plans to litigate. You can never say we’ll never do anything in the future, but that’s not our strategy. That article spins it on the attack. The only new piece information in that article is that it just put a number on the patents.
…
The people in the open-source community that I know well . . . they contacted me right away. All of the European guys I know called me at 2 a.m. I told them what I told you. They said “Okay, that’s what I needed to hear.”
…
I personally believe that there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done in software patent reform. However, the current rules still apply. It’s still the way we do business today and how all other businesses work. So we still have to find ways to work in the current system even though we do want it to be improved in the future.
…
There’s no other strategy. There’s no other hidden agenda. I’m trying to be as clear as I can to people that this isn’t a threat. We’re not going out and attacking people. We’re trying to solve an IP issue.

Update: I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the pic that John Lam attached to his post congratulating the Mono team on their spectacular achievement,

Which reminds me. If it wasn’t for penguin “pics” such as this,

… reminding us all that there are those who see FLOSS as something more than the freedom to adapt, change, tinker, and create, I wonder if the attitude on MSFT campus towards apparent FLOSS patent infringement might suddenly change?

Folks: There are *MANY* reasons people go to war, but generally speaking it can be boiled down to two,

1) Freedom.

2) Power (AKA Control, Money, etc.)

The FLOSS “War” isn’t an exception to the rule.

I expect to be quite wealthy once the dust from the Linux IPOs has settled

Eric Raymond, Doing It For The Cause, December 12th, 1999

People who invested in the Linux IPO’s of the late 90’s/early 00’s didn’t do so because of a belief in the FLOSS cause. They did so because they believed their was profit to be made.

Please don’t lose sight of that.

Update: It’s now official. Thanks to Zoltan Varga’s recent check-in to SVN, Mono now successfully runs IronPython 2.0A1/DLR,

[mdavid@domU-12-31-37-00-03-10 Debug]$ mono -V
Mono JIT compiler version 1.2.4 (/trunk/ r77478)
Copyright (C) 2002-2007 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com
        TLS:           __thread
        GC:            Included Boehm (with typed GC)
        SIGSEGV:       normal
        Architecture:  x86
        Disabled:      none
[mdavid@domU-12-31-37-00-03-10 Debug]$ mono ipy.exe
IronPython console: IronPython 2.0A1 (2.0.10427.02) on .NET 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
>>>

And to make things even better…

7:54:34 AM sanxiyn: It seems that there’s no more serious Mono runtime bug hiding.

7:55:12 AM sanxiyn: I’ve just run HTTP sanity test (which uses urllib and BeautifulSoup) on IP2/Mono.

7:55:25 AM xmlhacker: and?

7:55:34 AM sanxiyn: Passed.

7:55:39 AM xmlhacker: nice!

7:56:03 AM sanxiyn: DNS test passed. (This uses dnspython, which implements all of DNS protocol marshal/unmarshal in pure Python.)

7:56:37 AM sanxiyn: XML-RPC passed. Well, it looks good.

7:57:03 AM xmlhacker: XML-RPC passed? That is *very* encouraging!

So there you have it folks. 16 days for the Mono-Project hackers to implement support for the DLR.

That *ROCKS*!!! :D

Thanks to Seo, Zoltan, and *ALL* of the rest of the folks who pulled this together! *VERY* nice work!

Very happy to see the recent report that Norway is adopting a standards-based policy for public (external) documents hosted on websites, pretty much along the lines that I have been calling for (some reminders below)[5] identifying when formats are appropriate [1]:

• W3C XHTML or HTML is still possible [2][4]
• ISO PDF/A (or Adobe PDF1.4, I hope temporarily) for finished documents [3]
• ISO ODF for documents “still being worked on” [3][4]
• Allow other formats in addition, as long as the required formats are available [2]
• An acknowledgement that Open XML is “a better format for preserving semantics and special formats from Microsoft’s proprietary binary formats,” [4]

I expect that Open XML becoming an ISO standard would not change these minimum requirements for web-hosted public documents, and neither should it IMHO. I think it shows that governments and regulators are perfectly capable of treating the available standards as a technical library[6] and selecting the correct one for each job as they see fit. It shows again that being pro-ODF for public documents does not require that one is anti-Open XML as an ISO standard, as part of the library: regulators and legislators are the appropriate people to decide which standards to favour for different uses.

