Federer v Safin

With Federer ousting Ferrero, it should be a great men's final at the down-under open. Safin is playing "in the zone" and Federer is pure tennis genius.

Now, if I can somehow manage to NOT have the score revealed to me BEFORE I sit down to watch the match!

W32.Novarg.A@mm

Grumble.... I've been striken by this insideous creature. Must be pretty sneaky to slip by all of the defenses between me and the net.

Daveo was clearly at an f2f meeting today

While I agree that these would be important resources, it would be really annoying, and rather long winded to hear this during a telcon:

A: aich tee tee pee colon slash slash dub dub dub dot pacificspirit dot com slash two thousand four slash oh one slash twenty nine slash numbered percent sign twenty standards percent sign twenty arguments hash seventeen

B: aich tee tee pee colon slash slash dub dub dub dot pacificspirit dot com slash two thousand four slash oh one slash twenty nine slash numbered percent sign twenty standards percent sign twenty arguments hash twenty three

C: aich tee tee pee colon slash slash dub dub dub dot pacificspirit dot com slash two thousand four slash oh one slash twenty nine slash numbered percent sign twenty standards percent sign twenty arguments hash ninty eight

WG chair: aich tee tee pee colon slash slash makeashorterlink dot com slash questionmark double ewe one A eight twenty three dee thirty seven

Re: BEEP and Hacks

Mark Baker picked up on my recent post on BEEPLite.

His post merits a response.

BEEP, BEEP!

Kewl, alphaWorks has recently posted a BEEP implementation: BeepLite Networking Layer. Now, all we need is a killer app for BEEP (IETF RFC3080) to get it more widely adopted and deployed.

The BEEP protocol offers much richer message exchange patterns than does HTTP, enabling the likes of publish/subscribe, one request/N responses, etc. without having to resort to hacks. The alphaWorks implementation includes the SOAP/BEEP binding (IETF RFC3288) which deserves some closer inspection. Personally, I think that all of this needs a more effective programming model to simplify things a bit for the average developer, but it is a start in the right direction.

mnot strikes again

Mark has posted a RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. Well done!

Ahem... er, Tom, you've been asked nicely... now he's gone and written a whole tutorial for you! Get with the program, sailor! <smiley/>

New WS Specs and white paper

IBM, Globus, HP and others published new Web services specs yesterday: Web Services Notification and Web Services Resource Framework. I'm pretty jazzed about WS-Notification.

Additionally, there is a white paper that accompanies these specs and puts them into perspective: Modeling Stateful Resources with Web services. Definitely suggested reading.

Ty Law for Secretary of Defense

Unbelievable! Peyton who?

Dubya strikes again

The cancellation of the shuttle missions to service the Hubble Telescope, which is discussed in this /. thread, is an unfortunate turn of events. NASA leadership seems to be suggesting that the move is all about astronaut safety, yet the day before, Dubya gave his policy speech on manned missions to the moon and Mars before 2020. A manned trip to Mars compares to a shuttle mission as a highwire act without a net compares to a walk in the park. Makes you wonder about the positioning.

Let's face it, this is really about money. And yet, Dubya and his cronies think that a better allocation of money would be to launch a "Healthy Marriage" initiative for $1.5B. I mean really!

More woes... this time it's the s/w

More troubles... I lost all connectivity... something in the TCP/IP stack got corrupted and I had to rebuild my system from the ground up... second time in a week... I'm getting really good at this :-)

Decentralised Registration

Mark has published his ID on decentralized registration of media types mnot's blog: Decentralised Registration

Dave Orchard's Blog: Elements and Wildcards as siblings

Dave Orchard writes more about versioning in his blog: Elements and Wildcards as siblings.

I think that there are some important points he raises in the series of notes he's published recently, including the draft TAG finding on versioning. Most importantly, are the thoughts on forwards and backwards compatibility of schemas and instances. In designing a schema for forwards compatibility, you want to ensure that application components with an older version of the schema will be capable of validating instances which were created using a newer version of the schema. Further, you want to ensure that a newer version of the schema does not unnecessarily make instances produced using older versions of the schema invalid. This is known as backwards compatibility.

In a distributed system, it is important to accomodate evolution in a manner that doesn't require what is often affectionately known as "the big bang". It is nearly impossible, and certainly highly impractical and very costly in terms of both resources and coordination, to upgrade all components of a distributed system simultaneously to accomodate versioning. I believe that this is what Peter Deutsch cautions against with fallacy number 6.

Bottom line, versioning is hard. Sure, XML is eXtensible. However, as with any tool, what matters is how it is used. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, XML can be very powerful, and can enable the forwards and backwards compatibility that I believe is necessary to successful deployment of a highly distributed system.

Before embarking on a project to design a schema for your application, I would highly recommend that you understand the issues that Dave discusses in his series of articles on versioning and extensibility.

Go Pats!

Patriots 17, Titans 14: Vinatieri Warms New England Again With the Winning Kick

WS-I Basic Profile - Not just another Web service specification

I've had my article on WS-I Basic Profile published in Web Services Journal: WS-I Basic Profile - Not just another Web service specification.

Back in the saddle again!

Well, I received my new T40 earlier today... up and running in about 15 minutes... It's a sad state of affairs given that I'm getting the hang of reinstalling and reconfiguring the same suite of software over and over and over again... I've got the basics done (VPN, Notes, OfficeXP, Sametime, Trillian) but have a ways to go yet. I'll probably wait until I'm on the IBM LAN to d/l WSAD and some of the other behemoths.

Hopefully, I'll be able to recover some things from my T30's hard drive when I visit Raleigh next week.

The hardware gods are not smiling on me

I must have really ticked off the hardware gods recently... possibly retribution for the comments I made regarding keyboard designers to kick off my blog last month. Both my thinkpad, and now my phone have gone to "panvalet heaven" as a colleague used to call it. My T30 just started rebooting itself without notice last night, or else simply froze up the keyboard/display necessitating a reboot. The frequency with which this symptom struck seemed to grow exponentially. In any event, I now get absolutely nothing upon reboot but some beeps on rare occasion.... sigh. And my phone, which worked just fine earlier this afternoon, has decided that it can no longer find its base station despite repeated attempts to reprogram the base station id in the handset.
Fortunately, a new T40 is winging its way to me as I write this, hopefully in hand by tomorrow. I guess I'll need to go down to Best Buy for a new phone as well. I really liked my phone while it lasted, hope I can find something equivalent.