Northern Voice (2006)

 Conference  1 Response »
Sep 262005
 

So I’m up to my eye­balls in pro­ceed­ings papers for XML 2005 which is one end of the con­fer­ence spec­trum in terms of form­al­ity, work for the chair and the plan­ning com­mit­tee, and degree to which things must be organ­ised, when along comes the remind­er that the web site is up for North­ern Voice 2006. North­ern Voice is proof that there are cer­tain con­fer­ence con­cepts that don’t need a high degree of form­al­ity, in fact the concept of per­son­al blog­ging is, I think, dia­met­ric­ally opposed to too much form­al­ity, so as a mem­ber of the organ­ising group (plan­ning com­mit­tee seems a bit, ah, form­al a term) I’ve always been on the side of “keep it simple, keep it informal”. 

Last year’s event was a lot of fun and people seemed to really enjoy them­selves. So this year we’re put­ting a Moose Camp on the day before the con­fer­ence itself, where people can organ­ise them­selves into groups to dis­cuss whatever they want to dis­cuss that’s related in some way to per­son­al blog­ging. Dead­line for speak­er sub­mis­sions (we need to have some form­al­ity!) is Novem­ber 16, Moose camp is on Feb­ru­ary 10, the con­fer­ence is on Feb­ru­ary 11 and all the oth­er dates are on the web site. Yes, we still have the moose logo, although the col­ours are dif­fer­ent. Yes, we’re plan­ning on hav­ing more t‑shirts next year. No, we don’t yet know who the key­note speak­ers will be. Maybe we won’t have key­note speak­ers, we’ll fig­ure that out when we see the speak­er sub­mis­sions and see what sort of pro­gram we can build. Hope to see you there!

Okanagan Wineries

 Food and Wine, Travel  5 Responses »
Sep 232005
 

We went up to the Okanagan wine dis­trict for the Canada Day week­end this year, and I think it’s about time I wrote down some of my impres­sions of the vine­yards and the wine. We took my friend Sally (she of G&T fame who knows a lot about wine), and had a great time. Tim mostly enter­tained the off­spring while Sally and I tasted the wine, which seemed like a good divi­sion of labour to all of us. I typ­ic­ally like wines with body and heft, such as shiraz, much of the caber­net fam­ily, and rieslings; my impres­sions of oth­er wines depend on what they evoke (sit­ting on the deck in sum­mer, or some food pair­ing). So here are some notes about the winer­ies and the wines, none of them are any­thing sci­entif­ic or indeed any­thing oth­er than my impres­sion of that day!

Hawthorne Moun­tain Vineyards
Great view, but a very com­mer­cial vine­yard with lots of schnick-schnack to buy. I’d bought some caber­net franc here in 1995–6 which was great after a few years cel­lar­ing, but the 2003 Caber­net Franc they had on offer this year was too light and did­n’t give me any con­fid­ence it would devel­op the way I like. The pinot gris was good so I got some of that. The gewürztram­iner was ok though we’d had bet­ter at oth­er winer­ies, so that did­n’t go home with us, and although I thought the See-ya-later pinot noir could devel­op, I did­n’t feel like tak­ing the risk.
Wild Goose Vine­yards & Winery
Very friendly people, good whites (some have won prizes) though not what I’d call earth-shat­ter­ingly great. I bought a mixed case of whites, includ­ing the 2004 Riesling, 2003 Stony Slope Riesling, and the 2004 Gewürztraminer.
Stag’s Hol­low Winery
Unfriendly serv­er but a good vid­al (2004 Tra­gic­ally Vid­al), which is an unusu­al grape, and the 2002 Renais­sance Mer­lot struck me as worth tak­ing home, so I bought a couple of bottles for the cel­lar. It should be really good in a couple of years.
Hainle Vine­yards Estate Winery
Nice people, organ­ic wines; they’ve learned a lot about mak­ing organ­ic wines pal­at­able since I last vis­ited in 1996 or so. Good bis­tro for lunch out­side on the deck as well. The 2002 Hainle Chardon­nay, 2002 Hainle Pinot Blanc, 2002 Deep Creek Pinot Meuni­er (nice rich taste, like the Hawthorne Moun­tain one from 1995 or so), and 2003 Deep Creek Z2 were all good, the 2003 Hainle Syrah ok. Bought a mixed bunch to cel­lar, mostly the Pinot Meuni­er and Chardon­nay as they’re in short sup­ply and I figured I prob­ably could­n’t find them in Vancouver. 
Arrowleaf
New winery and quite far north. Friendly people. Bought a couple of bottles of 2002 Zei­gelt for the cel­lar, and some 2004 Bac­chus (nice light grape) and 2004 Gewürztram­iner for drinking. 
St Hubertus Estate Winery
Much of the winery was des­troyed in the big fire of 2003, but they’ve rebuilt with a big­ger tast­ing room. The rub­ber stamps are now in the tast­ing room rather than in a sep­ar­ate build­ing; they add a touch of eclecticism to the place. Decent selec­tion of wines. We picked the 2004 Dry Riesling to take home (with Tim warn­ing by this stage that we did­n’t have much room left in the car!)
Raven Ridge Cidery
Not quite a winery, this one, but a cidery con­nec­ted to an orch­ard with a good res­taur­ant. I picked up their last two bottles of Spark­ling Cider as well as a bottle of Brae­burn iced cider (like ice wine, but tastes of apples), just for a change. 

