Anyone wondering what BT may be selling to add value to a commoditised voice services marketplace and answer competition from the the mobile sector, especially once we’ve all got chips in our brains, only had to read this week’s Observer. Yes, it’s eternal life:

‘If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem,’ Pearson told The Observer. ‘If you’re rich enough then by 2050 it’s feasible. If you’re poor you’ll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it’s routine. We are very serious about it. That’s how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.’

Via Chris, and no, I didn’t cheat!
I am Kung Fu Master.
I like to be in control of myself. I dislike crowds, especially crowds containing people trying to kill me. Even though I always win, I prefer to avoid fights if possible. What Video Game Character Are You?

Following W3C tradition, we’ve extended the deadline so this Friday is the new closing day for experience reports for the up and coming W3C Workshop on Schema 1.0 User Experiences. You don’t have to attend to submit report, so if you have a story to tell on your use of XML Schema, you’ve no excuse. Send one in!

There’s also been a bit of buzz building around the workshop. Robin Cover has kindly put together an amuse-gueule (actually a great introduction to the problem area) which cites Michael Champion talking up the event nicely on XML-DEV. Michael also added some nauticalesque comments today on Dare Obasanjo’s Can XML Web Services Move Beyond the Twin Burdens of XSD and WSDL?. Chris Ferris pointed to the call for participation followed by the nicely wicked Square Peg, Round Hole :-)

Also this week Steve Loughran and Stefan Tilkov are starting to climb the mountain Apline Style. I for one am going to watch them progress and would be best pleased if they considered submitting something to the Workshop.

At home, Jon and I have been putting together a report on behalf of BT where I’ve been playing a doc-head yang to his code-head yin, so I hope we’ve struck the right balance in our narrative of using Web service toolkits over the past four or so years.

We’ve a Organising Committee right out of the top-drawer and looking at the participants so far, we’re going to get many of the right people in the room; quality, if not quantity. Rich Jelliffe citing the excellent RIG profiles, explored some of the reasons why people might not attend. However most of the regrets I’ve received have been due to travel clashes or budget constraints and all of the reactions I’ve heard so far have all been all positive towards the Workshop and the W3C for holding it; there certainly seem to be a lot of people interested in the outcome. Should be fun! Be there or be a square-peg!

Tags: w3c, schemaexperiences

Technorati Tags: schemaexperiences, w3c

The XML world is split into two camps: those who see it as a document format for encapsulating data and those who view it as just another serialisation. The litmus test for which camp you fall into being would an XML Schema for your XML documents contain ‘mixed’ attributes? So as someone tasked with bridging this divide in my day job but firmly ‘headed’ in the mixed camp, I’m really enjoying all the buzz surrounding the notion of micro formats. I really wish I was in Amsterdam this week, in part to follow the open data track, but especially to hear Dom talking about GRDDL. That is all.

xtech

Via John Naughton, this is how Google maps shows the Dick Cheney residence.

Way-hey! Jonathan has a blog and has already pushed out some cracking entries. Subscribed!

In the week that IBM’ers rejoiced over the announcement of official support for their using Firefox and the amazing Mark Pilgrim published his latest free book Dive into Greasemonkey, I was passed an industry analyst report, you know the sort that big companies pay big money for their insight, which, says something along the lines: “Greasemonkey has absolutely no place on corporate computers [snip] it opens you up to exploits, performance problems, and support chaos.”. I found this really depressing. Firstly as any good cook knows you’re more likely to cut yourself using blunt knives. Secondly, I wonder what really is the difference between a GM script and a bookmarklet such as flickreplacr. Guess mnot maybe onto something with his ideas for a Greasemonkey proxy if it puts corporate thought-police minds at rest, but in essence GM is about personal computing and that is always going to be in contention with those responsible for protecting the herd - “you do realise it’s not your computer, it’s the company’s”.

Water-cooler TV here in the UK this week is Derren Brown’s zombie video game mind trick, which certainly crossed some line or other, assuming it’s for real. Grab the Torrent if you missed it or live in a country where the threat of being sued might be more troubling for your TV pranksters.

Are You A Republican?, via Chris

Via Mark, extispicious is a nice CGI to visualise your deli.icio.us bookmark tags. Here are mine. I quite like the sister page to collect images from a Yahoo! search based on your tags which inspired the shared pool on flickr. .. Hmm .. wonder if the source code is available ..