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.

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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.

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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.

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James Greiner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest, Inc. In preparation for Where 2.0, MapQuest conducted an ethnography study. The massive survey polled users on what they want from location-based services, mapping sites, and in mobile. It should be a very informative look into the desires of the people (many) our apps are made for. From O’Reilly Where 2.0, San Jose, CA, Tuesday, May 29th, 2007.

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Since Google first presented a snapshot of the geoweb at last year’s Where 2.0, it has considerably evolved: more Geo data is published on the web, KML was accepted as an OGC standard and is adopted by a growing number of tools. Join John Hanke, Director of Google Earth & Maps to hear the latest on the evolution of the Geoweb and Google’s effort to organize it and make it universally accessible and useful. In this video from the O’Reilly 2008 Where 2.0 conference, John Hanke demonstrates the latest in Google geo development with Jack Dangemond of ESRI.

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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 b