At some time in the future, I suspect these kinds of recommendations will need to be strengthened. Which version of ODF (etc.)? Which profile? (And I still think that HTML and web delivery have a momentum and logic that makes both ODF and Open XML second-class citizens for public documents: don’t forget HTML!)

Microsoft XML Team’s WebLog : Live from MIX07: Silverlight and XML!

XML Features in Silverlight

In the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release, we have enabled streamed XML reading and writing through the XmlReader and XmlWriter, respectively.

That’s it, you say? For the MIX Alpha release, yes. Over the 1.1 alpha release cycle, we have focused on providing a great XML foundation within Silverlight through the reader and writer in order to enable the delivery of additional pieces of the XML stack within the context of Silverlight in the future.

XML, Silverlight, and the Future

Going forward, we are planning to support LINQ to XML within Silverlight to enable a great story for query, caching, manipulation, aggregation, and data binding using XML.

Additionally, we’d love to get feedback on what types of activities are relevant for you, given this great new programming model of .NET within the browser. In particular, how do you feel about the following features in the browser?

· XSD Schemas
· XPath
· XSLT
· DOM

Well, the dinner bell is ringing here at MIX07, so that’s all for now. Though, as we’re now allowed to talk about Silverlight publically, I am very excited to discuss XML and Silverlight, what types of applications are interesting for you in this space, as well as the types of XML features are relevant for you in the context of the browser.

Great! Here’s my wish list,

· XSD Schemas
· Schematron
· RNG
· XPath 2.0
· XSLT 2.0
· DOM
· E4X

I’m just heading off to Thailand for a week: I am speaking at a seminar on Monday “Interoperable ICT Systems
Seminar” with speakers from NECTEC, CompTIA and Microsoft, with me as Dr Strangelove. James Clark has threatened to be there and ask hard questions: scary! He lives in Thailand has been promoting open source software there for several years.

Going over the Open Office Office Open XML schemas to prepare for the seminar, the I’ve been struck with the similarity with early 90s SGML “big system” similarities: the HyTime era. Interesting to see old approaches reborn: the HTML generation of systems went a different way…small documents, no link integrity control, no reuse of links, no semantic labelling, indirection handled by servers not documents: MIME, HTTP, REST, the WWW was about how you could take lots of small dumb documents and build a big dumb eco-system, which turned out to be a fine and practical approach for many things.

I remember Dave Peterson suggesting that tables as we know them (HTML-style, CALS-style) were bad because they mixed presentation with content, for example: instead the data should be maintained in a separate semantical structure, and included by reference; so in SpreadsheetML, data and strings can be maintained separately.

Elliot Kimber has often argued that there are many “difficult” problems with handling large dynamic document sets that go away with a suitable, simple indirection method: hence his XIndirect, and indeed OASIS SGML/XML catalogs and even ISO DSDL’s Document Schema Renaming Language (DSRL) which comes through Martin Bryan; the relationship system in the Open Packaging Conventions seem similar.

It is an interesting thought, though: at what point of complexity/maintainability does it become a requirement to add extra levels of indirection? I can see that both extremes are appealing: the one that says “just make do with simplicity” and the other that says “build in moderate indirection because it is easier to have it there when you need it and impossible to retrofit.”

Update: BTW, on the *HIGHLY* off-chance you are unaware of who Jeni Tennison is (I realize the chances are basically zero, but as I once proclaimed suggested may have partially fabricated completely lied about for the sake of pretending I knew what I was talking about on XSL-List, a new XSLT developer is born once every 4 minutes (or maybe it was 4 hours… I can’t remember as it was an on-the-fly-lie, and we all know on-the-fly-lies leave our memory banks about the same time they enter), and with this “fact” in mind), maybe Jeni’s search link on Amazon.com will help you get up to speed.

Oh, and while you’re there, pick up this one, that one, and at very least this one as well, though if you have the means, I would recommend buying all of them, and then set aside a solid year or two to learn how to write code the way God intended us to write code: The Correct Way (AKA XSLT, Functional Programming, and/or Lisp, Scheme, Haskell (still need to learn Haskell myself, but all the cool kids think it’s great, so I think it’s time I start following the in-crowd and start learning a thing or two about it. ;-) and so forth.

