It is NOT for the OIL!

Yes, Belgium is present on the world-map again!Just to make sure: Let's add another blog-link to boost this topic on the Google charts :-)

The BeJUG is prepping up to get his anual conference on stage. Mark your calendars: 3rd and 4th December. But all of you out there might of have heard already, after all we had all of this surounding it by now:

• Sun reaffirms : "No JBoss at JavaPolis"
• SunBE is anti-matter to clue
• Sun sinks to all new lows and manhandles a JUG
• even a genuine thread at jakarta-general: Sun

So I find myself adding my 2 cents here after asking myself 'why all the fuzz?'

Basically Sun does not want to be paying the stage performance of some guy, service, product they perceive as competition. [period] I can hardly see how this could be a surprise to anyone.

Apparently it surprises even Sun, so they lose themselves in finding some politic correct reasoning for their behaviour (other then the simple competition truth) which goes over non-profit and non-certification paths that are too easily going to be used against them.

IMHO, Sun just likes to hide under the 'politic correct and independant' flag of an orginal grass-root movement as the Java-User-Group to make some marketing shots at the audience... it seems logic to me that crossing the borders of that independance will leave some to bleed. Hoping it will not be the BeJUG however, they are on the other side just wanting that the sponsor injected money will get the speaker-wishlist up on the scene for their members. Just guessing: It would be hard to perceive the presence of some JBoss presentation in there as irrelevant.

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I can't help thinking about the US coming to the rescue of Liberty, Deomcracy and Worldwide Peace lately.

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READ THIS: What is really enteresting though is that Jacek Ambroziak and Adam Bosworth already have confirmed to show up.

# Posted by mpo at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Superdad.

Happy Els back home yesterday evening after a full week of battery-recharging. Mission accomplished: all prepped up for the upcoming tourist-season over at Veld&Duin (yes, generated with Apache Cocoon)TIP: Applying paint to childrens' faces hides the bruises after one week of having only dad around to take care.

Tuur wanted to be a lion, not really menacing is he? Still trying to figure out how Fien recognised herself as a rabbit... # Posted by mpo at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Unproven Truth...

I do relate to this... specially where Stefano keeps using question marks I'm with him all the way. Just about none of the posed questions were not already dwelling my brain before (a lot less clearly expressed for sure)

I've been mentioning him before, but good 'ol Kurt already new that one fool can ask a lot more pertinent questions then a thousand wise men could prove as being true, relevant, inapropriate or false... Only bad thing about that last statement is that it uses words as 'fool' and 'wise men' to falsly imply that (just) asking the questions is the easy part...

So let me ask a question: Isn't the 'lawmaking practice' just there to stabalize and solidify what has been emerging as the most succesful (as selected by Darwin) way of being?

Times change but argueably in a way controlled by anyone, history does enable the ones on top to solidify their position. But this can very well get in their own way and hampers their flexibility sooner or later, no? And if not, then that fact might just be Reality's prove that the style, pattern, philosophy was one to comply with rather then to compete with?

Stefano's proposal to (formally??) let go of control and decentralize is one I'ld vote for right away. However it sounds a bit like 'organizing' the chaos. (which makes me remember the falseness in the word 'empowerment'). Seems like a battle that is lost before it is begun?

Hm, the only way for me to keep some mental health in all of this is to flee to the axiom of 'INDESTRUCTABLE IDEAS'. No solidifcation or controlling process can make thoughts go away, or extinguish them. From there I would be comfortable that somehow all thoughts will eventually get their way and influence larger parts of human thinking.

(Damn, that is as horifying as it is comforting! I'ld better stick to just posing the questions?)

So were these ideas or just forgotten memories?

# Posted by mpo at 03:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

to ReST or not to...

Steven is triggering me again...

• can't say I relate to the conclusions he's making: there _are_ libraries out there to handle both HTTP and XML binding
• but I do agree that ReST seems to remain a grass-root movement, which quite naturally fosters a 'roll your own' mentality

Maybe there is room for more formally pinning down how to repeatedly do ReSTy things rather then re-invent the wheel each time. (Why am I thinking xlink and roles?)

In the mean time, I'm adding these to my to-read list:

• Rest purity and HTTP Get rocks
• Google's gaffe
• Hyperlinks matter

*Update*: Sam adds more to the reading list:

• Google's Genius

He even reminded me of the true classic(S) on the subject: ReST + SOAP together with Noun vs. Verb

# Posted by mpo at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Ouch

At some point, looking for even more simplicity you will just burn your ass :-)

So, inversing the logic that would mean there is something comforting about complexity?

