NOLA wrap-up

Monday evening we went to a jazz club called Mermaid Lounge and listened to the Charlie Hunter trio. Simply fantastic! The guitarist had an eight-string combo bass/6 string which was really pretty neat. It must also be a midi device because he had some really cool sounds coming from that thing. The sax player was really smooth and the drummer was awesome as well.

I went with some colleagues to Preservation Hall Wednesday evening after dinner. The ultimate end to a great evening with friends.

Overall, I'd say that the Symposium was a rousing success. Certainly there was controversy, but there were plenty of great discussions triggered by the various session presentations. The turn-out was better than we had initially expected and then some.

Tim Bray on standards

From ongoing:

The Standards Process This essay is about theory and practice, and we ought to have learned by now that standards are terrific when applied to proven industry practice but high-risk in the domain of theory and science. SQL and XML were both exercises in writing down something that had already been proven to work.

When committees get together either in an informal cabal or an official standards process, and go about inventing new technologies, the results are usually pretty bad. ODA (Never heard of it? Exactly); OSI Networking; W3C XML Schemas. The list goes on and on.

Emphasis mine.

NOLA

I'm in New Orleans for the OASIS Symposium on Reliable Infrastructures for XML this week. Last night, the OASIS staff and a few members of the OASIS TAB had dinner at K-Pauls. All I can say is "wow!". Definitely one of the best meals I've ever had, period. A little pricey; entrees can run you up to $39.00, so bring your checkbook. However, well worth the few extra bucks if you ask me. Normally, K-Pauls is closed on Sunday. However, because the JazzFest is still on and there are plenty of tourists, they opened. Apparently, not many of the local concierges got the message as we had no wait at all.

Yesterday, it rained over 7 inches as measured at the airport; more in some spots (8-10). I got completely soaked returning to my hotel on the RiverWalk after dinner. A small price to pay if you ask me.

This was my second meal at K-Pauls. I definitely plan to make it a tradition when I'm in town.

Festival for the Earth

My daughter and I took the T from Riverside into Boston yesterday. We went down to the Hatch Shell for the Festival for the Earth concert to celebrate Earth Day. My daughter was born on Earth Day so it has special meaning for us. We spread an old shower curtain and sat in the sun, listening to the BoDeans, Third Eye Blind and Edie Brickell. It was a great concert; the weather was as fantastic as the music. The only drawback to the day was that during the break before Third Eye Blind took the stage, one of the towers displaying a large banner for the local radio station that hosted the concert toppled and injured 9 people sitting beneath it. Two people had been injured seriously enough that they had to be taken to Mass General via ambulance. Fortunately, Mass General is right around the corner from the Hatch Shell. The banner had acted as a sail in the fairly stiff breeze. You would have thought that the banner would have had holes in it for that very reason.

Update: I guess I should have worn a hat!

Third Eye Blind was the one act we were both looking forward to hearing. They didn't disappoint, although you could tell they were a little uncomfortable taking the stage after the accident. Everyone was a little bummed out over the incident. They covered mostly songs from their first album and soon had the crowd rockin'.

The place was silly with Kerry people; passing out stickers for Kerry in 2004. Not a Republican in sight. Quelle suprise!

Where's the Feed?

As usual, Mark is taking cuts at Web services. This time, he dredges up a two year old email to make a point, but then fails to do so. Sorry, Mark... nice try.

He claims:

anytime you need an RSS feed to track new specs, something is, prima facie, horribly, horribly, wrong.

Really? I would have thought that an RSS Feed for a project, no matter how large or small would be a good thing(tm).

Gee, what's this in my News Aggregator? Huh, I have an RSS feed from the W3C that syndicates status changes for W3C specs and other key events. Ohmigod! Does that mean that there's something horribly, horribly wrong at the W3C?

And gee... the list of specs here seems to be much longer than the list here that he claims is hysterical. Or, for that matter, the list here.

