Home from Oxford

As usu­al, the trip to the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford was excel­lent. I learned a lot and met some inter­est­ing people and had fun too, even though I’ve decided that two trips to Europe, with a one-year-old, in 26 days, is a little too much travel in a short peri­od of time. The XML Sum­mer School had day­care, oth­er­wise I really would­n’t have been able to cope. I think the baby enjoyed the trip as well; she made lots of new friends and I star­ted call­ing her “Prin­cess” because of the way she waved and simpered. I am extremely grate­ful for all the work the Sum­mer School organ­isers and the day­care people put in to make the trip as easy as possible.

I did­n’t see a lot of the flood­ing and was only tan­gen­tially affected by it; I do have memor­ies of the water slosh­ing around on the arrivals floor in Ter­min­al 1 when I arrived on the morn­ing of Fri­day 20th July and the attempts people were mak­ing to stop it going down into the base­ment where the Tube and the tun­nels to get to oth­er parts of the air­port are loc­ated. The tun­nel out of Heath­row was down to one lane and it was closed in the oth­er dir­ec­tion. I was­n’t sur­prised to learn later that sev­er­al flights had been cancelled.

Although in the centre of Oxford, where we were, there were few signs of the floods (a couple of roads closed off), sur­round­ing areas were strongly affected. One friend who cycled in to meet us at the pub crawl on Wed­nes­day found it sur­real that his area was full of sand­bags and people pan­ick­ing about the rising ground­wa­ter, while a short bike ride away people were going shop­ping, going to the pub, and gen­er­ally behav­ing the way they would without the floods.

The punt­ing was can­celled of course, the Cher­well was just too high and too fast for it to be safe; there was a cer­tain amount of nervous­ness about los­ing a del­eg­ate or two.

Punts on the Cherwell River by the Boathouse

Before the Sum­mer School star­ted, I met up with a friend on the Sunday for lunch. We went to The Fishes in North Hink­sey, a cute little place with a ver­andah and a play­ground and a pic­nic area. Which would have been great for the baby to crawl around in, if it had­n’t been under a cer­tain amount of water at the time.

flooded_playground flooded_picnic_area

All in all, I was quite glad to see the sun again when I got home to Van­couver, and to be happy we don’t live on a flood plain.

Off to Oxford

I’m leav­ing for Oxford this after­noon; haven’t had much time for blog­ging in the last few days, what with recov­er­ing from the Ber­lin trip and get­ting ready for this one. Not to men­tion cop­ing with an extremely clingy tod­dler, who gets jeal­ous of Mummy’s laptop, and the phone, and any­one who dares get in between us. Wish me luck on the flight — she’ll either be a per­fect little angel because she has me to her­self or (and this is more likely) drive me com­pletely bonkers.

Definition of Open Standards

Rick Jel­liffe, who’s been in the middle of lots of stand­ards efforts, writes on the sub­ject at Is our idea of “Open Stand­ards” good enough? Veri­fi­able vendor-neut­ral­ity. Worth read­ing, although he does make the assump­tion that the term “open stand­ards” means “cre­ated by some stand­ards organ­iz­a­tion”. Although that’s a tempt­ing defin­i­tion, and the one used by a lot of people (and the one I hap­pen to prefer), it’s not the only defin­i­tion that I’ve seen. I’ve seen three main cat­egor­ies of defin­i­tions of the term “open stand­ard” when applied to some specification:

  • Any­one can read the spe­cific­a­tion (usu­ally without pay­ing); often applied to pro­pri­et­ary spe­cific­a­tions which are treated as de facto standards.
  • Cre­ated in a stand­ards organ­iz­a­tion that allows any­one to take part who has rel­ev­ant expert­ise or can pay the appro­pri­ate dues.
  • Able to be used in any open source pro­jects (i.e., there are restric­tions on the types of licenses that can be used).