# Posted by mpo at 09:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Pleaing guilty
Sometimes storytelling is too much fun. Glad to be standing corrected though. # Posted by mpo at 09:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Old wine in... new poems.

Just reformulated some earlier thoughts... lazy me just got tired of trying to figure it out myself, so hoping that bouncing off my vague ideas in the group will at least deepen my own insight. There is some comfort in knowing that I'm not alone on some of this... (if not in detail, then at least in principle)

I'm a bit afraid though that the embryonal state of my thoughts is very much causing me to fall in my own trap of elliptical and near-poetic communication style for which my colleagues like me so much...

In fact there is even more embryo's fighting up under the skull here, so more verses for future poems:

• Can we have an ObjectResolver like we have the SourceResolver? Euh, Do they need to be kept separate?
• Or is this already been called an input-module?
• Where is the fundamental difference between how sitemaps look at subsitemaps, actions and flowscripts? Why the different contracts between them? (Why the sometimes strong feelings for or against one or the other?)
• What is (detached from the notational wearies) so different between the transforming pipes that use xslt with document() function, jxpath, and even xinclude to some extend.
• Why can our sources be xmlized (and thus plugged in just about everywhere), while it requires a specific jxpath-aware pipeline element to extract smaller pieces out of an object-graph.
• And reversely why can we only xmlize the full source, and not extract jxpath like strings out of it to be used in e.g. attribute-values.

See, when Larry said 'tmtowtdi', he didn't mean the same thing needed so many different interfaces, did he?I'm probably just getting fundamental on the still existant walls between XML and objects? Up for a little [POLL] then: Which statement describes best your fundamental approach:

• Java objects? You mean the things that weren't serialized to XML yet? (There exists a wealth of standard, loose coupled data-handling techniques that work on pure self-describing XML-data structures)
• XML? Ah, that handy notation to communicate object states with? (Java objects have methods, you can never grasp those dynamics inside XML)

Maybe we need to see that we should not be made to chose? # Posted by mpo at 02:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Useful, more useful, MSIE (not crashing)

Well you can maybe crash it easily... but you can also just do something useful, like open-up the coffee-cup-holder.

This seems to do it:

if (document.all) { 

 var oWMP = new ActiveXObject('WMPlayer.OCX.7'); 

 var colCDROMS = oWMP.cdromCollection; 

 for (i = 0 ; i<colCDROMS.Count; i++) { 

 colCDROMS.Item(i).Eject(); 

 colCDROMS.Item(i).Eject(); 

 }

}

# Posted by mpo at 02:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

20030507 TravelLog

4.27 pm

Eurostar leaves from London Waterlo Station

19.47

Eurostar arrives at Lille Flandres

21.03

Steven drops me off. Home.

In memory of how we organized travel in the previous century I can only conclude that there is something really dull about progress and luxury. (Note that calculating the timezone-boundary-crossing makes it even worse)

# Posted by mpo at 05:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

20030507 ConferenceLog

Celebs at work.

Carefully choosing the Balmoral track this morning... where I get splendid entertainment from first (mr. SAX1) David Megginson, and (mr half a parser) Simon St Laurent. The main memories from David's presentation:

• The (only useful) possible use for XML Dave is seeing is in publishing DATA online (for all the rest, there is already quite some stuff out there to everyones satisfaction)
• Folowing up on his talk there is http://www.megginson.com/pubxs/ to keep track of the status

And the funny ones:

• XML is a solution in search for a problem.
• Standardisation organizations are (in terms of biological reproduction strategy) Frogs.

[the comparison was between humans having little offspring which they nurture and protect, while frogs just throw around their eggs (specs) and don't really worry that a lot of them do not survive]

During QA: ReSTy Paul Prescod in the room relates to HTTP publishing data and having xpointer-like references to retrieve specific data.

I make the mental note of sending them both a reference to xreporter.

Validation stinks!

Efficient presentation by the people of DecisionSoft on a proposal for possibly expressing arbitrary business rules inside an XML Schema (or did you think it was already complex enough?)

I find myself feeling quite alone in the room with some remarks on

• the fact that validation is already handled in systems out there, and reinventing the wheel will not make anyones lives easier, it will just add another copy of the same business logic to the scene
• programming/scripting languages with an angle bracket syntax are to be abolished (hmm, ant too?)
• if the business analyst is really the person we want to help, then formal modelling techniques like adding OCL to the UML might be making more sense then XML-implementation specific schema-extension

Of course... to a lot of the people at the conference XML is to be seen as conceptual esoteric manna for your brain, and is surely not the handy implmentation stuff I take it for...

Sorry, for thinking it's just XML.

Jacek again.

