It’s Proceedings Time!

As usu­al for this time of year, the XML 2005 Con­fer­ence is mov­ing into the next level of pre­par­a­tion. There are quite a few spon­sors signed up already (Sun Microsys­tems, RenderX, Just­sys­tem, IBM, and DesignScience), the dead­line for late-break­ing and product present­a­tions and town hall sub­mis­sions is in 28 days (!!) and today we activ­ated the site for pro­ceed­ings sub­mis­sions. The pro­ceed­ing papers, which have to val­id­ate accord­ing to the con­fer­ence schema, are due on Septem­ber 16th.

The con­fer­ence has always had pro­ceed­ings and they really add to the value for attendees, as well as those who can­’t attend the con­fer­ence but wish to refer to the work after­wards. I wrote about this last year and won’t bore you by repeat­ing myself this year; suf­fice to say that much the same sys­tem applies. Norm Walsh helped immensely in tight­en­ing up the schema, apply­ing what I learned last year in clean­ing up the papers so that they all look good in the final HTML and PDF formats. The author­ing tool vendors have made spe­cial­ised tools avail­able for speak­ers, and this year RenderX is cre­at­ing the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem. (SchemaSoft, who made the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem last year, was acquired earli­er this year.)

On anoth­er note, hav­ing the con­fer­ence web site hos­ted by Bryght has been a great help. It’s easi­er for us to fix typos and make neces­sary changes to the con­tent, and we have access to a num­ber of fea­tures in the sys­tem, such as an RSS feed so people can keep up to date on the latest con­fer­ence news. Com­ments are wel­come on what oth­er fea­tures we should imple­ment — just add a com­ment on the site!

Trends and Transients

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School in Oxford this year, I chaired the Trends and Tran­si­ents track. This used to be called “What’s Hot and What’s Not” but people used to ask which of the speak­ers was talk­ing on the what’s not hot sub­ject, so I decided to change the title this year. As oth­ers have writ­ten, this year was as much fun as pre­vi­ous years, and I hope as inform­at­ive for the people attend­ing. One thing that was obvi­ous is that the XML growth curve con­tin­ues; lots of people attend­ing knew very little about XML oth­er than that they were expec­ted to imple­ment and use sys­tems that some­how were based on it. This, of course, is because it’s a school and not a con­fer­ence; the “Trends and Tran­si­ents” day is a bit of an excep­tion to that rule in that the top­ics are not neces­sar­ily focussed as much on learn­ing the tech­no­logy as in learn­ing how to eval­u­ate wheth­er a giv­en tech­no­logy that is cur­rently being hyped is worth­while or not. This leads to some inter­est­ing exchanges between the speak­ers, who are often of dif­fer­ent opin­ions. I some­times won­der wheth­er it’s a little con­fus­ing for the attendees who don’t know much about XML, but I was assured by many of them that they may not have under­stood it all, but it sure was enter­tain­ing (it was of course designed to be that way, hence hav­ing Tim Bray, Sean McGrath, and Tim McGrath as speakers). 

As usu­al, the rest of the Sum­mer School was enter­tain­ing and inform­at­ive and I got a good chance to talk to lots of people about what they’re doing with XML. And vis­it­ing Oxford is always a joy! Thanks again to the organ­isers (mostly Kerry Poult­er, who provides ster­ling ser­vice with a smile every year).

P.S. — please note use of the “Oxford comma” — I usu­ally like using it any­way, but find it par­tic­u­larly appro­pri­ate here :-).

Tungsten Update

Reg­u­lar read­ers will remem­ber that I got a Tung­sten T2 last year. It worked fine, except for one prob­lem — the digit­izer kept drift­ing, and I had to recal­ib­rate it every couple of days. Even­tu­ally the screen star­ted to cycle con­tinu­ously on an inter­mit­tent basis. I tried the tips on the Palm web site, which did­n’t fix the prob­lem. So, since it was still with­in the one year war­ranty peri­od, I called Palm support.

I had to fax in cop­ies of my pur­chase receipts (note to self: be glad you prin­ted those out!) and call back a couple of days later when they had the inform­a­tion attached to my file. Then I spoke to a tech­ni­cian, told him I’d tried the tips on the web site, and the rest was rel­at­ively pain­less (apart from the $30 it cost to ship the old one to Ontario from Van­couver). A week later (I chose the slow ship­ping option, which is why it was *only* $30), I had a brand-new Tung­sten T3, which actu­ally seems a lot bet­ter. Full kudos to Palm for stick­ing to their word and repla­cing the defect­ive Tung­sten without quibbles, and with a bet­ter ver­sion as well! I’ve got so used to incom­pet­ence in the cus­tom­er ser­vice world that it’s a refresh­ing change to meet a com­pany that does­n’t settle for that.

Visibility Online

One unex­pec­ted but totally wel­come side-effect of blogs and instant mes­saging these days is know­ing that people you care about are ok. Just being able to see their names and their post­ings while the effects of what happened in Lon­don sunk in made a big dif­fer­ence to my day. My con­dol­ences to all those for whom that could­n’t help.

London

The bombs in Lon­don have proven again that Lon­don­ers are resi­li­ent, that they have learnt from the WWII blitz and the years of IRA attacks, how to cope with ter­ror that would bring oth­er cit­ies to a screech­ing halt. And yet, I can­’t help but worry what the reac­tions will be. Will the gov­ern­ments of the world now insist that every­one get­ting on a bus or train go through met­al detect­ors, or worse, be scanned by the incred­ibly pri­vacy-invad­ing backs­cat­ter X‑ray scan­ners? (See Bruce Schnei­er­’s blog for more dis­cus­sion on this). I don’t care what any­one says, I don’t believe that mak­ing people go through X‑ray machines is healthy, even if the amount is low — hav­ing trained as an exper­i­ment­al nuc­le­ar phys­i­cist, I’ve learned that even low dosages are cumulative. 