(aside: When is the IETF going to pull its collective head out of the 1980s and publish an RSS feed for its activity? For that matter, you'd think that it could at least publish an index with links to the specs!)

But let's dig a bit deeper. RFC2616 has 39 references (give or take a couple) to other IETF RFCs plus a couple more references to ISO and ANSI character set specifications. Hard to tell which are normative or not. Hmmm... And of course, it doesn't stop there. There are about a dozen or more additional specs that you really need beyond RFC2616 to do anything meaningful at all (such as those related to security and clarifications about limitations with proxy caching, etc). Oh, and what about all those pesky media type specifications for the things that are transferred about over RFC2616. If you're a browser developer, you'd probably want a heads up on any changes to those. Maybe an RSS Feed wouldn't be such a bad idea. Or would that mean that there was something horribly, horribly wrong with the Web?

Please don't misunderstand my intent, I like HTTP. Unlike Mark, neither do I think it is the last protocol we'll ever need (it is not), nor do I spend every waking moment trying to tear it down or to poke fun at things that it simply doesn't handle effectively. That would be pointless.

Ich spreche nicht Deutsches...

Stefan wants a draft article on WS-Reliable Messaging reviewed.

Ich spreche nicht Deutsches, aber ich nehme an, daß ich babelfish wirksam einsetzen und ihm einen Versuch geben könnte. ;-)

W3C XML Schema Interoperability?

There seems to be increasing concern within the Web services community regarding the interoperability of W3C's XML Schema.

Some would like a formally defined subset of XML Schema, omitting some of the more advanced features, that would be geared towards consumption by Web services toolkits that generate databinding code in their favorite programming language. Others simply want a definitive answer to the question: "is this schema valid?" so that when they publish the schema for others to use, they can do so with confidence such that when someone complains that their tool of preference says that the schema is not valid or is unable to process the schema, they can respond: "your tool is incorrect; suggest you contact the vendor and have them fix it".

Some want to limit the use of XML schema to a subset capable of express their service's underlying programming-language-specific data model as XML. They typically start with a Java, C# or other programming language-specific interface/data model and use a development tool to generate a corresponding schema and databinding logic. This is often referred to as the bottoms-up design approach.

Others want to leverage the full expressiveness of XML that XML Schema can offer. They are designing schema for messages and document exchanges that are typically XML-centric; although sometimes leveraging the features of XML Schema that lean towards object-orientation. This is frequently called
the top-down design approach.

Whether the service is designed using the bottoms-up or top-down approach, the service consumer code is typically generated from the WSDL/schema which means that effectively the developer of a service consumer is using the top-down approach. Even when the service is generated using the bottoms-up approach with a limited subset of XML Schema, there can be interoperability problems between development tools used by the service provider and service consumer.

Trust but verify

Regardless of approach, the advice of the old Russian adage; "trust but verify" should be followed by the Web service designer. Regardless of what the development tooling used says about the validity of the schema, use as many other sources as possible to verify the assessment. There are a number of resources that a developer can turn to in this regard:

• IBM's Schema Quality Checker


• Microsoft's schema validator


• DecisionSoft's schema validator


• W3C Schema Validity Checker (beta and "experimental")

Certainly, one can also employ multiple development tools from different vendors, but it can be somewhat costly to provide each developer with a copy of each vendor's IDE. An approach to consider would be to license a single copy of a few widely used development tools for use by the QA staff to validate schemas and possibly to generate consumer code from the WSDL/schema if time permits. If you don't have that luxury and are doing top-down development of schemas in an open standards development forum such as OASIS, circulate the draft schema amongst the various participants and have them use their favorite development tools to validate the schema and report back any issues.

If the schema validates cleanly against all of these various sources; chances are that it will not yield interoperability headaches. If the schema does not validate according to one or more of the resources, the developer should work through the issues as if they were bugs in the schema until the schema validates cleanly using multiple sources of validation.

