XML FAQs

 Technology  Comments Off on XML FAQs
Jun 282005
 

The XML FAQ is one of those web sites that those who’ve been doing XML for a while tend to for­get about, until asked to explain some piece of XML that causes large volumes of dis­course on xml-dev (such as wheth­er to use ele­ments or attrib­utes). Then it comes in really handy to be able to point people at the care­fully col­lec­ted pearls (in this case, at D. 3 Which should I use in my DTD, attrib­utes or ele­ments?) and even remind your­self of them.

Which is why it’s good that Peter Flynn, who has main­tained the XML FAQ for some years, has revamped the site, and made it easi­er to find what you need (or just to browse, mut­ter­ing “that’s inter­est­ing” to your­self on a reg­u­lar basis as you dis­cov­er some new fact­oid). Thanks!

Picking Papers

 Conference  Comments Off on Picking Papers
Jun 202005
 

We just fin­ished the XML 2005 Plan­ning Com­mit­tee Selec­tion Meet­ing, three days at the end of last week. This is one of the fun, albeit exhaust­ing, parts of the con­fer­ence, when all the would-be speak­ers have sub­mit­ted their abstracts, the review­ers have graded them and com­men­ted on them, and then the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee gets to build a com­pel­ling sched­ule out of them.

The papers this year did­n’t fit into areas or tracks as neatly as in pre­vi­ous years; I think this means that XML usages are broad­en­ing away from the “clas­sic” publishing/web services/core tech­no­lo­gies and mov­ing into more mixed areas. It has­n’t been about the syn­tax for some years now, of course. There are papers that are show­ing more research into uses of XML, more rigour in design­ing sys­tems, and more emphas­is on get­ting things to work right.

Of course there were lots of papers where the authors proved they did­n’t both­er read­ing any of the hints on writ­ing abstracts on the con­fer­ence web site. When abstracts are meant to be 500 words long, those that are under 50 get short shrift by the review­ers. Those with mis­spelled acronyms or loaded up with buzzwords or that looked like advert­ise­ments for products did­n’t do too well either. For­tu­nately the review­ers did a good job at rank­ing the papers, and giv­ing us lots of com­ments to back up their grades, so I think we have a strong pro­gram this year, full of inter­est­ing con­tent. We’ll be pub­lish­ing the sched­ule once the accep­ted speak­ers have had a chance to con­firm their talks.

For those who don’t have speak­ing slots, or who get the dreaded rejec­tion email in the next week or so, don’t des­pair! We decided to keep the con­fer­ence con­tent really fresh this year by reserving 20% of the speak­ing slots for late-break­ing, instead of the usu­al 10%. So read over those writ­ing hints, mark your cal­en­dars for Septem­ber 16, and, come late July, see what holes we have in the sched­ule that your con­tent is per­fect for filling!

OpenSolaris

 Technology  1 Response »
Jun 142005
 

Well, it’s out. OpenSol­ar­is, that is. I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little fake his­tor­ic­al writ­ing (or dream­ing, some of it really out there)…

Even the people in the middle of it all, those who came up with the idea of mak­ing Sol­ar­is open source, those who came up with the idea of launch­ing a major ini­ti­at­ive by blog­ging, did­n’t real­ise what an impact this would have on the world. Even now, 5 years later, we’re still dis­cov­er­ing nuances, still dis­cuss­ing wheth­er this product or that sys­tem could even have been con­tem­plated without the boost provided by the OpenSol­ar­is initiative.

So what was so new about this? Two things spring imme­di­ately to mind. This was the first time a major oper­at­ing sys­tem had moved from closed-source to open source. A num­ber of organ­iz­a­tions had made such a leap in the years imme­di­ately pri­or to OpenSol­ar­is, not­ably the Moz­illa Found­a­tion (which cre­ated the Fire­fox browser) but those were all applic­a­tions. Linux (the main oth­er open source oper­at­ing sys­tem) was open source from the begin­ning. The oth­er was the launch-by-blog­ging. Sun Microsys­tems was one of the first major com­pan­ies to truly embrace blog­ging by any employ­ee as a means not only to get inter­est­ing inform­a­tion out there, but to build com­munity, and we can now see (and this was inten­ded at the time) the blog­ging launch of OpenSol­ar­is as being a nat­ur­al part of that com­munity-build­ing pro­cess. The 132 Sun engin­eers who wrote 215 000 words to launch OpenSol­ar­is was seen as a dis­ap­point­ment at the time by some, as a tri­umph by oth­ers. It was clear that this was only the begin­ning of what would become a wave of launch-by-blog­ging mar­ket­ing that was copied widely and is a stand­ard part of any product launch today.

