Here is at least one more blog reference to Danny Ayer's book. (re: This first reference.)
I just got it recently and so far so good. A variety of topics and apparently useful core information.
Another good book seems to be Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, by Ben Hammersley. That one seems to stay more to the core though I've barely cracked either of them.
At least two more with similarly sounding titles are on their way.
Update: Brian Jones has a blog with more information. Not a whole lot more yet, but more. For example the default stroage will be zipped XML. The XML will be "fully documented". A royalty-free license is mentioned with no hints as to what it provides. However on their press site comes this encourage news...
PressPass: Won't this make it easier for your competitors to copy Microsoft Office?So now I mainly wonder a few things...Sinofsky: Certainly this will make it easier for other developers to use our formats to build solutions that don't require Office. However, the ability of other technology providers to use the new file format to integrate their solutions with the Microsoft Office System is an important and frequently requested capability by the industry. We feel it's to everyone's advantage to respond. Customers also know that the true value of a desktop application is not the format in which data is stored but the full breadth of capabilities offered by that application, along with the quality and security of the user experience that it provides.
What does it mean these days to anyone knowledgeable enough to care to say that you store your data "in XML format" without saying anything meaningful about what that format actually is.
My interpretation of this contentless "news" about content is that it serves as FUD given the recent ballyhoo about OASIS and the Open Document format. I have seen no other meaningful information to suggest an alternative explanation.
Unwittingly the typical customer says, "Why switch to another office suite when Microsoft is also publishing 'in XML format'".
A tag line found on Danny Ayers blog...
Tags: hReview, microformats, microformat, rdf
Is there something concerning about this?
Mark Baker suggests about web description languages...
I generally think it's a bad idea to describe the data produced using a schema since schemas generally (DaveO's excellent extensibility advice notwithstanding) change foreseeably over time, and I don't want a change in the schema produced by a service breaking clients if I can help it. Instead, I'm more a fan of simply using a media type as a name for an open-ended sequence of backwards-compatible schemas (think "text/html" vs. HTML 2.0, 3.2, 4.01, etc..), as well as, of course, associating an extensible processing model to that media type to accomodate as many unanticipated extensions as possible over time.
Chris Sells makes a, er, "point"...
The thing that I really need that I'm missing is for my computer, and everyone's computer that I'm conferencing with, to have a stylus attached to their screen. The "let's just sketch something on the white board" is really the last remote collaboration frontier 'til we get some kind of fancy "virtual presence" stuff going.Good point. A freehand drawing and handwriting surface should "just be" part of the standard desktop.I don't mean that every computer needs to be a Tablet PC. Frankly, I'm not very productive on a computer that doesn't have a keyboard. But, I want to be able to sketch something right on my computer screen like a tablet can and instantly share it as I do so. Plus, and here's the rub, I want everyone else to have a stylus, too. If they don't, they'll turn to the white board and I'm out of luck across the great divide.
Martin Fowler looks for a rigoruous definition of "agile" software development practices, and measurements of which practices may be more effective than others.
...agile methods fundamentally expect teams to decide what process to follow and furthermore expect teams to actively and regularly change their process. Any attempt to define a rigorous process that can be tested for conformance runs contrary to this philosophy...The first part of the quote above *is* the definition of agile in my experience: if the team decides what to follow and actively improves their performance then they are "being agile". The second part of the quote becomes less interesting in this case.How can you do a survey on whether agile methods are more effective that alternatives, or whether Extreme Programming is more effective than Scrum, when you can't get a clear definition of what Scrum is in the first place? If a client wants a system built using Extreme Programming how can they tell if it's really being done?
Comparing textbook definitions to each other is less interesting than comparing an agile team to its own history. If the team is improving then that's the goal.
A useful excercise for a team when considering their own agility is for them to explicitly describe their feedback loops (plural), who should be in their loops for which information, and how are decisions (and their timing) made in each of these loops.