Avoid being too clever

Finally, anyone doing schema design should avoid being too clever. KISS has never failed me. With that in mind, there are a number of resources available that offer sage advice to schema designers such as this article by Dare Obasanjo which responds to this one by Kohsuke Kawaguchi. I would recommend reading both and drawing your own conclusions.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)

I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) the other night with my son. Great flick! Quite different than Vol 1. In many ways I enjoyed Vol 2 more than Vol 1. I recently bought the Vol 1 DVD but haven't had a chance to watch it yet and it has been 6 months, but I certainly recall the non-stop action as being quite a rush.

WS-ReliableMessaging and DeliveryAssurances

Stefan asks why the formal specification for the delivery assurance policy assertions was omitted from the recently revised WS-Reliable Messaging specification.

The delivery assurance policy assertions were removed because of feedback received during the feedback and interop workshops, and through the comments link. Basically, it was felt by the authors that while it is important to point out the various levels of delivery assurance that the protocol supports, that because the protocol itself is unaffected by the choice of delivery assurance that we would be better served to simply remove the aspect related to both how an endpoint relates its respective QoS assurances and how it implements support for the level(s) of delivery assurance.

The WS-Reliable Messaging specification makes it clear that the fulfilment of the delivery assurance is the responsibility of the RM Destination. How an RM Destination communicates to the Application Destination the delivery assurance characteristics it offers/supports, or how an Application Destination requests or selects, a particular delivery assurance is therefore an implementation-specific choice and hence out of scope of the specification.

Additionally, the delivery assurance policy assertions were only informative for the Application or RM Source. We received feedback that suggested that it was unclear as to what, if anything, the RM Source needed to do with the information. Anything that we might say would be encroaching on implementation specifics and the authors agreed that anything to do with implementation specifics is completely out of scope.

Page 23, 5th sentence meme

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I left my service number and asked him to return the call.

Over the Edge by Jonathan Kellerman

The price of freedom?

This AP article says that it would cost $11.7B to build out an infrastructure of hydrogen fuel stations in the US.

We're spending (at least) $137B this year and last on the war in Iraq (not to mention the priceless loss of 700+ of our brave warriors) which the administration keeps telling us is not about oil, but you know damned well it is. It certainly isn't about WMD, it isn't and never was about terrorism (although the administration is doing a bang-up job of continuously repeating that lie to the point that enough of the great unwashed now believe that to be true).

You do the math.

I'm shocked!

Bush said to order war plan in 2001.

This news comes as such a surprise!

'bout time too!

War coverage shifts dramatically

Silver spoon

Dubya complains that he wasn't given "actionable intelligence".

Those are the words of someone who has had everything in life fed to him on a silver spoon.

To me though, if I had my senior spook (Tenet) running around all summer with his "hair on fire", and am receiving "frustratingly vague" reports about "spectacular events", "really, really big" attacks, etc. I wouldn't be waiting around for "actionable intelligence". I certainly wouldn't go on vacation!

"George Bush, you're about to suffer a major terrorist attack! What are you going to do next?" ... "I'm going to Disney World!!!"

This is not a good sign.

Redundancy Dept.

Ian White *is* a geek.

Silent minority?

Bob Novak writes of Generals weary of low troop levels:

"While Democrats roar, the generals are silent -- in public. Many confide that they will not cast their normal Republican votes on Nov. 2. They cannot bring themselves to vote for John Kerry, who has been a consistent Senate vote against the military. But they say they are unable to vote for Don Rumsfeld's boss, and so will not vote at all."

Hey, don't blame me. I'm only the President!

This NYT Article quotes the Dubya:

I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America — at a time and a place, an attack

Doesn't this strike you as odd? The administration keeps pressing on the fact that there was no intellegence "of a time and place of an attack". Well, that would have been serendipitous had they been tipped off as to the time and place. However, don't you think that if the FAA had been made aware of the threat that they might have responded differently when they figured out 90 minutes before the planes actually struck the WTC and Pentagon that there had been multiple hijackings? Might the added vigilance of the security screeners have possibly caught one of the hijackers before they boarded?

