December 5, 2002
@ 11:58 PM
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XML 2002, Dijkstra's blog and Stuff I Forgot To Mention On Monday
Bob Abooey style again.
  • The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra. Wow.
    For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as "EWDs", to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Edsger's writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands
    One that is slowly becoming a favorite of mine is Recollections on Operating System Design. A coworker liked the sentiments on teamwork in Trip report E.W.Dijkstra, California, 17-31 January 1981. Dive in and find your favorites, this is a veritable gold mine of insightful thoughts. If Dijkstra was still around today I'm sure he could have been convinced to turn these writings into some sort of weblog.

  • The article for Dr. Dobbs I mentioned several months ago is finally done and they seem to have liked it. I remember being a little froshling and wondering if I'd ever be l337 enough to grok the articles in DDJ. How times change. That isn't my most amusing "when I was a newbie" thought though. That is reserved for the time I while I was in Nigeria I saw this woman's computer crashing with all sorts of weird hieroglyphics and asked in a panicked voice what was going on. She looked at me with disdain and said "that's my screen saver".

  • So it looks like Eminem and Benzino are beefing. This seems like such a manufactured conflict. Benzino complains about the music media treating Eminem specially because he is white but conveniently forgets that as a co-owner of The Source he is the music media. I'd understand if it was some talented rapper like Kurupt or Andre from Outkast playing the race card because then they might have a very weak point. However Benzino is the definition of a wack rapper. In fact, industry insiders point out that he only has a record deal due to his position as a co-owner of the Source. That explains why a relatively unknown rapper can have big names like Scarface, Snoop, Fabolous and Teddy Riley on his CD.

    The entire conflict looks like it was designed to give Benzino more street cred and exposure. Sad.

  • Saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Saturday. The plot was a lot better than the first in my opinion and fairly imaginative. I didn't like the fact Hermione didn't get as much face time. She is such a geek role model.

  • Photoshop Phriday: Rejected Software is too funny. I especially like the Microsoft ones with products like Microsoft Notepad XP, Visual Binary++, and Microsoft Linux XP Professional.

  • I wonder who K5ers think are the most undeserving of ever winning an Academy Award for acting. I think Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Oscar was highway robbery given th eexcellent performances from William H. Macy and Edward Norton in Fargo and Primal Fear respectively. Marissa Tomei's is also kinda fishy. My sister thinks Halle Berry robbed Rene Zelwegger given her performance in Bridget Jones Diary. The only friend I've asked about this doesn't think Denzel's performance in Training Day deserved an Oscar just because it was out of character. What do you guys think?

  • I bought a new cell phone on Black Friday. The LG 5350 is pretty sweet and I've found myself playing with it quite often.

  • Gordon Weakliem has provided the only detailed feedback about my recent XML Schema article I've seen and I'd like to address his points.

    1. On mastering the technology: I consider XML Schema to be like C++, many people use it both probably less than 5% of its users actually know how to use it beyond the intermediate level. The similarity isn't just the fact that they are both complex but they also share the fact that they a large spec bugs. Take a look at the C++ standard's issues list then compare that to the W3C XML Schema issues list. Consider that even if you understand the spec there are over a 100 places where it is ambiguous or just flat out wrong. Hopefully, most people have better things to do with their time than chase after esoterica and arcana cooked up by bored theoreticians on a whim.

    2. On elementFormDefault: Gordon is correct in summarizing my issues with why I don't like elementFormDefault being set to unqualified. Funnily enough, I got an email from one of the schema working group folks chastizing me encouraging elementFormDefault="qualified" because it broke some kind of conceptual integrity. I disagreed that whatever conceptua integrity that supposedly existed was worth preserving if it lead to user confusion and ugly looking documents.

    3. On derivation by restriction of complex types: Gordon astutely picked up that I don't like this feature and he cracked my veneer of objectiveness. However I have to admit that there are a few people who think that the feature is useful. I should have done due diligence in finding a real world usage scenario so my words didn't ring hollow. I believe such scenarios involve global schemas bing issued by an authority then extended and refined by local entities. E.g. DareSoft HQ has a global schema for describing Employee information while a local branch of DareSoft may remove or refine aspects of this information that better describes the employees of that local branch. For example, changing pager numbers from being optional for all employees to be mandatory for sys admins.


  • I opened my mail and it looks like this month's issue of Playboy is hot off the presses with a Tia Carrere nude pictorial. Yiyeah!!!

 

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