Tour­ing Okanagan winer­ies is an excel­lent exper­i­ence, and hav­ing the kid around meant we also tried out some of the oth­er tour­ist things rather than just sit­ting in the car. So although we did­n’t see as many winer­ies as the 1996 trip, we still filled the car and have wine enough to last us for quite a while!

Double Routing

 Technology  4 Responses »
Sep 182005
 

Like prob­ably every oth­er com­puter geek out there, I do a cer­tain amount of help­ing friends set up their home sys­tems. This par­tic­u­lar friend knows noth­ing about net­works and fire­walls and the like, and just wanted some­thing secure that would allow her to have a reas­on­ably safe Win­dows box and the daugh­ter to have a reas­on­ably safe and vir­us-free Win­dows laptop. The easy bits were installing the spy­ware detect­ors (Ad-Aware and Spy­bot S&D) and the vir­us checker/utilities (Norton Sys­tem­Works); the tough bit was get­ting the routers to work.

The sys­tem that made most sense was to feed the DSL into a wired eth­er­net router with a built-in fire­wall (the D‑Link DI-604 has a reas­on­able price point and an integ­rated fire­wall) and then set up a wire­less point for the daugh­ter­’s laptop. So my friend got a Link­sys wire­less router (no fire­wall). We have this sys­tem at home, though with dif­fer­ent hard­ware (Linux fire­wall + Air­port wire­less) and it works just fine. So I was­n’t expect­ing any oddit­ies. I found the sup­port page on the Link­sys site that said to turn off the DHCP serv­er on the wire­less router, and to give it an IP address that fit­ted in with the IP setup of the wired router. That was easy enough to do. But some­how the laptop just nev­er man­aged to sync up.

Ah, how good it was that I allowed more time than I expec­ted to need to set it up! My basic idea was that eth­er­net comes out of the DSL mode, goes into the wired router in the uplink sock­et, then a cable comes out of the wired router and goes into the uplink sock­et of the wire­less router. Still seems logic­al to me, but in this case my logic was com­pletely wrong. For­tu­nately Link­sys has live chat to tech sup­port that works on a Sat­urday (good move, people!) and Mel­rose did­n’t need very long to fig­ure out the prob­lem and tell me to put the cable com­ing out of the wired router into one of the 4 reg­u­lar sock­ets. This worked just fine; the laptop synced up, my friend (and her daugh­ter) are happy and think I know exactly what I’m doing, while I’m still slightly baffled and won­der­ing what’s wrong with my simple hose-pipe ana­logy of inter­net con­nec­tions. Still, I now know empir­ic­ally what to do, so that’s the import­ant thing.

Bring out Your Votes!

 Technology  No Responses »
Sep 162005
 

Work­ing in small tech­nic­al com­mit­tees on well-con­strained prob­lems can be really reward­ing; the small group allows for a cer­tain amount of fun in the meet­ings and every­one knows they have a role to play. I chair the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion TC, which is work­ing on XML Catalogs.

The idea of cata­logs has been around for a long time, it was one of the first pieces of work to come out of SGML Open, the pre­curs­or to OASIS. We’ve updated them for XML and use on the Web and although we spend a lot of time explain­ing that entity res­ol­u­tion is not restric­ted to XML enti­tit­ies and indeed we use the word “entity” in the more gen­er­al sense of the word, i.e. we really mean “resource” in today’s ter­min­o­logy (see the FAQ for more on this), I think it’s a good piece of work. Mind you, hav­ing Norm edit it and write code to imple­ment it does help immensely. 

So now it’s time to vote! We need anoth­er 44 OASIS mem­ber com­pan­ies to vote (we need to reach a total of 47 “Yes” votes to pass) — so please pass this on to any vot­ing reps you know (yes, this is a shame­less lob­by­ing act for some­thing I think is worth­while). The bal­lot is at Approve XML Cata­logs v1.1 as an OASIS Stand­ard. Many thanks!

Some sup­port­ing inform­a­tion from the TC:

XML doc­u­ments and data often ref­er­ence oth­er extern­al resources. Often the ref­er­en­cing inform­a­tion is not suf­fi­cient to loc­ate the desired resource unam­bigu­ously, or the resource is not access­ible at the giv­en loc­a­tion at the time it is required, or it is prefer­able that an altern­ate resource be used in place of the ref­er­enced resource. 