Next to Gregor this young man has a beautifull full-text-zone-aware search engine lingering around on the laptop's HD.Mmm, maybe he's not all that lazy :-)

And we get to talk in metafors now. He wants to keep Gregor (15 months of personal coding investment) as his own (closed source) product to build a business upon. After the build-up respect in two mindsharing days I cannot make the OSS arguments about doing it different, and can only whish him all the luck. He is after all right: people that are satisfied with the free/open family car can do so and drive wherever they like, he'll be glad to sell the F1 version to those people that need it and can afford it.However: the analogy (as the good ones do) goes quite a long way: his F1 is to be used on the racing track only.

Maybe I can plant some thought in his brain as well: From as little of what I understand from what Gregor is doing, part of the pudding-proof is in how the parser-API is presenting the XML content to the translets... And basically a whole wealth of SAX based applications (why am I thinking Apache Cocoon here) could benefit from the power-driven ideas behind that.

Jacek is pretty concerned with his intelectual property here (understandable with his intelect), but I honestly think his business could only benefit from the fact that all roads out there would be getting upgraded to racing-standards... it would allow his car to seemlessly drive home after the spinning rounds on he current racing track he built for himself...

Mental note to me: I left him with the idea of making public the (non-implementation) API of some, let's call it, sax-ng. I need to follow up on that, and actively help him doing so (if and when he's ready and willing)

While at it, Simon St. Laurent's effort with Ripper might fit in as well.

# Posted by mpo at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

20030506 BirthdayLog

Bustje Kapp'n

Missing half of the conference today: I'm starting to notice that the deal between the conference organization and the hotel was to put all the interesting stuff in the last days... So I'm not particularly getting the feeling that I'm missing anything when I just lock myself up in my hotel room and finish up on a due offer for a customer back home.

Yeah, what a way to spend my birthday, I find some resolution in the notion that getting 33 wasn't exactly an easy year for Jesus either...

Conferencing again

Steven does the Cocoon intro show, and Uche's code sample shows the point I tried to make yersterday about serious XSLT abuse. Quite some app they build with Cocoon there.Adding the fact that I had quite some Cocoon coverage in my pre-conference tutorial on java/xml and oss that makes this conference had quite some Cocoon humming in the corridors...

Lazy Jacek

Bumping into the fill-rouge of this conference, Jacek.

As some (too little) payback for all the fresh thoughts planted by him in my brain yesterday I share to him the utter wisdom my father would always say: (in Dutch first, on special request by Janek)

• Hij die niet ijvert om zijn eigen werk makkelijker te maken, is een luiaard.
• He who is not in pursuit of making his own work more easy, is really lazy.

(-- Gaston Portier, Belgian bus- and tram driver)

So let me make a quality statement on Jacek's skills: lazy to the n'th

Cocoon gettogether

Meeting up with 6 cocooners in the center of London is equal fun as meeting 100 of them in Ghent... Aaargh, we really need to get started on the 2003 edition of the bigger version. Just hoping people in more local areas do this kind of stuff, it's so much more connecting the community to people then to code (Stefano's adagium)

# Posted by mpo at 05:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

20030505 ConferenceLog

I get to teach.

Boy, do I like this, a room full of people that have payed to pay attention to me. Getting ready for seriously intellectual abuse of the audience...

Ouch, I'm in an XML only zone here...

I have this classical slide in my presentations which basically explains why XSLT is bad for your mental health... and normally it's just a funny part of the show, and I would see all the heads nodd YESYESYES... Not today! These XML-straight-edgers want to lynch me for stating that there is so much one could do with just Java and not wanting my programming language of choice to have a pointy-tagged syntax...

Somehow we get to calm down a bit and make some consesus on the facts:

• writing XSLT _is_ programming. In fact it's due time that the current free hacking mode of writing those gets on a level where there is a full programming cycle of design, modelling, best practices, patters, debugging, (junit) testing, and all of that hopefully supported by a decent IDE environment. I know it's declarative, but writing Java is also _authoring_ in my book.
• XSLT is the best tool for the carefully selected job: purely transforming XML to XML. So don't even bother to explain how to put in my own extensions...

nu.XOM

My main course of new API coverage is about nu.XOM. Hm, nobody in the room even heard about it? This while I'm quite sure Eliotte didn't mean it to be such a secret... maybe I should just post back my slides to him, see what happens, they are in debt with him to a large extend anyway. (which is not that unlogic given his ownership on the thingy)

If nothing else, teaching people about nu.XOM is a great way for showing DOM's deficiencies and gotcha's.

Celebs

In the afternoon Jeni Tennison is in the room next door. I have vivid memories of discussing regexp declared parsing with her more then a year ago. So I dive next door in the lunch break to shake hands and put a face to the emailaddress. Fun.