[Original Post]
“And I think to myself… What a won-der-ful Wwoooorrrrllldd….”

Hello, David Carlisle! - O’Reilly XML Blog

That final piece slips into place…

Jeni Tennison | April 23, 2007 02:24 PM

and via http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/1

So I finally have just enough spare capacity to start blogging. And if James Clark and David Carlisle can join the party late, why not me. (Yes, M. David Peterson, your eveel plan is coming to fruition.)

“Ohhhhhhhh, Yeahhhhhhh!!!!!!” (or is it “Bwah, haa, haa, haa, haa, haaahhh”? Pick one and run with it ;-))

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jeni! Not like I really have to say this, but >> SUBSCRIBED! :D Oh, and *GREAT* design! Good layout, nice choice of color and contrast. Of course, given that it’s you, that’s to be expected, but still worth pointing out none-the-less. :)

Tommie? Wendell? Feel like a little Christmas gift giving in July? (or anytime sooner? :D :D :D) You know, for the children (a group in which I proudly count myself amongst. ;-))

Thanks in advance for your considerations! :D

I attended the Web 2.0 Expo last week, representing the AOL Developer Community. One thing that stands out for me is — not only is XML experiencing a kind of “renaissance” (renewed interest in XSLT, application of microformats as a mechanism for creating the uncapitalized “semantic web,” revived XML-related standards activity, etc.) — but in a very real sense, XML has become pervasive on the Web. It’s become a natural part of every Web developer’s toolkit.

In a sense, you can no longer put “XML” on your resume in the list of technologies you understand. Yes, it’s been that way for a while, but what I mean is that today there are new complexities, new mechanisms which utilize XML, and these are moving to the forefront, becoming a “standard” means for distributing data and interfacing applications on the Web. Hence, for a Web developer to say “I know XML” will prompt a well-deserved “well, duh!” response from any other Web developer.

Even in cases where the technologies themselves aren’t brand new, their application is growing. For example, ProgrammableWeb.com founder John Musser presented a slide in his “API And Mashup Best Practices” session that suggested that large companies that have APIs increasingly consider it critical to offer a REST version of their APIs. 68% of the APIs were accessible using REST, compared with 40% using SOAP, with Javascript, XML-RPC, Atom, and proprietary interfaces all in the single digits. (The totals exceed 100% because many APIs provide multiple interface methods.) The conclusion is that the user community increasingly expects to be able to access APIs using REST, and in response vendors are making the effort to provide a REST interface to their APIs. REST apparently is considered the most efficient and easiest-to-work-with API interface by developers.

There was not a single session (as far as I’m aware) that was “about” XML or XSLT or REST. There was a session about microformats. Yet XML as a data transport and/or application interface device was an element in almost every code-centric session I attended.

Interesting!

Update: PLEASE NOTE: I’ve turned off comments to this post as,

1) I don’t have anymore invites right at this moment.
2) I probably should have stated “send me an email to m.davidATxmlhacker.com” instead of hyperlinking “first request” with a mailto: link to the same address. That’s my bad. The next batch I get I will update the top of this post with something more explicit as to what you need to do to get the invitation I have available.
3) Each additional comment add’s another point to the popularity of this post. Neither the content or related conversation is worth being labeled and broadcast to the world in various places as being labeled as something they need to check out because of it’s popularity. At the current comment rate this post would maintain the #1 spot on the front page of the blogs section of O’ReillyNet from now until Christmas 2009. For that reason alone it really isn’t fair to leave the comments open. There’s a lot of interesting blog entries on O’ReillyNet. As much as I appreciate each of you who have spent the time to leave a comment, this post isn’t one of them.

When I get a new batch of invites, again, I will update the top of this post at which point the first person who emails me with the specified and proper subject will get the invite.

Update: The time is now 2:42 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time on Friday, April the 27th, 2007. I’ve got one invite left from the latest batch of invites I was given. I realize that a *TON* (<- *WOW* <- is all I have to say. Well that + the fact that (Skype + YouTube) = Nothing even close to what Joost will ultimately be sold for, that I can promise you!) of you have followed up the original post, some begging, some demanding (NOTE: Not an approach I would personally recommend, but to each his/her own ;-), and some who are willing to trade an assorted base of items in return for the rights to an invitation that was already long gone before their email arrived.