(Hint: many problems in an organization of any size occur, and are therefore obscured, outside the boundaries or on the border of the "team" per se.)
Using this approach Scrum, XP, and other approaches become possible sources of improvement and less a necessarily well-defined instruction manual that can be graded independent of actual performance.
James Robertson defeats the Dark Side with one simple observation...
The characters made stupid choices again and again. Not to mention the improbability surrounding the central fear point of the movie, that Padme would die in childbirth. Apparently, hyperdrive is one thing in the Star Wars galaxy, but knowledge of C-Sections - nope.Anakin's response: "Oh. Yeah. Good idea."
Via the Utne Reader...
This week Halliburton holds its annual shareholders meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston. Attendees will toast a whopping 25 percent overall revenue growth thanks to recent work in Iraq. Others will gather outside the swank hotel to protest corporate-cronyism and war-profiteering.Accountability? America needs you, Harry Truman
Yet?
"Open-source technologies such as Python and PHP, to name just two, are of great interest to college students and younger people with a passion," according to Shai Agassi of SAP's Executive Board. But he doesn't believe there is yet the same enthusiasm for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications.Evidence the long-tail may be gaining mind share over the SOA?
A.F. reports...
Maher followed by asking Coleman if it struck him as odd that there haven’t been any terror alerts since the election?After a long laugh from the audience, Coleman answered with some stuff about there still being a high level alert, but then reassured everybody with: "If in fact people used these things for political purposes, I’m sure Congress will look into that."...
Meanwhile, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which we ran, has lost 8.8 billion dollars. By lost, I mean it’s totally unaccounted for. Not only has Congress not "looked into" this $8.8 billion and who might have it now, but it seems that some members are completely unaware that this staggering sum, which was supposed to go toward rebuilding Iraq, is missing. The Sunday morning after the White House Correspondents dinner, I ran into Senator George Allen at a brunch thrown by John McLaughlin and his wife. Allen had never heard of the missing $8.8 billion, or at least that's what he told me. And he's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Stunned, I went up to Susan Page of USA Today and her husband Carl Lubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News, two veteran Washington political reporters, and told them about Allen’s ignorance of this huge scandal, which has no doubt contributed to hatred for America and the deaths of our troops. There’s less electricity in Iraq now than there was before we invaded Iraq.
Turns out that Page and Lubsdorf had also never heard of the unaccounted-for $8.8 billion. For a moment I thought that maybe I had been imagining things.
Then I spotted my friend Norm Ornstein, scholar from the American Enterprise Institute. "Would you believe it if Norm Ornstein told you about the $8.8 billion?" I asked Susan and Carl.
"Sure."
I brought Norm over, and indeed I had not been imagining things. "It was a huge story," Norm told them.
"Was it in the New York Times?" Carl asked Norm.
"Yes," Norm assured him.
Howard Dean on the Senate...
One of the great geniuses of American democracy, unlike most of the democracies in the world that minority rights are protected, 48 percent of us didn't vote for President Bush, but we still have some say in shaping the agenda of the country. If the filibuster is gotten rid of, the extended debate is gotten rid of in the Senate, first of all, it means the president can put 10 judges on the bench that we believe are not qualified to serve. We've confirmed 205 of his judges. He wants those last 10, so they're willing to change the rules to do it.But it has much worse implications.
A.H. observes Tim Russert "interviewing" Howard Dean. As a counterpoint to my last post, what happens when a Democrat does try to really talk about the war in a national forum...
The key exchange came when Dean raised the most critical point about Iraq:Another reason why I don't watch "major" news networks.DEAN: Because of the president’s actions, I would argue that we are in greater danger now because of what’s going on in Iraq than we were before. Now there are terrorists in Iraq. They have migrated there since our troops were there.
RUSSERT: Let me stay on your rhetoric…
Nice pivot, Tim. Yes, by all means, let’s stay on Dean’s rhetoric rather than on the insignificant fact that our country is less safe as a result of our invasion of Iraq. Good to see you’ve got your priorities in order.