And confronting: Conceptual me never got round to actually finishing up on the regexsl parser idea of then. Still halfish finisdhed on my HD... I guess Chaperon offers everyone what they need now anyway... If not, just yell, would be happy to revive the thinking.

Speaker's Drink

Known faces all over. And mingling... All the way up to the real contact with Jacek Ambroziak. Utterly refreshing. Basically I am not such a great innovative thinker myself, but I do have a 6th sense to feel new ideas in other peoples minds... Talking to Jacek is a great way to sharpen my antenna again. In the neuron-transmission radius of (knife-)sharp people like Jacek there is a fair danger for utter idea-bandwidth congestion... It's not untill a lot later that night that I get to parse and process everything he thinks...

On a more lightweight level, we get to find the similiraties between Large Corporations and XML Validation as well as between budweiser beer and having sex in a canoe... Hoping this is the start of a deeper intelectual friendship we can sustain over the email-channel :-)

# Posted by mpo at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

20030504 TravelLog

9.43

We leave home by car. Ostend no longer operates a passenger boat service accross the channel. The option being called 'via Calais' inspires us to attach a long due visit to some friends in Ghent. Hence the early leave.

9.58

Tuur declares he wants to go home.

10.02

Tuur throws up and manages to puke over the complete rear space of the car. Fien takes it rather well and finds it actually quite 'gross' Cleaning up I make the mental note that my audience tomorow will enjoy my sweater being cleaned by the hotel laundry services.

11.05

Arriving with Annemie and Matthew a bit later then promised. Nice catch-up talks, exquisit lunch, enjoying the company and the pleasant atmosphere they created throughout living quarters and garden. Today's serving it with a shining spring sun makes it double.

14.26

Family drops me off at the station. Sudden push up of expectations at the ticket desk are not met: There really is NO Eurostar today. The clerk didn't realize the 4th of May was today.

15.42

We pass the depressing railway station of Tourcoing and get a visit of 5 customs officers. (Casual clothing and all) Has been a long time since I saw any of those really operate inside Europe (I should take these uncommon transportation modes more often.)It's probably only about knowing how to do your job efficiently but all other passengers must have noticed also that the white guy (me) is the only one that doesn't need to open his bags. My explanation "Je vais á Londres" together with "L' Eurostar ne roule pas aujourd'hui" is all that it takes.

16.13

Swiss clockwork driven sharpness. My train for Boulogne leaves. Everyone on this train seems to be dressed up for a steamy night on the beach over there. I manage to find the carriage with "les pensionés" that are either listening to headphones-classical-music (eyes shut) ot talking to each other in a funny french-influenced old flemish. I even understand some words from my dialect. Frans Vlaanderen. They get off in Hasebrouck.

17.15

It is hot in this train. A midly sour smell from my sweater is making sure I will not forget what needs to be done about it.

18.17

I get to learn:

• that the ferry booking was noted down for 6.45 am (!= 18.45)
• that the "every 45' minutes scheme" actually means: the next one is operated by our competitor on the other side of the room
• that switching companies is not an option since the fair is already charged from my VISA (we like you to book early)
• that there are nicer areas to waste 90 minutes

18.45

Boooring

19.13

I see the 4th fire-arm of the day while being on french territory. I make the personal observation that I never see those in Belgium. Over there one of the ever returning election topics comes from the undefined 'feeling of unsafety' that seems to have grabbed each and everyone. My personal opinion on the subject os that not arms but outspoken voices will make the difference.

It's probably just easier for a 33y-old, 1m86-high packaged 91 kilos of white male meat but I always make an outspoken remark when I witness any of the smaller deilcts that are said to cause this: boys fighting, youngsters littering, useless brutality... stupid things but something in me says that the grown-up, big-crime villains were just never told that what they did was wrong? I vote for some civil duty to perform this kind of vocal public education to actually balance the right everyone has to a proper education into good citizenship.

19.45

In the boat, waiting another 15' before we leave. Must of been something like 15 years ago that I was on one of these. Can't even remember the setting, occasion, company. I do remember puking all over the North Sea, but then again it could just be the sweater at my feet colouring that part of memory.

19.57

There'sa boat dat's leaving soon for...

21.01

Switching to UK time, almost on British soil.

8.20 pm

I must be the only male passing customs without a bag full of tabaco.

9.17 pm

Welcome to the railroad-museum. If the brits were indeed the pioneers of the railroads, then the current state of their rail-system is an obvious case of the 'law of the hampering headstart'

0.21 pm

finally checked in - laundry handed over - head down

# Posted by mpo at 05:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)