If you ask me, there should have been a few more people running around with their hair on fire. It might have at least allowed someone to put two and two together a bit more quickly.

But what I find really odd is that few are picking up on the "lacked sufficient details" excuse. There weren't additional details because the Dubya can't be bothered to read through these boring briefs every day. Don't you wonder whether the details of the analysis that would have been present in any other president's brief might have prompted areas of additional inquiry?

Get on with it; I have some trails to clear this morning...

From this Washington Post article in March 2002:

Under President Bill Clinton, the PDB ran around 12 pages and often included detailed analyses as well as new information that Clinton generally read before the briefing. Indeed, in the early days, he often had little use for the follow-up oral briefings offered by the CIA -- a trait that exacerbated tensions between the White House and Langley.

Under Bush, the PDB has become shorter, a seven-to-10-page document containing "more targeted hard intelligence" items, with few longer than a page, according to a former senior intelligence official who was involved in the process. It is written with the understanding that the president is a "multi-modality learner" who processes information better through questions and answers while reading along, the former official said. Most days, Tenet reviews the PDB with the briefer as they drive from the director's Maryland home to the White House. On the way, Tenet often makes notes and looks over the backup material the briefer has brought. Tenet and often the deputy director for intelligence have already looked it over before going to bed the night before, though it is finished by staffers who go to work at midnight and monitor incoming intelligence throughout the night.

There you have it; the leader of the free world has to have his PDB spoon fed to him. Makes one wonder who was around to spoon feed him on the morning of August 6th. We know that Condi wasn't there. She couldn't recall whether she was even in contact with him that day. Note that it wasn't until after 9/11 that the PDB attendance was expanded to include practically the whole A team (Cheney, Card, Rice and Ashcroft) in addition to both the DCI and Director of the FBI.

I think that the key thing to look for next are answers to the question: What taskings were given the morning of August 6, 2001 from the ranch in Crawford, Tx? We know that the August 6th PDB was the result of a tasking from July:

One trigger for his request was information developed around mid-July when there was, Rice said, a "major threat spike" related to a possible attempt to kill the president using an aircraft at the Group of Eight meeting scheduled in Genoa, Italy.

Given that only the CIA briefer and Dubya were present for the August 6th briefing, would it be possible that Mr. Incurious upon finding that there was no evidence of any plan to assassinate him; that he simply dismissed the rest as "historical" and asked the briefer to "move on"?

Was there a tasking to the Director of the FBI to follow-up on the "70 current field investigations"? Was there any interest at all in learning more about

FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, ...

Who was notified of this? Who should have been notified? How recent was this information?

It amazes me that roughly 50% of the country remain blind to the facts before them. Would "shaking the trees" based on taskings from the Aug 6th PDB have thwarted the 9/11 attack? Possibly not. However, I would feel a whole lot safer if I had confidence that the President was paying attention to what's going on around him as opposed to someone who doesn't even read the paper(s) or watch CNN. I'd feel safer having a President who could tell that the contents of most of his PDBs were information he had already read or heard elsewhere as opposed to someone who needed his PDBs reduced to "more targetted hard intellegence items" of less than a page without the detailed analysis.

What part of "No" don't you understand?

Also sprach Senator McCain on Meet the Press this morning in response to questioning whether he'd accept the second billing on the Kerry 2004 ticket. It is as I predicted in an earlier post; McCain would be a good doobie and stay the Republican course despite the fact that he cannot abide Dubya and his cronies.

Too bad, really. This country could use a few more leaders of McCain's ilk. I am so tired of listening to the doublespeak coming from the Ministry of Truth.

Spring is here and summer's coming

I want one of these!

What to do next?