With this last bit in mind, to keep things exciting and to see how many of you are actually paying attention, the first email to arrive after the above stamped time with the subject line: “Yes, I actually read the post” gets it.

Update: I was unable to access Joost all of yesterday, so was only able to just now send out the invite to Dan Arbel who just barely beat out the next request by a few minutes.

I’ll update the top of this same post when I receive a new batch of invites, so stay tuned…

[Original Post]
The first request that arrives in my inbox gets it.

For those unaware, Mr. MathML himself (AKA David Carlisle) has hit the ground of the blogosphere in what I can only term as a full out sprint…

David Carlisle: Hello World

Hello World

I thought I’d start a blog…..

SWEET! Welcome, David!

Now if I could only convince Wendell (Piez) and (B.) Tommie (Usdin) to start a blog, my eveel plan to get the who’s-who in the land of XSLT** blogging will be nearly complete (Jeni Tennison being the final piece of the XSLT who’s-who puzzle, though there are few others on my “list” as well… “Bwah, haa, haa, haa, haaaaa…. ” ;-)

–
** Not that I had anything to do with David, or anyone else for that matter, starting his blog. I guess it’s more of a check-list of people I wish would blog more so than a plan. But it’ an “eveel” check-list, that’s for certain! ;-)

The first interoperability session for Atom Publishing Protocol implementations (both clients and servers) was a success. The best news was that many of the clients and servers were able to interoperate with little to no tweaking despite never having met before. Check out the (evolving) grid of success and failures for details. More than 20 implementors attended the event, held yesterday and today at Google, as well as Lisa Dusseault, the IETF Area Director for APP.

So I’m at the APP Interop at Google today, and discovered that, in fact, it is possible for two Zunes to be in the same place at the same time.

Proof,

OASIS members have approved Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) as an OASIS standard. WS-BPEL is a core piece of WS-*, which defines an object model and associated grammar for web service orchestration.

James Clark is blogging!

Welcome, James!

But I’m not letting this opportunity pass. James Clark has taken up blogging and with a bang too!

Welcome back, James!

Suddenly, life just feels more complete. This *ROCKS*! :D

Update: Please see the MSFT/Zune response below. But first,

To Lawrence Lessig, the Free Software Foundation, and the good folks at Creative Commons: It might be *OUR* year. But this is *YOUR* victory. Your efforts have redefined an entire generation,

Thank you.

[Original Post]
A funeral in which I have no plans to attend,

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store

CUPERTINO, California–April 2, 2007–Apple� today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes� Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today–128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM–at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.

“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice–the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”

ed. emphasis added.

Hey Apple|EMI > Welcome to the Social ;-)

Oh: and thanks! It might only be a first step, but it’s the first step that leads to the second. Nice work!
—

According to my clock we’re only 52 minutes into the first of April and we already have the clear and uncontested winner…

How TiSP Works

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

And if that wasn’t enough, how about,

DING, DING, DING > We have a winner! ;-) Everyone else: Just give up. You’re not going to win.

Thanks for making me laugh, Google! :D

While Target is facing the lawsuit by NFB on accessibility issues, Amazon realised the importance of accessibility and they are going to make Amazon.com accessible for blind people via screen readers. Lately AJAX accessibility issues caught vendors attention and lot of companies including Bindows focused on implementing the accessibility functionality for Ajax applications. Today Amazon.com and National Federation of the Blind joined the forces to develop and promote web accessibility. From the press release:

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and Amazon.com announced today that they have agreed to work together to promote and improve technology that enables blind people to access and use the World Wide Web. In a cooperation agreement, Amazon.com pledged its commitment to continue improving the accessibility of its Web site platform, while the NFB committed to contribute its expertise in Web accessibility technologies to help further Amazon.com’s efforts.

From the NFB and Amazon agreement:

PART 3 - ACCESSIBILITY TIME TABLE
A. Amazon commits to work to provide Full and Equal Access on Amazon.com and Syndicated Store Web Sites, to the extent such access is not already available, by no later than December 31,2007 and continuing thereafter.
B. Amazon commits to work to implement technical measures, to the extent any are necessary, no later than June 30, 2008 and continuing thereafter, so as to ensure that third parties to whom Amazon delivers e-commerce services are not prevented by Amazon-supplied technology from providing Full and Equal Access on their Merchant.com Web Sites.

