I finally got around to finishing the article the XML Journal folks asked me for a few months ago. I've sent it out for review and have gotten a mixed set of reactions from the first two reviewers. One guy thinks it's great and suggested a minor tweak while the other felt it was too abstract without code samples and couldn't make much sense of it. As I sent the article out I had a gut feeling that it needed code samples but decided to wait and see what others thought. I guess it does make sense for an article entitled One API To Rule Them All to have code samples. :)

Click below for a more thoughts on release early, release often vs. better together, a response to Ted Neward's response to my comments on his article on Strongly Typed Infosets in the .NET Framework, and an addendum to my post on corporate secrets.

I've taken to working out regularly and have decided I need a more flexible way of listening to music while I work out than a Sony Discman. I have a friend who has an iPod who's had nothing but good things to say about it. I'm considering getting one but haven't been sure which one to get and have been slightly put off by some conflicting reviews about whether you can connect it to a Windows box or not.

Thoughts below on corporate secrets, the internet's failure to cure us of our biases and make us all members of the global village, the closure of Eclectic (the XML-DEV blog) and a review of Ted Neward's recent article Blending Objects and XML: Building Strongly-Typed Infosets in .NET

I've been reading Phil Greenspun's weblog for the past couple of weeks and I have to say he probably has the most interesting ideas I've seen online in a while. Two of his more interesting posts in the past few weeks have been Americans No Longer Welcome At IBM? and Widening gap between rich and poor leads to aggressive driving?. I don't necessarily agree with a lot of what he writes but I find that his opinions are always interesting as opposed to reading various online journals from technical folks which are either wanking about technology, wanking about blogging or boring us with the mundane minutae of their lives (like my K5 diary).

More below on the Mozilla foundation, posting to eBay from your blog (whatever that means) and some thoughts on attendance by Microsoft employees to Microsoft sponsored conferences.

By the way the title of this diary entry came from this Slashdot post

It's so fucking hot in my apartment I can't sleep. The worst part of living in an apartment in the Seattle area is the general lack of air conditioning in like 90% of the apartments out here. My apartment complex is particularly screwed up because the hallway is air-conditioned.

Ramblings below about Seattle festivals, Iraq and the War on Terror^TM, Dave Winer's recent announcement about RSS 2.0, and random XML geekery.

Thanks to an offtopic post to XML-DEV this morning I saw a post entitled Don't Be A ShareCropper on Slashdot which was a link to a rant by Tim Bray entitled The Web's The Place. The rant is full of the kind of idealized view of Open Source and the World Wide Web I thought only existed in the late nineties at the height of the dotbomb boom. A dissection of some aspects of his rant below.

Poll: Best Part of the DotBomb Era?

A fellow B0rg drone recently got was ticked off at me in private email because I had the nerve to link to Microsoft products in a recent post about software I can't stand. I hadn't realized that working in the Belly of the Beast meant I no longer can dislike software that doesn't meet my needs. However I do agree that I should have provided some constructive criticism or some descriptions of the problems I have instead of just being negative. So I go into some detail this time.

I also have a few more links and thoughts about the Necho project.

Poll: Most Disappointing Movie of the Summer So Far?

A:

XML is more than just a text format for describing documents. It is a mechanism for describing structured and semi-structured data, which provides access to a rich family of technologies for processing such data. Powerful abstractions like the XML Information Set open the door to processing non-textual data such as file systems, relational databases and even programming language objects using XML technologies. XML brings us one step closer to universal data access

It always surprises me that even though it's been about six years since ESR's original Cathedral and the Bazaar and almost four years since Nikolai Bezroukov 's A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar people seem to conflate bazaar style development with open source licensing terms.

Source code licensing terms are typically orthogonal to whether the software is developed cathedral-style or bazaar-style. This is why I consider articles like Opensource Code More Refined Than Closed? to be based on a fundamentally flawed premise. People seem to think that Open Source means "any Tom, Dick and Harry can checkin a change" when many of us know this is not the case. This seems to have been one of the major misconceptions of the folks behind GotDotNet Workspaces and why they give any body who is signed up for a project checkin privileges.

More below on XML-RPC vs. SOAP vs. REST for the Echo Project's blogging API, thoughts on BlogX and yet more reasons why derivation by restriction in W3C XML Schema is unnecessary ( Harry Pierson edition)

Follow the instructions provided by Luke Huttemann for the w::bloggar plugin for SharpReader and replace SharpReader with RSS Bandit. Aren't plugins grand?