Recog­nising that lots of people use the term “open stand­ard” to mean dif­fer­ent things, the Liberty Alli­ance recently pub­lished what that term means in the con­text of Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions and guidelines. It’s called the Liberty Alli­ance Com­mit­ment to Open Stand­ards and it’s a very brief doc­u­ment out­lining a set of con­di­tions for those spe­cific­a­tions and guidelines (yes, the doc­u­ment talks about tech­nic­al spe­cific­a­tions but really it applies to oth­er types of doc­u­ments as well). The top item in the list of con­di­tions to be an open stand­ard, to answer Rick­’s main point that rather than talk­ing “open stand­ard­s” we need to be talk­ing as much of “verifiable vendor-neut­ral­ity”, is can­not be con­trolled by any single per­son or entity with any ves­ted interests.

I dis­agree with Rick when he says that only ISO is truly vendor-neut­ral since only nation­al bod­ies vote, as those nation­al bod­ies could in the­ory be swayed by vendors. What you really want is to bal­ance the needs of all parties (vendors, users, gov­ern­ments), but that’s dif­fi­cult to attain in any organ­iz­a­tion. You need not only an organ­iz­a­tion that is set up to allow for input from all those stake­hold­ers (to pro­duce stand­ards that are evolved and man­aged in a trans­par­ent pro­cess open to all inter­ested parties and approved through due pro­cess by rough con­sensus among par­ti­cipants) but you also need to have enough par­ti­cipants who are inter­ested in the end res­ult, and have the appro­pri­ate expert­ise. And you need a com­pet­ent chair for each com­mit­tee, of course.

Henry VIII’s Wives

Here’s a review of Ant­o­nia Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII (there also seems to be an updated ver­sion, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Women in His­tory)), which the book­club picked, par­tially because I’d read it before and thought it was inter­est­ing, par­tially because most of the book­club mem­bers knew a little about that peri­od but not much and wanted to learn more, and par­tially because one book­club mem­ber will read any­thing and everything about the Tudors. Every­one enjoyed the book, but with some caveats.

To go with it, I read Alis­on Weir’s Henry VIII: The King and His Court. Read­ing both books at much the same time was good, I found they com­ple­men­ted each oth­er and helped me under­stand more of what was going on.

The Henry VIII book mostly con­cen­trates on the King him­self, what he was like as a young man (incred­ibly gif­ted, hand­some, and strong, if the records are all to be believed), how the court func­tioned, what all the people around the King were meant to do, how much things cost, what the fash­ions of the time were. It then goes into the King’s life, and how, to quote Alis­on Weir, Henry began his reign in a medi­aev­al king­dom, he ended it in a mod­ern state. I found the first part of the book to be the most inter­est­ing, per­haps because I got rather lost with all the people who kept chan­ging names as they were pro­moted and demoted, and the King him­self became less sym­path­et­ic as he became more dic­tat­ori­al and averse to being crossed.

The Wives book (and Alis­on Weir has also writ­ten one on that sub­ject, which I haven’t read) con­cen­trates on the wives them­selves, their per­son­al­it­ies and their his­tor­ies. Ant­o­nia Fraser, unlike Alis­on Weir, gen­er­ally uses the same name to describe the same per­son through the book, which makes fol­low­ing along who did what when much easi­er. I also found her fam­ily trees to be of more use. She brings up a lot of inter­est­ing points about the expect­a­tions placed on women in those times, that people genu­inely believed that Henry ruled by divine right (which makes it easi­er to under­stand some of what happened), and that Henry towards the end of his life was driv­en by the need for a male heir (iron­ic­ally) and saw his daugh­ters, just like his sis­ter, as pawns to be used to prop up his king­dom by means of alli­ances. Even though Henry saw that his own mar­riages should also be use­ful (polit­ic­ally and reli­giously), he had a great tal­ent for con­vin­cing him­self that God wanted him to do what he wanted to do any­way and thus he could always con­vince him­self that the woman who cur­rently attrac­ted him was the one he had to marry.