This is a good sign and I am sure more applications/sites will follow this. Good move by Amazon.

If you were too late, and were denied access on your first attempt, word on the street is that Brad found ways to distract upper management with “Hot” Krispy Kremes and as such, there’s a chance he can sneak you in the back door during the aforementioned moment of distraction. Let him know *SOON* (bradATbungeelabs.com)

If you already have a spot, or are able to gain one via Brad’s ever so sly “Krispy Kreme method”: See ya there! :)

Update: As per my follow-up to orcmid,

Oh, I think the marketplace is a *GREAT* idea, and in fact is *WELL* overdue. They should have been doing this all along! I was just laughing at Oleg’s follow-up phrasing of one (of many!) ways you could utilize OSS to your financial benefit. In fact, I almost titled the post “On SourceForge and Open Source Obfuscation”, (and probably should have now that I think of it), but chose not to for some odd reason.

I was in a hurry, and didn’t extend things as I normally will, so my apologies to those of you left with the impression that I thought the SourceForge Marketplace was in any way a bad thing.

[Original Post]
Signs on the Sand: SourceForge Marketplace

Sounds interesting. Another way to get rich - create great open source product, make your code unreadable, provide no documentation and then sell support :)

Update: via http://www.rpath.com/rbuilder/tryItNow?id=1,

This appliance can be run in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), compliments of rPath. Click on the button below to launch the appliance. Once the boot process is complete, additional instructions will appear and you can complete the installation. Then, use the MediaWiki appliance in the cloud!

Just tried it and it seems you get about 15 minutes worth of play time via the rPath Appliance Agent interface which allows you to change the password, create an admin+password for the MediaWiki instance, add an email address (part of the MediaWiki setup process, though it seems any old email (read: fake**) will do) and then access the MediaWiki instance itself.

Nice touch, rPath!

** NOTE: Don’t use any periods in the admin name OR the email address you provide. Using m.david and m.david@fill_in_the_blank threw errors for both, which is why I decided to had little choice but to use a fake email address, as 95% of my email addresses have periods in the handle segment.)

[Original Post]
rPath - rPath Teams with Amazon Web Services

It will work like this: software developers use rBuilder to build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Then, with a single click, rBuilder and rBuilder Online users can boot their software appliances on Amazon EC2. No more waiting for downloads or fighting with complex installation procedures. Software appliances plus Amazon EC2 deliver software value without the hassles - on-demand. To learn more visit: www.rpath.com/amazon.

So firstly, this *ROCKS*!

Secondly,

But much to my surprise, MSFT isn’t the one cashing in on the traffic,

CodePlex Information and Discussion

CodePlex gives project owners the choice of placing sponsored ads on their project pages. Project advertising is provided through Kanoodle BrightAds, and all the proceeds from Kanoodle go entirely to the project owner.

Many open source developers work long and hard on their project efforts and use donations or sponsorships as a way of helping to support their efforts. We wanted to give project owners the ability of having sponsored ads for their project if they choose.

Nice! So MSFT: while you seem to be in the giving mood, can you please implement support for Subversion, an option to use Trac, as well as the ability to allow direct deployment of ClickOnce and/or ClickThrough apps from a project repository? That would be just peachy!

Thanks in advance for your considerations. ;-)

A couple of months back I got a *TOP SECRET* invite from a *TOP SECRET* laboratory located in a *TOP SECRET* location here in Utah to gain a *SNEAK* pre-view of a *TOP SECRET* browser-based web services development tool. For now, we’ll call this tool “Frank.”

Me: So, “Frank”, tell all the Land’OXML about yourself.

Frank: My names BUNGEE, you phreak. Stop calling me Frank!

Me: *WHOA* Frank! You can’t tell them your real name! You’ve signed an NDA!

Frank: No, *YOU* signed an NDA. I can say anything I want.

Me: Wow. Little snippy today, aren’t we Frank?

Frank: BUNGEE!!! My name is BUNGEE, BUNGEE, BUNGEE!

