In her post Blog Activity Julia Lerman writes

There must be a few people who have their aggregators set to check rss feeds every 10 seconds or something. I very rarely look at my stats because they don't really tell me much. But I have to say I was a little surprised to see that there were over 14,000 hits to my website today (from 12am to almost 5pm).

So where do they come from?

10,000+ are from NewzCrawler then a whole lot of other aggregators and then a small # of browsers. 

This problem is due to the phenomenon originally pointed out by Phil Ringnalda in his post What's Newzcrawler Doing? and expounded on by me in my post News Aggregators As Denial of Service Clients. Basically 

According to the answer on the NewzCrawler support forums when NewzCrawler updates the channel supporting wfw:commentRss it first updates the main feed and then it updates comment feeds. Repeatedly downloading the RSS feed for the comments to each entry in my blog when the user hasn't requested them is unnecessary and quite frankly wasteful.  

Recently I upgraded my web server to using Windows 2003 Server due to having problems with a limitation on the number of outgoing connections using Windows XP. Recently I noticed that my web server was still getting overloaded with requests during hours of peak traffic. Checking my server logs I found out that another aggregator, Sauce Reader, has joined Newzcrawler in its extremely rude bandwidth hogging behavior. This is compounded by the fact that the weblog software I use, dasBlog, does not support HTTP Conditional GET for comments feeds so I'm serving dozens of XML files to each user of Newzcrawler and SauceReader subscribed to my RSS feed every hour.

I'm really irritated at this behavior and have considered banning Sauce Reader & Newzcrawler from fetching RSS feeds on my blog due to the fact that they significantly contribute to bringing down my site on weekday mornings when people first fire up their aggregators at work or at home.  Instead, I'll probably end up patching my local install of dasBlog to support HTTP conditional GET for comments feeds when I get some free time. In the meantime I've tweaked some options in IIS that should reduce the amount of times the server is inaccessible due to being flooded with HTTP requests.

This doesn't mean I think this feature of the aforementioned aggregators is something that should be encouraged. I just don't want to punish readers of my blog because of decisions made by the authors of their news reading software.

 

In a post entitled When will Scoble earn his Longhorn pay? Robert Scoble writes

The thing is that I don't have any credibility left when it comes to Longhorn. Over the last 18 months I got out there and lead lots of Longhorn cheers. And now there's a changing of direction.

Tons of people, both inside and outside of Microsoft, have been talking with me about where we're going now. I've met in the past week with the Avalon and WinFS teams (yes, they both still exist).

The thing is, I am super sensitive right now to making a whole new round of promises. I'd rather wait to talk until there's beta build to hand you. Why? Cause what good does it do to write about the feature set if you can't see it? And if you're a developer, you don't want to hear FUD, you wanna see working APIs.

Shortly after Robert joined Microsoft I sent him a link to Joel Spolsky's Mouth Wide Shut article because I thought he was going overboard in pimping Longhorn. Experience working with product teams at Microsoft had already thought me that until a technology is in beta almost everything about it can change. For example, the plans my team had for what we were shipping in Whidbey two years ago are very different from what we planned to ship a year ago which is very different plan to ship today. Features gets cut all the time, priorities change and then there's the date driven release dance.

Microsoft has always had a credibility problem due to what people have termed vaporware announcements. Although many have assumed that the company does this maliciously the truth of the matter is that a lot of these incidents are product teams prematurely announcing their plans to the world. Personally I think Microsoft's evangelists and marketing folks could do the company, our customers and the software industry in general a service by shutting the hell up about future product plans until they were more than a glimmer in some software architect's eye.

Borrowing a leaf from Apple doesn't sound so bad right about now.

 

My article Improving XML Document Validation with Schematron is finally up on MSDN. It provides a brief introduction to Schematron, shows how to embed Schematron assertions in a W3C XML Schema document for improved validation capabilities and how to get the power of Schematron in the .NET Framework today. The introduction of the article is excerpted below

Currently the most popular XML schema language is the W3C XML Schema Definition language (XSD). Although XSD is capable of satisfying scenarios involving type annotated infosets it is fairly limited when it comes to describing constraints on the structure of an XML document. There are many examples of situations where common idioms in XML vocabulary design are impossible to express using the constraints available in W3C XML Schema. The three most commonly requested constraints that are incapable of being described by W3C XML Schema are:

1. The ability to specify a choice of attributes. For example, a server-status element should either have a server-uptime attribute or a server-downtime attribute.