Screen­ing pub­lic trans­it pas­sen­gers would slow down pub­lic trans­port and force more people into their cars; it’s just not prac­tic­al in Lon­don rush-hour traffic to com­pletely screen every per­son get­ting on to every train or bus at every stop and sta­tion without bring­ing the sys­tem to a com­plete halt. And the traffic con­ges­tion in Lon­don is so bad already that encour­aging people to drive won’t solve any prob­lems either!

Tony Blair insists that the ter­ror­ists won’t win — but then why is the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment try­ing to push through legis­la­tion on ID cards that has sig­ni­fic­ant pri­vacy and cost implic­a­tions (thanks to Robin Wilton for the link) ? The attacks on Septem­ber 11, 2001, proved that sui­cide ter­ror­ists will go to extreme lengths to ensure that their iden­tity papers look right, and that they have built up a reas­on­able his­tory (the hijack­ers had val­id ID and were fre­quent fly­ers, in part in order to plan the attacks metic­u­lously). Mak­ing people carry iden­tity cards will just make life dif­fi­cult for ordin­ary people, not for the ter­ror­ists who will be pre­pared with all the iden­ti­fic­a­tion (fake or real) that they need.

I don’t know what can be done to solve the ter­ror­ist prob­lem but mak­ing life more dif­fi­cult for ordin­ary people try­ing to go about their lives without a def­in­ite bene­fit (for example, the x‑ray machines men­tioned above can­’t search in body cav­it­ies so it’s also of lim­ited use) really seems to me to be let­ting them win. Yes, there are def­in­ite things people can do — the clas­sic advice to not leave lug­gage unat­ten­ded and to avoid sus­pi­cious pack­ages, for example. And some amount of secur­ity check­ing when you board air­craft is reas­on­able — I would­n’t want someone with a gun on board or a long knife, even if they’re not ter­ror­ists, in case of acci­dents. But the more dra­coni­an parts of the vari­ous Acts that many gov­ern­ments rushed to pass after 2001 are not neces­sary. There’s an old say­ing that the police gen­er­ally tend to treat all people as crim­in­als who haven’t been caught yet (and giv­en that they usu­ally deal with crim­in­als all day, one can for­give their per­cep­tion as to the rel­at­ive pro­por­tions of crim­in­als and hon­est people in the pop­u­la­tion). We need to ensure that we’re not all treated as ter­ror­ists-in-wait­ing, while bal­an­cing the secur­ity needed to catch the real terrorists.

The Perfect G&T

My friend Sally has the recipe for the per­fect gin and tonic.

My friend Sally vis­ited us from Mel­bourne for about 10 days. I’ve known Sally for half my life; we met when I was study­ing at Mel­bourne Uni­ver­sity. Sally received the Gin Award from Rolland House, the hostel where we lived, so she’s been study­ing the sub­ject for some years and has par­layed her know­ledge into a career organ­iz­ing ban­quets and func­tions for the Athen­aeum Club, a private gen­tle­men’s club (think P.G. Wode­house and Jeeves). I talked Sally into writ­ing down how to make the per­fect G&T for pos­ter­ity, and here it is.

At the end of a long hot day on the road every doc­tor should pre­scribe a G&T to restore one’s pos­it­ive out­look on life. The pre­par­a­tion of the per­fect G&T does how­ever take some effort and even more research. Like many things in life it is all a mat­ter of taste but to help in the research phase I will share some of my own per­son­al find­ings gained over some 23 years.

Select a high­ball glass made from a glass that is on the finer side as I think it improves the taste. It is pos­sible to mix a G&T in an old fash­ioned glass but this requires refills more often.

Add ice, which is import­ant to main­tain the tem­per­at­ure, to the bot­tom of the glass (prob­ably more import­ant on the 3rd or 4th glass as these tend to last longer).

Add the Gin. This is the ele­ment that requires extens­ive research. My per­son­al favour­ite is Bom­bay Sap­phire which has an herb­aceous and com­plex fla­vour but I would encour­age you to sample as many types as pos­sible. Just like a good scotch or wine there are many fla­vour com­bin­a­tions. Gor­dons is really light and crisp, it isn’t very com­plex or herb­aceous. Tan­queray is quite lem­ony and a bit sharp­er and more bitter.

The amount required tra­di­tion­ally is 30ml but I have found that it some­times depends on how much pos­it­ive out­look you require. Once again this also takes some research to get it right and will depend on the gin of choice.

The ton­ic is often much under-estim­ated and is worthy of the time and effort of get­ting a bet­ter qual­ity and hav­ing a few bottles in the fridge for those emer­gency situ­ations. I usu­ally sug­gest the small 300ml splits as they are one use and avoid the dis­ap­point­ment of a half-used flat bottle. I prefer Schweppes. Do your­self a favour and don’t get the diet style, after all this is for medi­cin­al pur­poses. Dur­ing my time in Canada I have found the Canada Dry style of ton­ic water is a very good substitute. 

The per­fect G&T should have a half slice of lem­on or lime to fin­ish it off, I prefer lime with my Bom­bay gin but if I can­’t get it then lem­on. I use lem­on with Tan­queray or Gordons. 

Take the per­fect G&T out onto the porch and con­sume till your pos­it­ive out­look on life has been restored.

This has been a life-long pro­ject and I have spent many hours of research to get to this point. I hope this has inspired you to start your own research project.