Me: Well okay then, Frank.

Frank: BUNGEE!

Me: Frank? Didn’t you just say that it was I that was under NDA and not you? Wouldn’t that mean that you can call yourself anything you want, but I can’t?

Frank: That’s a good point. I’ll give you that one.

Me: Thanks! :D I like points. How many did I get?

Frank: Don’t push your luck.

Me: Okay.

Me: So “Frank”, since my tongue is still bound by the legal system, why don’t you tell the good people in Land’OXML about yourself.

Frank: Okay. Well, I’m 6 feet tall, Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes, and

Me: Frank. That’s not what I meant. How about telling them about — you know — who you are, what you do for a living, if you happen to be giving any free seminars in San Francisco tomorrow (the 22nd) and in Orem, Utah on the 29th, and for those who want to get their mind blown with a sneak preview of the next generation of web services development tools to shoot Brad (bradATbungeelabs.com) a *TOP SECRET* email with the code word,

“Frank sent me…”

as the subject.

Frank: Well I would, but *YOU JUST DID ALREADY*

Me: Oh, well… hmmm… That’s a good point. Frank, question: Did I just break my NDA?

Frank: Just give me the mic.

Me: Okay.

Frank: So, a little about myself,

Update: So I’ve now got things set-up such that there are several default/built-in collections, and for now have updated the client-side XSLT to access the APP service document @ /service/pub/, access each of the related Atom feed-based collections, and create a simple report that outputs the detailed info for each collection, and if there are any entries (which by default, there is not), will iterate over each entry and output a report of each.

A couple of screen shots to help warm each of your AtomPub-enabled hearts,

I also spent some time and quickly added an AtomProvider class to the DynamicWebServiceHelpers project for IronPython provided by Microsoft such that you could load collection feeds served by by Amplee from the IP console app. Take a look at the rss.py sample provided with this same sample project to gain a feel for how to use it.

Oh, I’ve checked the updated code into SVN, and updated the ClickOnce app as well. For more detail (URI’s, etc.), please see the end of this post.

Tomorrow I will be adding in the ability to add/update/delete entries in each collection to then take these entries and mash them up with with any external web feed, outputting the result in a reusable ModuleT to be rendered on any system which supports ModuleT (At present time AIM Pages as well as the built in capabilities I will be adding to the Xameleon code base to render them locally.) If you take a look at the flickr.py or the amazon.py from the same DWSH project, it should become pretty obvious how the combination of IronPython, Amplee, AtomicXML, ModuleT, and LiveClipboard will enable some pretty amazing mashup capabilities that bring together REST, WS-*, APP, and/or any given Atom/RSS web feed, combining them together in any way you can imagine, and making them reusable and shareable with nothing more than a simple copy/paste of the LiveClipboard scissor icon.

Fun times ahead, but for now, however: Sleep ;-)

Bye… :D

Update: Note to self and others: When attempting to setup a recursive planet using Venus (e.g. http://planet.xsltransformations.com/river includes http://planet.xsltransformations.com/ and http://planet.xsltransformations.com/flood includes http://planet.xsltransformations.com/river) don’t use the same on-disk location for the feed cache.

The result if you do? Hours of wondering how on earth entries with the author listed as “Planet XSLTransformations + River” are making it into the root of the planet.

Doh!

[Original Post]
Holy Hannah!!! I guess I should have realized that adding both Technorati[xslt|xsl|xsl-fo] and del.icio.us[xsl|xslt|xsl-fo] to the mix would have resulted in the flood of XSLT-related material that it did, but as with all things in life, experience is what helps make you a wiser human being.

So,

http://planet.xsltransformations.com/ = A “stream” of XSLT-related material from a pre-determined list of XSLT hackers, technologists, and overall community members.

http://planet.xsltransformations.com/river/ = All of the above + del.icio.us[xsl|xslt|xsl-fo]

http://planet.xsltransformations.com/flood/ = All of the above + Technorati[xsl|xslt|xsl-fo] + del.icio.us[xquery|xpath|linq]

I’ll be tinkering with the last two until I get it to what seems like the right level of river and flood status. If you would like to help in my attempt to control the flood gates, by all means, please do.

