So we now have interopalliance.org:

Making Technologies Work Better Together for Customers
The Interop Vendor Alliance is a community of software and hardware vendors working together to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems.

Which is nice because who better knows what customers want better than vendor-pies and silicon shifters? At first glance this looks like a marketing operation designed to sell customers the illusion of Web services interoperability except they explicitly don't want customers involved, not even to bash on a plastic steering wheel whilst the drive train is connected to a smoke filled board room next door.

So what's not to like? Surely like motherhood and apple pie, any effort to increase Interop surely has to be a good thing? Firstly getting everybody to interop with Microsoft is simply one to many, when interop is all about are many to many. What happens when there is an issue? Will we ever get to find out - I somehow doubt it! And who is going to fix their stuff, the "one" or the "many".

I'm quite despondent we have yet another organisation to position and track, but at least I'm unlikely to be able to attend this country club. What we need now is an organisation to manage the interoperability between the interoperability organisations.

Then there are the vendors listed as "founding members". I used to think there was only one standardisation initiative IBM had spurned, I suddenly feel a lot less special ;-)

But most of all I'm baffled why Microsoft are leading this given they already have the workshop process for Web services and that's a game they can stop any time they want their ball back. Maybe this results from a little arm twisting?

Technorati Tags: interoperability, WebServices, WS-I

Kewl! I note England is finally on Yahoo! maps, and therefore available in flickr's mapping. Time to revisit some of my geotagging photos and hacks, methinks.

Technorati Tags: flickr, geotagging, maps, Yahoo!

I'd love to be able to remain ignorant of US politics, but it's hard to ignore a large friendly dog in a small room, and although they have two parties which are identically useless (unlike here in the UK where we have three main parties which are um identically useless), Bush and his posse are without question a morally bankrupt bunch of witless feckers. So it's nice to see them get a little slap. Wonder if it'll make any difference.

Technorati Tags: politics

So Internet Explorer 7 rejects DTDs:

Feeds that reference a DTD are not supported by the RSS Platform. A DTD is used to help XML parsers with validation of the document. However, DTD validation is a potential source of security issues for XML parsers, and validation is not required for feeds to work correctly in aggregators.

This is by no means news from Microsoft possibly with good cause. The WS-I Basic Profile disallows DTDs in SOAP messages, and just like SOAP many see RSS as a serialisation spewed out by tools and not a document lovingly crafted by humans, to which I say "feh". Still it's likely to take many others by surprise.

Coincidentally I'm currently trying to work out how well supported DTDs are by databinding implementations, and thus far they seem OK-ish, but I do wonder for how much longer. I guess we are just observing a defacto XML 2.0 emerging, which is OK, but not before we have a standard replacement for entities, something like xmlchar or EDML might be good enough if only everyone could have agreed upon them six years ago. You know it's much easier to chop things off than add new stuff in later.

Technorati Tags: XML

google |ˈgoōgəl| (verb)

To be so arrogant you think you can use lawyers to change the English language.

See also King Canute

Paris, October 2006 is a jumble of photos taken during a family weekend in, er, Paris.

Technorati Tags: photography

If like me, you have occasion to explain Wikipedia.org to the great unwashed, you may have found yourself descending into a contradiction because although "anyone can edit it", the power come precisely because "anyone can edit it!" Well help is at hand in shape of the raft of cohesive arguments and fascinating discussion on the Wikipedia:essays and Policies and Guidelines pages. See, it's not all Complete Bollocks.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia

Via Nick, Nabaz'mob is "an opera for 100 smart rabbits". It's worth watching the video to the end if only to see the artist throw carrots into the audience. Mad as a box of ferrets.

You can now buy these - see nabaztag!

Technorati Tags: art, music, bunnies

Thanks to a dose of man flu, I've not been sleeping well, and the other night found myself counting sheep, Yan, Tan, Thethera, Mether, Pip, Azer, Sezar, Akker, Conter, Dick. Where the heck had that come from? The following evening we sat down to watch a documentary about Jake Thackray (Yorkshire's answer to George Brassens) in which he sang a Swaledale shepherd's song "Yan Tean Tethera". Spooky!

Sophia Anitoplis is a small set of photos taken during last week's W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group meeting.

Update: how did I go for so long spelling Sophia Antipolis as "Sofia Antipolis" :-(

Technorati Tags: databinding, flickr, photography, w3c