What was not expec­ted was the sheer speed at which non-Sun developers took the oppor­tun­ity to cre­ate end-user applic­a­tions. Up until the launch, Sol­ar­is was con­sidered a cor­por­ate oper­at­ing sys­tem. Sol­id, secure, but noth­ing fancy that would tempt a con­sumer to switch. There were few applic­a­tions cre­ated by third party developers; sev­er­al hard-work­ing cor­por­ate applic­a­tions but little of interest to oth­ers. But by the end of 2005 there was an explo­sion of applic­a­tions, some duplic­at­ing sim­il­ar work on the Linux plat­forms such as new desktops and ports of vari­ous pop­u­lar applic­a­tions, and some that were tailored to the OpenSol­ar­is oper­at­ing sys­tem, tak­ing advant­age of fea­tures that were not avail­able else­where. OpenSol­ar­is became the slash­dot­ter oper­at­ing sys­tem of choice, and reports star­ted com­ing in of com­pan­ies being deluged with requests to port their applic­a­tions to OpenSolaris. 

Now, 5 years after that fate­ful day, we see OpenSol­ar­is being used as the base of gam­ing con­soles, bank sys­tems, even mobile phones! Oth­er oper­at­ing sys­tem developers and vendors were inspired to improve their offer­ings, and the sta­bil­ity and secur­ity of all oper­at­ing sys­tems has increased to the stage where teen­agers don’t under­stand adult jokes about blue screens.

Ok, now back to real­ity. I use Sol­ar­is on my laptop so some of the above is my dream — more choice in Sol­ar­is-based oper­at­ing sys­tems and desktops (the Sol­ar­is equi­val­ent of Ubuntu, for example) and in applic­a­tions. There are lots of applic­a­tions avail­able for Linux (Skype, for example) that could be por­ted to Sol­ar­is with (I assume) rel­at­ively small effort. The basic things do work — brows­ing, edit­ing office doc­u­ments, email. I can even use punchin (though not in con­junc­tion with my Debi­an fire­wall, since I need to set up ipsec tables and that requires updat­ing to sarge, then recom­pil­ing the ker­nel, then fig­ur­ing out the magic incant­a­tions. If any­one is using punchin on a Sol­ar­is box behind a Debi­an fire­wall and has hints on the best way to tackle this, please let me know!). I like using Sol­ar­is, it feels sol­id and stable and although it’s been a long time since I worked on a Unix-based sys­tem, so I have to refresh my memory on how to do a lot of things, it’s good to have the choice.

Comment Spam

 Technology  2 Responses »
Jun 102005
 

Any­one else notice a flood (well, trickle) of com­ment spams? They are com­ments of the form “great site”, “glad I found this site” etc, i.e., all mind­less com­ments that could apply to any site, with senders that are poker or online gambling sites. Some­how they’re get­ting past Spam Karma 2 (which nor­mally catches all the spam), so I’m hav­ing to delete them by hand. It’s not as it I have a par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar site either!

Pilates Reprogramming

 Hobbies  5 Responses »
Jun 052005
 

One side-effect of work­ing in the soft­ware world is a tend­ency to use pro­gram­ming as an ana­logy for life. Just to prove this, when people ask why I do Pil­ates I use a couple of pro­gram­ming ana­lo­gies about how the whole pro­cess works. Pil­ates is a meth­od of exer­cise which I star­ted doing after tir­ing of the way my knee would slightly dis­lo­cate when I walked. I’ve been doing it for about 2 years now and although I’ve sprained my knee since, it does­n’t dis­lo­cate any more (yes, this is pro­gress!). Any decent Pil­ates stu­dio (I go to Dianne Miller Pil­ates) will tail­or not only the pro­gram but the way it’s taught to each indi­vidu­al’s needs. I’ve seen two cat­egor­ies of teach­ing, with dis­tinct sim­il­ar­it­ies to main­tain­ing software. 

First, there’s what you might call the fix­ing bugs mode (or maybe TQM if you’re more into acronym-filled BPR ana­lo­gies). Strength­en­ing the muscles around the knees in my case, and teach­ing my over-achiev­er delt­oids not to do the work that the rotat­or cuff and ser­ratus anteri­or muscles should be doing (lots of the Pil­ates philo­sophy revolves around mak­ing muscle groups do the work, not train­ing indi­vidu­al muscles).

Even­tu­ally you’re far enough along the path that the instruct­ors decide it’s time to change everything — some­what like deep refact­or­ing, or rewrit­ing the ker­nel. So right now I’m work­ing on chan­ging the way I walk, and I’m back to doing the really basic exer­cises at Pil­ates in a dif­fer­ent way. I’ve heard people who golf a lot talk­ing about rebuild­ing their swing which sounds like a sim­il­ar pro­cess, with sim­il­ar trade-offs to deep refact­or­ing. If you don’t do it, you don’t have any major per­form­ance gains. But rework­ing the way you walk, or the way you do exer­cises you’ve been doing for two years, or a pro­gram you’ve been fix­ing bugs in for five years, can be a big under­tak­ing. Per­son­ally I think refact­or­ing pro­grams is easi­er than repro­gram­ming muscle memory — soft­ware sel­dom spon­tan­eously leaps back to the old version!

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