Please note: If your feed reader looked anything like mine after the initial flood, my most sincere apologies! Hopefully things will be a bit more under control now.

http://planet.xsltransformations.com/ [feed, opml]

I’m still busy adding feeds from folks in whom most definitely provide value to those with interest in XSLT and/or similar technologies such as XQuery and LINQ. I was going to hold off from announcing this until I was absolutely certain I had everybody on there that obviously should be on there. But since that will more than likely never happen within a reasonable time frame, and since the best way to fix something is to give it to people to play with such that they can tell you where it’s broken (and/or how they broke it, though in this case (I hope!) this really doesn’t apply), I figured now is the time to announce its existence, using a collaborative approach to filling in the missing links. If it seems to you there is someone missing, please let me know. Thanks!

Update: Please note: If you visit the site expecting to see your name+link, and for some odd reason it isn’t there, please don’t take it personally. I do stupid things like this *ALL* the time. For example, it took me close to a year before I realized I didn’t have Elliotte Rusty Harold listed on the XSLT:Blog “Legends of the XSLT Community” roster. With this in mind, please forgive me, and let me know of my evil sins so I can properly repent. Thanks!

In addition to adding new folks as time continues, I also plan to begin the integration of the client-side XSLT framework I have been developing, some of which you can find @ http://extf.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/WebApp/public_web/ (and play with @ http://browserbasedxml.com/ ). This same framework you will be learning about in the now quite belated Open Source XML Weekly Roundup (which will now be titled “Week 9 1/2″ when it’s ready to go either later today or tomorrow ;-)

More on that when it arrives ( < obviously! ;-)

Oh, and also,

Microsoft guns Open XML onto ISO fast track

March 12, 2007 (Computerworld) — The International Standards Organization (ISO) agreed Saturday to put Open XML, the document format created and championed by Microsoft Corp., on a fast-track approval process that could see Open XML ratified as an international standard by August.

That’s despite lingering opposition to Open XML by several key voting countries, including some of whom whose governments are moving forward to adopt the alternative Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) format, which the ISO approved as a standard last year.

Hmmm… Interesting… A bit further down we discover,

Rajchel wrote that she decided to move Open XML forward after consulting with staff at the International Technology Task Force. She did not mention that the 6,000-page proposal, submitted by another standards body, Ecma International, had garnered comments and criticism from 20 out of the 30 countries sitting on the JTC-1 committee.

Hmmm… Interesting… A bit further down we discover,

In regards to Daylight Saving Time here in the United States, this year: It’s both! 3 weeks back, and 1 week forward to be more precise, accounting for 4 more weeks worth of sunshine to brighten each and every one of our days.

Unless you live in Seattle**. ;-)

via the U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department,

… and went to Book Publisher Sales Heaven!

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades

Like a lot of teens, Leslie Cornaby has a crowded schedule — her days crammed with homework, hobbies and an array of techno diversions. When she’s not checking e-mail, she’s cruising YouTube or scrolling her iPod to tunes by Pink or Christina Aguilera.

She’s also reading — just for the glorious fun of it — and says, “Most of my friends are readers, too.”

The Shorecrest High School sophomore may not realize it, but she’s enjoying the fruits of one of the most fertile periods in the history of young adult literature.

It’s a time of strong writing and strong sales as readers in the 12-to-18 age group rock the marketplace.

“Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before,” said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. “And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s.”

Wow!

Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

Double *WOW*!

Update: via Rick Jelliffe,

I think this is really promising. The WhatWG material will undoubtedly be the prime inputs for consideration. It would be nice if the WG had its minutes published in the open, given the public interest.

As I pointed out in a follow-up, while the minutes are obviously different, the archives for the mailing list are labeled “public-html”. 12 posts and counting, and yep: They’re public > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007JanMar/

Thanks for your input, Rick! I most certainly hope your thoughts regarding the work of the WHATWG are exactly how things play out.

[Original Post]
I don’t always have the kindest things to say both to and about the W3C, often criticizing them for their closed door, closed ear policy when it comes to listening to what the developers in whom use their technologies have to say on any given matter.

