Banner Ads We'd Like To See parts 1,2,3 & 4

The folks at Valley of the Geeks have a popular series on humorous banner ads we'd like to see. The slogans from some of the funnier ones are below

• Internal Revenue Service: You Make It, We Take It
• Microsoft: Keeping the World Safe from Competition
• Oracle: Where Quality and Service are Often Mentioned
• Microsoft Windows: Where Quality is Job 1.1
• Bea: Software So Complicated Even We Don't Understand It
• Sun Microsystems - Java: It's More Than A Technology. It's a Lawsuit Too.
• Apple: Products so cool, we don't need customers.
• Global Crossing: Who Knew $1 Could Buy So Many Shares?

You can catch them all first hand at Banner Ads We'd Like To See, More Banner Ads, Even More Banner Ads and Still More Banner Ads

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Penn and Teller: Bullshit

Penn and Teller have a show where they debunk tackle urban myths like Talking to the Dead & Alien Abductions. I don't have Showtime or I'd be watching this religiously. I wonder if they accept viewer suggestions because I'd love to see a show that compared the stupidity of Fighting Terror with Duct Tape and Plastic Wrap with the Duck and Cover malarky from the Cold War era.

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Blogs and Journalism

Every now and again I read posts in various blogs about how people who post their brain farts on the InterWeb bloggers will replace journalists. I have been mentally composing a lengthy rant about this but Shelley Powers beat me to it and said it more eloquently than I ever could in here post Google is not God, Webloggers are not Capital-J Journalists, the only thing emerging is my fear of war, and a headache

Now I don't question the value of speaking directly to domain experts via blogs instead of having to get your information filtered, misquoted and soundbite-ized by the modern media. It's more likely that what what you get on Don's blog is Microsoft's view on XML Web Services than some sensationalized piece in one of the technology rags. However, does this mean I'll stop reading technology news sites for information about Microsoft's XML Web Services strategy and only get my news from Don and Tim's blogs? Nope.

A recent sterling example of why blogs as journalism doesn't entice me is the recent "news" of the supposed "hole" in Windows XP that began on Brian Livingstone's blog. This sterling example of underinformed pontification circulated around the Web until it eventually was picked up by conventional journalists. Eventually the ludicrous nature of the original claims was exposed on SecurityFocus but not after many had been misinformed by what was most likely an innocent slip up.

If you want to replace conventional journalists with your blog you need to give me the [minimal] fact checking, domain expertise and editorial review that I get from them.

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Regex-able XML

Joe Gregorio wants a Regex-able subset of XML. When I read that I can't help remembering the XML-DEV meme of the Desperate Perl Hacker who can write aplications that use regexes to parse arbitrary XML in a single sitting. These meme started spreading before the Namespaces in XML recommendation but even then there are lots of things in XML 1.0 that don't make it amenable to regular expressions. Joe points out a few of them with CDATA sections and DTDs (I assume he means attribute defaulting behavior and entities) but leaves out others like character references. Some may also complain that the fact that XML 1.0 is unicode would also prevent using certain tools to process arbitrary XML with regular expressions.

Looking at Joe's example he seems to want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Most of the features of XML he complains about disappear when processed with in an infoset based data model such as the XPath data model. In fact, none of what he complains about in his examples isn't already mitigated with existing XML technologies and APIs like those in the .NET Framework.

However even with a data model like that used by XPath/XSLT which makes CDATA sections, character references and entities transparent he still does need a decent function library that lets him actually perform his beloved regular expressions. Hopefully my EXSLT implementation will be found useful by people like him.

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Political Humor

Found these online and they cracked me up so I decided to share

• Bush On Tour
  
  
• URGENT PLEA
  
  
• Gulf War 2

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.