Today's NYT Editorial quote:

The real challenge came after the Afghan invasion, when Mr. Bush had to decide what to do next — rethink the outdated world view his advisers had brought into office, or snap back into old reflexes and go after Iraq, the enemy of the last generation. It was then that he chose the wrong path.

What he should have done next was to continue to press the hunt for UBL and the remaining al Qaeda and Taliban hold-outs. They are still there, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, causing trouble around the globe.

Talk about swatting flies; at best the continued prosecution of the hunt for al Qaeda and UBL could be characterized as "swatting flies".

But then how would Haliburton siphon off all of the US tax dollars being sunk into Iraq?

The Blogging of the President: 2004:

One of the most foolish things done during the occupation was having foreign contractors attempt to do most of the rebuilding. Iraqis built most of their own infrastructure and there are companies in Iraq that are capable of rebuilding it.

Dya think?

Kerry suggests June 30 deadline is just politics...

Another myth to debunk...

Stefan writes:

But I don't think WSDL is a good candidate for making this point, since with its reliance on XML Schema it's probably the least flexible and most static part of the whole Web services architecture.

Since when does WSDL rely upon WSDL?

The WSDL2.0 draft has the following pseudo schema for the types component:

<definitions>

  <types>

    <documentation />?

    [extension elements]*

  </types>

</definitions>

Aside from the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 which does constrain the use of XML Schema for WSDL1.1 descriptions (although as with WSDL2.0 any schema definition language can be used), there is no reason why the definition of the WSDL types couldn't be RelaxNG or schematron or anything else for that matter.

And I really don't understand why XML Schema would be considered inflexible or static. David Orchard has been blogging on the topic of versioning XML Schema and Web services. It isn't XML Schema holding things back in this regard. Rather, it is the hard-wired data binding (blech!) that so many are enamored of that makes things unnecessarily complicated in this regard.

ongoing � Office Doofuses

Tim Bray suggests that Microsoft drop the "Great Moments At Work" ad campaign. Amen, brother!

Number 1?

I'd support this in a heartbeat. I voted for McCain in the 2000 Ma. primary because I simply couldn't stomach the idea of a Dubya presidency. Three and a half years later, I still can't.

My guess though is that McCain would decline the invitation. He's a "good doobie" and will toe the Republican line despite what the Dubya team did in S.C. during the 2000 primary.

Too bad, really. I think that they'd make a good pair and I also think that many Democrats and most independents like me would support McCain.

Sloganator

Make your own Bush/Cheney '04 Poster! like this one.

Update on RSS feed

I found the 2rss.com web service superior to the one I chose this morning. Here's my new RSS feed.

New to the blogosphere

Jacek has a blog!

New RSS Feed

In response to seeing this post, I've changed my RSS feed. This one is derived from my Blogger generated Atom 0.3 feed courtesy of this service.

Previously, I had been using rssify which did not include permalinks amongst other failings. As for the navigability of my blog... I'm not sure what to make of that comment. I have been meaning to transition from Blogger to something I can host (and hack!), but my current ISP situation prevents me from doing so. I'm presently considering use of DynDNS.org so that I can host my site and blog on my own system. First things first though, I need to install Linux on an old Dell I have lying around... and I need some spare time.

Adam Bosworth: Be very afraid

This is troubling.

Sad, but true...

Great... now I'm a a verb.

YAGAFDGS

RFC3751 is Yet Another Great April Fools Day Gag Spec. Enjoy.

Another good one

The Web Standards Project

Ah memories...

Tim Bray sez "TCP is So Over". Reminds me of RFC3252.

No surprise I guess

Sigh, this nugget courtesy of David Chess. I guess it should come as no surprise. Most people don't read the paper or even watch the evening news on TV these days.

It scares me to think how ill informed Americans are these days. Unfortunately, there isn't a quiz you have to pass to make sure you have a clue before you can cast your ballot in a democracy.