This time around is different,

W3C Relaunches HTML Activity

http://www.w3.org/ — 7 March 2007 — Recognizing the importance of an open forum for the development of the predominant Web content technology, W3C today invites browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group. Based on significant input from the design and developer communities within and outside the W3C Membership, W3C has chartered the group to conduct its work in public and to solicit broad participation from W3C Members and non-Members alike.

“HTML started simply, with structured markup, no licensing requirements, and the ability to link to anything. More than anything, this simplicity and openness has led to its tremendous and continued success,” explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and inventor of HTML. “It’s time to revisit the standard and see what we can do to meet the current community needs, and to do so effectively with commitments from browser manufacturers in a visible and open way.”

Good on ya W3C!

Today we released a new alpha version of Prince that supports a new CSS property that we cooked up for performing text replacement. It is loosely based on the tr command in UNIX and Perl and was inspired by a specific use case of wanting to replace straight apostrophes (’) with curly right single quotes (U+2019), which are more aesthetically pleasing in some fonts and harmonise better with the use of curly double quotes. With the new property, this can be achieved like this:

(NOTE: Since this blog, Computerworld published Ecma’s fulll Contradiction Response which includes summaries of the national bodies’ substantive comments. Here is an updated table with positions as apparent from the Ecma responses. I count 7 rather than 8 actual claims of contradictions, but many of the national bodies recommend shifting OOXML into some SC34-based review.)

Here’s the latest on the rumoured positions taken by the national standards bodies that are full participating members of ISO/IEC JTC1 (P Countries). We’ll know more over the next few weeks as material comes online. I’ve summarized things in a following table as best as I can make them out, but (apart from Australia’s comments which I have seen) I’m not too confident in my source, another website.

The responses have two aspects. First there are responses connected to the amount of time available to check for contradictions. Now this is really an ISO procedural matter, and, as I have mentioned before, in effect national bodies get much less than the 30 days to check for contradictions: really it is as little as a week. But it doesn’t matter, because the national vote comes up anyway: as I’ve said before, the contradiction period is a coarse sieve for big issues. At least seven of the thirty national bodies from P Countries have made remarks concerning the time period. I expect JTC1’s answer will be: if this is important, raise this at JTC1 committee.

So second are responses on contradiction proper. It seems that eight (update: 7) of the thirty P Countries have raised issues on contradiction. Another four have passed on issues without necessarily claiming contradiction (in some cases because their procedural comment is that they are not clear on what a contradiction entails.) This is a big number, but given the controversy it is not surprising, and getting the important issues discussed sooner rather than later is in everyone’s interest.

While some of the technical claims are silly (such as the bitmask rubbish) and can be resolved fast, there is an interesting procedural problem: traditionally, when there is some market need for different technologies or approaches to address the same goal, they just get made different parts of the same standard, which lets ISO pretend there is only one standard but actually to allow internal competition under the same number. But that approach is hardly possible for fast-tracked standards, since they come in from different organizations.

Apparantly Ecma has prepared responses, which will be sent to JTC1. Clearly they need to make the case better why OOXML is different from ODF and why there is a market requirement for it (and perhaps why ODF will not be mature fast enough to be usable: fast-track is supposed to be used when there is some aspect of timing where the market requires something fast.) Assuming OOXML survives this round, Ecma only will need to convince one or two countries not to vote “no” and try to get enough of the others to vote “yes”. (8/30 negative is the magic number for preventing a standard IIRC.) I suspect a name change for the proposed standard and some better word-smithing of the scope paragraphs would go a long way to resolve matters.

Update: The first part of “Week 1 : The Zune Experience” (with more to follow later today) is now available @ http://dev.aol.com/blog/mdavidpeterson/2007/02/26/week-1-the-zune-experience

[Original Post]

So as I blogged about last Thursday, I received the Zune I was awarded for being one of the first 10 folks to create and publish a VHD-based instance of their rPath Linux-based project. In the 10 days since, I’ve realized a couple of things,

1) “WOW! You think maybe you could turn up the quality rating the next time you post a picture of yourself so you don’t look like a 14 year going through puberty?” Or is just the angle I’m looking at it again, this time from a different monitor?

Well, regardless, my apologies if I scared you, your children, love ones, or possibly any of your pets due to concerns over catching “Whatever the hell that is on his face! Beth, get some rubbing alcohol! John, *DON’T* touch the screen until we disinfect it!̶