Superman 70% Spider-Man 65% Iron Man 60% Green Lantern 50% Supergirl 40% Robin 37% The Flash 35% Hulk 30% Wonder Woman 25% Batman 25% Catwoman 15%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Technorati Tags: psychology, quiz

I’d written Guy Kawasaki off as uninteresting when he appeared to recycle Paul Graham’s XTech talk on How to Be Silcon Valley into a US centric bullet list with no attribution, but after watching the video of The Art of the Start he’s right up there with Larry Wall’s State of the Onion. As for Mr Graham, well, he missed his European audience by the 5,473 miles he’d flown to patronise them with his parade of marginally offensive racial stereotypes.

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki, Larry Wall, Paul Graham, Presentations, xtech

To the WS-I, where I presented on behalf of the XML Schema Patterns for Databinding working group during the opening session of their plenary meetings to increase awareness of our issues and hopefully persuade more people to contribute patterns.

We’ve the WS-I above anyone else to thank for promoting the use of XML Schema as a way of literally describing SOAP payloads in WSDL, and the vendors who stack the board to thank for the widespread use of databinding tools which fail to consume XML Schema descriptions in oh so many different ways. So whilst they seem unable to help clear up the mess they created, it was a bit much to have the presentation derailed by heckling:

Dr Evil:

“Databinding is evil, so don’t do it”. Yeah, thanks! Whilst as a developer I may use XPath, it’s my customers who insist on using your companies’ sucky tools. What I’d like is to know how to publish schemas customers can consume, you know, interoperate with them.

Sir Pedant:

I made the mistake of mentioning how our charter covers versioning. “What is versioning, anyway?” Well I don’t know precisely, but we’ve the good enough W3C TAG draft finding, XML Schema Versioning Use-cases and collateral from plenty of others who have dined out on Schema techniques for service evolution. Versioning is something any non trivial service has to consider. Let’s just publish the commonly used patterns, and maybe toolkits will get around to not bailing at the first sight of xs:any.

Mr Relax:

It was the assertion from one big-name vendor’s rep that “using Relax NG is the answer” which rather took me aback. Great idea, I love Relax! Can we really ignore the history and expect the WS-I to deprecate Schema? Well no. It took a while to understand we should use Relax to model contents and then map to XML Schema. Unfortunately apart from James Clark’s Trang, there isn’t a standard mapping. Then Relax doesn’t do “types”, you still use XML Schema datatypes such as “xs:duration” which is where so many issues lie. Finally, schemas generated by Trang often don’t work well with current tools in particular the ones touted by this bright-spark’s company. It’s a nice idea, but a bit like asking for directions and being told to start from someplace else.

So I was miffed that the message of our doing valuable, tangible, bug fixing work was lost in a melee of FUD.

Less than 24 hours later and I’m on a telcon where another standards rep from Mr Relax and Dr Evil’s outfit relates difficulties mapping programming language data structures, such as an array, into XML. Sigh. How about a W3C working group to look into that very issue? Here’s one we prepared earlier. Maybe you’d like to contribute?

Technorati Tags: databinding, Otttawa, Schema, schemaexperiences, soap, versioning, w3c, WebServices, WS-I, wsdl, XML

Ottawa, June 2006 is a set of 130 odd photos taken during last week’s WS-I Plenary meetings.

Technorati Tags: flickr, Otttawa, photography, WS-I

I just spent 40 minutes trying to work out why Tiger (10.4.6) was refusing to mount disk images, Google didn’t have the answer, so hopefully after publishing this, it will :-)

Double clicking a .dmg file gave no response, and the Disk Utility, hdiutil and hdid commands locked up. Plugging around with the -debug and -verbose options gave nothing away. Resorting to trial and error clearing cache files from under the /System/Library/Caches directory was the answer with deleting Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext then rebooting finally doing the trick.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, osx

“Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.”

As usual Joel only fails to disappoint.

Technorati Tags: JoelSpolsky

A tale of two Travel Bugs, with an update of how I conned a friend into buying paying for sushi ..

Technorati Tags: geocaching, googleearth, sushi, The Great Sushi Race

Continue Reading »

So those people held in inhuman and degrading conditions, subject to torture and with no apparent prospect of trial, whose hunger strikes result in painful force feeding then in desperation take their own lives, do so as a good PR move, to draw attention. Removing Ms Graffy from office and closing down Guantanamo Bay, might be ‘good PR move’ at this point.

Technorati Tags: Guantanamo Bay, politics, Human Rights

Something I keep tripping over is how many tools consume a WSDL with a blank HTTP SOAPAction but then go onto reject valid messages because they don’t happen to have their different implementation specific incantation. I notice some standard WSDLs such as XKMS use an XML entity to make SOAPAction configurable though servers usually want a different value for each operation, and even then you can’t reuse the binding across multiple endpoints let alone switch implementations without impacting the client. Bah.

Technorati Tags: soap, wsdl

Given today is the 1st, here’s “a pinch and a punch for the first of the month”, followed by “white rabbits, white rabbits” just in case you come back with “a nip and a kick for being so quick”. Sometimes it’s scary being a Brit - you have all this weird stuff jammed in your head ..