For example:

  1. Extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers may require resources that are not always avail­able. For example, a sys­tem iden­ti­fi­er that points to a resource on anoth­er machine may be inac­cess­ible if a net­work con­nec­tion is not available. 
  2. Extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers may require pro­to­cols that are not access­ible to all of the tools on a single com­puter sys­tem. An extern­al iden­ti­fi­er that is addressed with the FTP pro­tocol, for example, is not access­ible to a tool that does not sup­port that protocol. 
  3. It is often con­veni­ent to access resources using sys­tem iden­ti­fi­ers that point to loc­al resources. Exchan­ging doc­u­ments that refer to loc­al resources with oth­er sys­tems is prob­lem­at­ic at best and impossible at worst. 
  4. Incom­ing XML doc­u­ments may ref­er­ence cus­tom­ized ver­sions of stand­ard XML schem­as. To pro­tect your sys­tems, it is neces­sary to remap the schema ref­er­ences so that known, trus­ted cop­ies of the schem­as are used. 

Entity Res­ol­u­tion is the pro­cess by which these resource ref­er­ences can be mapped to anoth­er ver­sion of the ref­er­ence that can be found or that is pre­ferred for oth­er reas­ons. To address these issues, the OASIS XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion defines an applic­a­tion-inde­pend­ent entity cata­log that maps extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers and URI ref­er­ences to (oth­er) URI references. 

Entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs have already been widely imple­men­ted in much deployed soft­ware. Pro­mot­ing the OASIS XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion to an OASIS Stand­ard is cru­cial for con­tin­ued inter­op­er­ab­il­ity of XML applications.

Invisible Files

 Technology  13 Responses »
Sep 122005
 

What do you do when you need the answer to a ques­tion and Google does­n’t deliv­er? Ask on the blog of course… I would really like to know the answer to this one, as it would save a large amount of irrit­a­tion and I assume oth­ers have the same prob­lem. I’ve spent hours bur­ied deep in search engine res­ults with no luck. 

As befits a fam­ily with jobs in the com­puter industry, we have a few com­puters spread around the house, all con­nec­ted with a decent home net­work and pro­tec­ted with a good Linux-based fire­wall (which also serves this blog). The com­puters run a num­ber of oper­at­ing sys­tems — Win­dows 2000, Win­dows XP, Mac OS X, Sol­ar­is. The prob­lem only appears with the Win­dows XP boxes — or rather, between them. For some reas­on, one Win­dows XP box can­’t see all the files and folders on the oth­er Win­dows XP box, although they’re quite vis­ible from both Win­dows 2000 and OS X. The odd thing is that some files and folders are vis­ible, often some files in a giv­en folder will be vis­ible but the oth­ers won’t, and to my eye there are no dif­fer­ences in secur­ity set­tings, own­er­ship, or ACLs. Mind you, I’m obvi­ously miss­ing some­thing some­where or I’d be able to see all those files from every machine in the house! I tried copy­ing some of the files to new dir­ect­or­ies; some­times that lets me see them across the net­work, and some­times it does­n’t. I have no idea what set­tings are being put in place to stop me look­ing at such dan­ger­ous files as .css and .html in par­tic­u­lar dir­ect­or­ies; the sys­tem seems capri­cious — as does any sys­tem when you haven’t figured out the rules by which it oper­ates. The innate abil­ity of the human brain to fig­ure out pat­terns has decidedly failed me in this instance.

Help would be much appre­ci­ated, not only for me but for the rest of the fam­ily who have to put up with my imprec­a­tions each time I want to trans­fer files from one box to the oth­er, only to find that they’re not vis­ible from the box I want to trans­fer them to.

Final Chance to Speak at XML 2005

 Conference  Comments Off on Final Chance to Speak at XML 2005
Sep 072005
 

It’s that time of year again, few­er than 10 days until the dead­line for your last chance to speak at XML 2005. This year we kept a lot of slots open for late-break­ing talks (which don’t have to be only on really late-break­ing sub­jects, good present­a­tions on oth­er top­ics that don’t duplic­ate mater­i­al already on the pro­gram will also be con­sidered, so check what’s already on the pro­gram!) We would like to see sub­mis­sions on new­er top­ics that wer­en’t around in May, wheth­er that’s WSDL for REST, or Ajax, or the tech­nic­al under­pin­nings of Web 2.0. More details on how to sub­mit are at Call for Par­ti­cip­a­tion / Late Break­ing News.

And there are also the Town Hall meet­ings, which this year we’d like to make less form­al, and more “the oppor­tun­ity to voice their opin­ion on con­tro­ver­sial top­ics” open mike, open-to-the-pub­lic, meeting.

And, of course, the product present­a­tions, designed to give attendees a space to really look inside inter­est­ing products that imple­ment stand­ards, inter­op­er­ate with oth­er products, and/or are new on the mar­ket. One of the reas­ons I like hav­ing the product present­a­tion talks on the pro­gram is that it gives attendees a way to find out about a product without wor­ry­ing that they’ll be pestered by over-eager sales people — they can find out the info they need without hand­ing in their busi­ness cards. Of course, lots of vendors aren’t as keen on these talks as they don’t get the busi­ness cards, but you nev­er know what makes some­body buy a product or recom­mend a product — where did the ori­gin­al spark come from? It could be a booth demon­stra­tion, or a full-length product present­a­tion. You just nev­er know.

So, if you’re inter­ested in speak­ing this year and you don’t already have a speak­ing slot, you have until Septem­ber 16 to get those sub­mis­sions in!

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