2. The ability to group elements and attributes into model groups. Although one can group elements using compositors such as xs:sequence, xs:choice, and xs:all, the same cannot be done with both elements and attributes. For example, one cannot create a choice between one set of elements and attributes and another.

3. The ability to vary the content model based on the value of an element or attribute. For example, if the value of the status attribute is "available" then the element should have an uptime child element; otherwise it should have a downtime child element. The technical name for such constraints is co-occurrence constraints.

Although these idioms are widely used in XML vocabularies it isn't possible to describe them using W3C XML Schema, which makes it difficult to rely on schema validation for enforcing the message contract. This article describes how to layer such functionality on top of the W3C XML Schema language using Schematron.

Embedding Schematron assertions in a W3C XML Schema document allows you to have your cake and eat it to.

 

Tim Bray has another rant on the prolifieration of WS-* specs in the XML Web Services world. In his post The Loyal WS Opposition he writes

I Still Dont Buy It No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think its going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure.

I look at Google and Amazon and EBay and Salesforce and see them doing tens of millions of transactions a day involving pumping XML back and forth over HTTP, and I cant help noticing that they dont seem to need much WS-apparatus.

One way to view the various WS-* specifications is that they are akin to Java Specification Requests (JSRs) in the Java world. A JSR is basically a way for various Java vendors to standardize on a mechanism for solving a particular customer problem. Usually this mechanism takes the form of an Application Programming Interface (API). Some JSRs are widely adopted and have become an integral aspect of programming on the Java platform (e.g. the JAXP JSR). Some JSRs are pushed by certain vendors while being ignored by others leading to overlap (e.g. the JDO JSR which was voted against by BEA, IBM and Oracle but supported by Macromedia and Sun). Then there's Enterprise Java Beans which is generally decried as a bloated and unnecessarily complex solution to business problems. Again that was the product of the JSR process.

The various WS-* specs are following the same pattern as JSRs which isn't much of a surprise since a number of the players are the same (e.g. Sun & IBM). Just like Tim Bray points out that one can be productive without adopting any of the WS-* family of specifications it is similarly true that one can be productive in Java without relying on the products of JSRs but instead  rolling one's own solutions. However this doesn't mean there aren't benefits of standardizing on the high level mechanisms for solving various business problems besides saying "We use XML and HTTP so we should interop".   

Omri Gazitt, the Produce Unit Manager of the Advanced XML Web Services team has a post on WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration which should hit close to home for Tim Bray since he is the co-chair of the Atom working group

WS-Transfer is a spec that Don has wanted to publish for a year now.  It codifies the simple CRUD pattern for Web services (the operations are named after their HTTP equivalents - GET, PUT, DELETE, and there is also a CREATE pattern.  The pattern of manipulating resources using these simple verbs is quite prevalent (Roy Fielding's REST is the most common moniker for it), and of course it underlies the HTTP protocol.  Of course, you could implement this pattern before WS-Transfer, but it does help to write this down so people can do this over SOAP in a consistent way.  One interesting existing application of this pattern is Atom (a publishing/blogging protocol built on top of SOAP).  Looking at the Atom WSDL, it looks very much like WS-Transfer - a GET, PUT, DELETE, and POST (which is the CREATE verb specific to this application).  So Atom could easily be built on top of WS-Transfer.  What would be the advantage of that?  The same advantage that comes with any kind of consistent application of a technology - the more the consistent pattern is applied, the more value it accrues.  Just the value of baking that pattern into various toolsets (e.g. VS.NET) makes it attractive to use the pattern. 

I personally think WS-Transfer is very interesting because it allows SOAP based applications to model themselves as REST Web Services and get explicit support for this methodolgy from toolkits. I talked about WS-Transfer with Don a few months ago and I've had to bite my tongue for a while whenever I hear people complain that SOAP and SOAP based toolkits don't encourage building RESTful XML Web Services.

I'm not as impressed with WS-Enumeration but I find it interesting that it also covers another use case of the ATOM API which is a mechanism for pulling down the content archive  from a weblog or similar system in a sequential manner. 