As I write this one of the best programs for real news and interviews... Democracy Now is on my TV, on a local community cable channel from 5am to 6am M-F. But you can watch it on the Internet too.
James Boyce writes...
The fact that thousands of young men and women are coming home disabled for life and learning to live on $2,000 a month disability is a disgrace. The future security of our country is at stake because, as an Army recruiter was explaining on a talk show the other night, this is the first “real” extended war the volunteer army has had to fight, and recruiting to actually fight is different than recruiting to train to fight...I spoke with a top Democratic fundraiser, smart guy, best of the best, and I quote: “The Democratic consultants here in Washington are convinced that the 2008 election will be all about domestic issues.” Sure it will be. Just like the last one was.
Joe Gregorio (BitWorking) smells a missed opportunity...
Personally I think he missed a great opportunity to name it Post Only Once.
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft sez of RSS (which one?)...
It is a little too simple, that is also the reason everyone’s using it. We are working on more existing powerful stuff, around XML/web services [sic] that will address many issues beyond RSS. RSS will be around, but whatever we are working next will be cooler and more prevelant.(via James Robertson)
Eric Meyer writes...
What’s fascinating is how fired up people get about microformats.I'm kind of fired up.
IEEE Computer May 5, 2005 Beyond the Relational Database Model David M. Kroenke, University of Washington Former VP of Development at Microrim (R:Base 5000) pp. 89-90
During the next hour or so, I walked her through the process of creating five normalized tables - Customer, Salesperson, Invoice, Line Item, and Item - and hooking them together with foreign keys. Then I explained how to rejoin them to get her sales order back. Long into the call, she asked, "Why am I doing this?"...After 35 years of computer science and numerous iterations of Moore's 18-month cycles, isn't there a better way?
Communications of the ACM
Volume 48, Number 5 (2005), Pages 111-118
The Lowell database research self-assessment
It is time to stop grafting new constructs onto the traditional architecture of the past. Instead, we should rethink basic DBMS architecture with an eye toward supporting:
as co-equal first-class components within the DBMS architecture—both its interface and its implementation—rather than as afterthoughts grafted onto a relational core...
- Structured data;
- Text, space, time, image, and multimedia data;
- Procedural data; that is, data types and the methods that encapsulate them;
- Triggers; and
- Data streams and queues
Many new applications that use DBMSs are going to require unattended operation. In addition to no-knobs tuning, the DBMS must be able to recognize internal malfunctions and malfunctions of communicating components, identify data corruption, detect application failures, and do something about them. Such capabilities require making the DBMS more self-aware and providing it with explicit models of the information system in which it participates...
A small number of slick visualization systems oriented toward information presentation were proposed during the 1980s, notably QBE and VisiCalc. There have not been comparable advances in the last 15 years, and there is a substantial need for better ideas in this area.
Thirty years of research on query languages can be summarized by "we have moved from SQL to XQuery."
First, the database research community should avoid drawing too narrow a box around what we do. We must explore opportunities for combining database and related technologies that can improve the usage of information, such as information visualization technologies, which has often been left to the domain of other research communities. To broaden the set of technologies database researchers apply, they need to expand their breadth of competencies. Consider the plasterers' union, which decided many years ago, when wallboard was being introduced, that it was not their competency. As plaster was replaced by wallboard, the union lost out. This fate could befall the DBMS community if it does not respond to the new challenges of integrating related technologies with information management.
Second, it was noted that the average age of participants at these meetings has been increasing. On the other hand, there are more young database researchers than ever before, as evidenced by the large number of junior faculty in databases. We recommend the next meeting invite a broader mix of age groups within our community.
From Vanessa Williams we get...
For my taste, Web Services and SOA architecture puts too much emphasis on centralized orchestration and not enough on self-organized, coordinated behaviour in large open systems.