It’s inter­est­ing to note the dif­fer­ences in the books. Alis­on Weir is obvi­ously a fan of Cath­er­ine of Aragon, and does­n’t much like Anne Boleyn. Ant­o­nia Fraser is sym­path­et­ic to Cath­er­ine, but seems to admire Anne, des­pite her sharp tongue and lack of dis­cre­tion. They both sym­path­ize with Henry’s pre­dic­a­ment, though not with how he chose to solve it.

The main prob­lem with both books is that there is a lot of detail, and they mostly seem to be aimed at an audi­ence that already knows some­thing of the era and the people involved. So those of us who did­n’t study his­tory at school in Eng­land are at a bit of a dis­ad­vant­age. Over­all, how­ever, both books are worth read­ing, you might just need to have some ref­er­ence mater­i­al at hand (or be pre­pared to skim a bit in the long con­fus­ing passages).

Summer in Oxford

Most years I get to speak at the XML Sum­mer School put on by CSW in late July in Oxford, Eng­land. Last year I did­n’t go since I’d just had a baby 6 weeks before and the fam­ily suc­ceeded in talk­ing me out of it. This year I’m going again. It should be a lot of fun; the idea of the school is to get a bunch of experts as teach­ers who go along with the attendees to all the social events, so the attendees can ask ques­tions while every­one is in the pub or wan­der­ing around the Old Bodlei­an Lib­rary. Ques­tions while punt­ing are best not dir­ec­ted at the punter, of course, and the rest of us are usu­ally too busy laugh­ing anyway.

With ses­sions on web ser­vices (includ­ing iden­tity and secur­ity), con­tent and know­ledge with XML, XSLT, XSL-FO and XQuery, Teach Your­self Onto­logy (that one’s new this year!), Build­ing XML Applic­a­tions, and XML in Health­care, there’s lots to choose from. I’ll have to choose which days I attend care­fully, there’s always too much going on.

I’m speak­ing in the Trends and Tran­si­ents track (which I chair each year, even when I’m not there) with Jeni Ten­nison and Dan Con­nolly; I’m talk­ing about Web 2.0 while they’re talk­ing XML Pro­cessing and Micro­formats respect­ively. I even got my present­a­tion deck fin­ished, and only a couple of days late! For the last ses­sion of the day, I get the oth­er track chairs to spend five minutes telling us what they think are this year’s hyped or under-appre­ci­ated tech­no­lo­gies, fol­lowed by a pan­el ses­sion of all the day’s speak­ers. There is always some con­tro­versy around people’s opin­ions, even of these sup­posedly dry tech­nic­al sub­jects. For a sample, check out the You­Tube video of Bob DuCh­arme’s talk (rant?) last year (the video and sound qual­ity’s not great, but adequate).

CSW is offer­ing a spe­cial deal this year, speak­ers get a spe­cial code that people can use for a dis­count on regis­tra­tion. So if you are think­ing of attend­ing, email me for the code, either at my Sun email address or my Tex­tu­al­ity email address. Unless you’ve already got a code from one of the oth­er speak­ers of course… 

Privacy and Identity

One of the bet­ter pieces on iden­tity and pri­vacy that I’ve read recently, and well worth every­one read­ing, wheth­er you do any­thing much with iden­tity man­age­ment or not, is from Dav­id Wein­ber­ger. Iden­tity man­age­ment in an unequal world dis­cusses how when sign­ing up for things is easi­er, people can take advant­age of that to ask us to sign up more often, to give more inform­a­tion than we really need to. I’ve been well trained at Sun to ask now why any­one needs the inform­a­tion they’re ask­ing for. Can­’t they do with less inform­a­tion? What are they going to do with it? These are the basic ques­tions every­one needs to ask every time some web site or shop asks for per­son­al inform­a­tion of any sort, basic­ally why do they want it and why do I need to give it? If more people ask the reas­on why, maybe few­er com­pan­ies will be need­lessly intrusive.