 

I saw Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence last night. I'm not a big fan of some of the critically acclaimed plot driven members of the anime genre such as the original Ghost in the Shell and Akira. I always thought they didn't have enough action nor did they delve deeply enough into the philosophical questions they raised. Thus I have tended to prefer anime that doesn't have any pretension of intellectual depth and was just straight violence fest such as Crying Freeman, Ninja Scroll and most recently Berserk.

Ghost in the Shell 2 struck a happy balance for me. It had excellent action, especially the scene where Batuo visits a local Yakuza hang out with a heavy machine gun. I also thought the exploration of what it means to be truly human in a world where the line between man and machine is continually blurred was better done in Innocence than in the original Ghost in the Shell. It just seemed a lot less heavy handed.

I'm definitely going to pick up the Ghost in the Shell TV series from Fry's later this week

Rating: **** out of *****

 

Reading a post on Dave Winer blog I caught the following snippet

NY Times survey of spyware and adware. "...a program that creeps onto a computer’s hard drive unannounced, is wrecking the Internet." 

I've noticed that every time I sit at the computer of a non-technical Windows user I end up spending at least an hour removing spyware from their computer. Yesterday, I encountered a particularly nasty piece of work that detected when the system was being scanned by Ad-Aware and forced a system reboot. I'd never realized how inadequate the functionality of the Add or Remove Programs dialog was for removing applications from your computer until spyware came around. After I was done yesterday, I began to suspect that some of the spyware that was polite enough to add an entry in "Add or Remove Programs" simply took the Uninstall instruction as a command to go into stealth mode. One application made you fill out a questionairre before it let you uninstall it. I wondered if it would refuse to uninstall if it didn't like my answers to its questions.

Something definitely has to be done about this crap. In the meantime I suggest using at least two anti-spyware applications if attempting to clean a system. I've already mentioned Ad-Aware, my other recommendation is Spybot - Search & Destroy.

 

Reading Gretchen's blog today I saw a post entitled Do you have any questions for me? where she wrote

One of the most mysterious questions of any interview is usually the last one asked … “Do you have any questions for me?”  Wow.  What a loaded question!  What do you say?  Is it a test?  Is it a genuine request for inquiries?  Who knows!

Well, unfortunately, I don’t have a clear-cut answer to this question.  I’ve yet to figure it out myself.  The best advice I can give is that the motive behind the question and the way in which you should respond really varies from interviewer to interviewer and situation to situation.

I've always taken this as an opportunity to figure out if the team I am interviewing with is a good fit for me. Over time, I've come up with a short list of questions which I plan to use if I'm ever interviewing around Microsoft based on my knowledge of how things work here. The 5 topics listed below are the biggest causes of unhappiness and morale issues in teams across Microsoft. Working for teams that don't know their competitors, cut projects due to poor planning, and require people to work insane hours are just a few of the reasons I've seen people become frustrated in positions here.

1. How do you make decisions such as adding new features, entering a new competitive space or cutting features?

2. How do you contribute to your product unit's bottomline? If not, are you strategic?

3. Who are your competitors? Do you have any overlap with other Microsoft products?

4. Ask about work/life balance. What is the policy on flex time, earliest meeting times, on average what kind of hours people work, etc.

5. What are my growth prospects on this team?

6.  What is the worst thing about your job?

Question 6 is a bonus question. The first 5 questions should root out whether the team is an unhealthy work environment or not. The last one is more specific to the individual interviewing you but may give insight into your future manager(s).  Remember to ask everyone who interviews you these questions so you can compare notes.

 

Yesterday in my post Killing the "WinFS is About Making Search Better" Myth I wrote

Now this isn't to say that there aren't some searches made better by coming up with a consistent way to interact with certain file types and providing structured metadata about these files. For example a search like

Get me all the songs [regardless of file type] either featuring or created by G-Unit or any of its members (Young Buck, 50 Cent, Tony Yayo or Lloyd Banks) between 2002 and 2004 on my hard drive

is made possible with this system. However it is more likely that I want to navigate this in a UI like the iTunes media library than I want to type the equivalent of SQL queries over my file system.

I just found out that I can already do stuff like this today in iTunes. I can create a playlist by querying based on artist, song name, genre, year, rating, album and a lot more. I've been wishing for this functionality ever since I bought an iPod. Apple fucking rocks. I'll never use WinAmp again.

 

In the comments to my recent blog post RSS Bandit Gets Around Phil Weber asked Dare: In addition to manual deletion, please consider offering an option to "Automatically delete posts older than X days." Flagged posts should not be auto-deleted. Thank you! This functionality already exists in RSS Bandit. You can set it on a per feed level and have a global default setting as well. The user interface for it is misleading which is probably why most people don't know it exists. The fields called "Max Item Age" and "Default Maximum Item Age" should actually be labelled as "Delete Items Older Than" instead. I'll probably change the text in the code after posting this blog entry. Click below to see screenshots of this feature.
 

I recently read an InfoWorld article entitled Gartner: Ignore Longhorn and stick with XP where it states

Microsoft Corp. may choose never to release its vaunted and long-overdue project WinFS, following its removal from the next version of Windows, according to analysts Gartner Inc.
...
Microsoft has said Longhorn will still include local desktop searching as a taste of the power of WinFS' relational database capabilities, but Gartner sees this as a hint that WinFS may never arrive. "Because Microsoft has committed to improving search without WinFS, it may choose never to deliver the delayed WinFS," Gartner said.

The fundamental premise of the above statements is that the purpose of WinFS is to make local desktop search better or to use a cruder term to create "Google for the Desktop". It may be true that when it first started getting pitched one of the scenarios people described was making search better. However as WinFS progressed the primary scenarios its designers focused on enabling didn't have much to do with search. If you read Longhorn evangelist Jeremy Mazner's blog posting entitled What happened to WinFS? posted after the Longhorn changes were announced you'll find the following excerpt

The WinFS team spent a solid couple weeks going through this evaluation.  There are of course plenty of things you could do to increase the confidence level on a project the size of WinFS, since it has so many features, including:

• Built-in schemas for calendar, contacts, documents, media, etc
• Extensibility for adding custom schema or business logic
• File system integration, like promotion/demotion and valid win32 file paths
• A synchronization runtime for keeping content up to date
• Rich API support for app scenarios like grouping and filtering
• A self-tuning management service to keep the system running well
• Tools for deploying schema, data and applications

The above feature list is missing the recent decision to incorporate the features of the object relational mapping technology codenamed ObjectSpaces into WinFS. Taking all these features together none of them is really focused on making it easier for me to find things on my desktop.

At its core, WinFS was about storing strongly typed objects in the file system instead of opaque blobs of bits. The purpose of doing this was to make accessing and manipulating the content and metadata of these files simpler and more consistent. For example, instead of having to know how to manipulate JPEG, TIFF, GIF and BMP files there would just be a Photo item type that applications would have to deal with. Similarly one could imagine just interacting with a built in Music item instead of programming against MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, and WAV files. In talking to Mike Deem a few months ago and recently seeing Bill Gates discuss his vision for WinFS to folks in our building a few weeks ago it is clear to me that the major benefits of WinFS to end users is the possibilities it creates in user interfaces for data organization.

Recently I switched from using WinAmp to iTunes on the strength of the music organizational capabilities of the iTunes library and "smart playlists". The strength of iTunes is that it provides a consistent interface to interacting with music files regardless of their underlying type (AAC, MP3, etc) and provides ways to add metadata about these music files (ratings, number of times played) then organize these files according to this metadata. Another application that shows the power of the data organization based on rich, structured metadata is Search Folders in Outlook 2003. When I used to think of WinFS I got excited about being able to perform SQL-like queries over items in the file system. Then I heard Bill Gates and Mike Deem speak about WinFS then saw them getting excited about the ability to take the data organizational capabilities of features like the My Pictures and My Music folders in Windows to the next level it all clicked.

Now this isn't to say that there aren't some searches made better by coming up with a consistent way to interact with certain file types and providing structured metadata about these files. For example a search like

Get me all the songs [regardless of file type] either featuring or created by G-Unit or any of its members (Young Buck, 50 Cent, Tony Yayo or Lloyd Banks) between 2002 and 2004 on my hard drive

is made possible with this system. However it is more likely that I want to navigate this in a UI like the iTunes media library than I want to type the equivalent of SQL queries over my file system.

More importantly, this system doesn't make much easier to find stuff I've lost on my file system like Java code I wrote while in college or drafts of articles created several years ago that I never finished. When I think "Google on the Desktop", that's the problem I want to see solved. However MSN just bought LookOut so I have faith that we will be solving this problem in the near future as well.