Just got back from Vancouver BC, where I attended the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group meeting and interoperability event. Two days of implementers sitting quietly in a conference room banging on each other’s implementations got us much closer to proving that the spec is ready for prime time. Paul and I had a great time designing the most complicated perl pipeline of XSLT on the planet to aggregate the results and display them. It really helped build the excitement to see how green squares spreading slowly through the matrix!
Vancouver was quite delightful too. The residents seemed to be celebrating the depression caused by the twin blows of having 28 straight days of rain, and then narrowly missing the record set in 1953 of 29 days. But having pouring rain for only half my stay was fortunate for me. Upon arriving, I found a hungry pair of English blokes (Paul and Marc) at the hotel, and joined them in cracking the shells off a succulent Spicy Black Bean Dungeness Crab and other Chinese delicacies.
During lunch a few days later Paul and I took a tiny rainbow-colored Aquabus over to Granville Island, which is a trendy artist colony with a great market, food court, and lots of art studios and galleries. I acquired a tiffin (essentially an Indian lunch box) full of savory Indian delicacies — worth returning for another the next day on our way to biking the seawall path around Stanley Park on the west end of the island. We even tried for a couple of geocaches but only the one nearest the hotel succumbed to our investigations.
Pictures snapped during my explorations are now posted on Flickr.
My announcement of the WSDL 2.0 CR to the SOA Web Services Journal, where it became a news flash complete with my picture! Or, actually, someone’s picture. Looks like Noah Mendelsohn of IBM to me…
From the Verbal Energy column following trends in language in the Christian Science Monitor comes more evidence that the language of political discourse is being IED’d. Ruth Walker reports that the usage of the word "mainstream" has been observed changing from the time-honored meaning:
Mainstream: the prevailing current of thought.
to a quite opposite meaning:
Out of the Mainstream: Used to describe the ideology of any political opponent."
When a word can mean two opposite things simultaneously, it no longer is useful for real political discourse. Instead it’s all about whipping up emotions, and unthinking support for one’s position. The Republican talking point machine has clearly been studying Lewis Carroll:
When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less”.
Orwell warned about damaging liberty by damaging the language. Pair this warning with Richard Mitchell who ties clear thinking to clear language. How can democracy survive when the ability to discuss/think clearly about the important issues facing us is under active attack? Soon we’ll be reduced to single syllables, on our way to confining our language to grunts and whines. And we won’t be whining about "democracy" at that point because we will no longer have either the word, or the concept.
P.S. My prediction on the next word to fall into meaninglessness: "activism" as in "judicial activism." Challenge your conservative friends for a meaningful definition.
I just added to my blog a list of books I’m currently reading. Ideally, I’d like the most recent on top, but it appears that the way the lists work in MSN spaces is that new items appear on the bottom. Not bad, but there doesn’t seem to be any facility for reordering the list. Any MSN Spaces guys listening - add "move up/move down" buttons to the list editor please!
As I’ve just spent some time broadcasting the WDSL 2.0 Call for Implementations announcement to every place I can thing of, I’ll put a copy of it here too.
The WSDL 2.0 specification [1,2,3] is now officially a W3C Candidate Recommendation (CR), the phase during which the Web Services Description Working Group [4] verifies the implementability of the spec and tests the interoperability between implementations from different vendors.
The CR phase is designed to flush out any remaining inconsistencies, edge cases, and ambiguities in the spec that arise from implementing the spec in a variety of different environments. During this phase, the Working Group provides evidence that the spec is and will have independent implementations. After successful completion, the specifications move to final W3C Recommendation status.
Accordingly, the Working Group is very interested in hearing about any implementations of the specification, and invites implementers to contact the Working Group to identify industry implementations.
The Working Group also invites implementers to try out their implementations against, and contribute to, the small but growing WSDL 2.0 Test Suite [5]. An interoperability event will be held as the implementations and test suite mature, which will be open to all implementers of the specification.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-wsdl20-primer-20060106/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-wsdl20-20060106
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-wsdl20-adjuncts-20060106
[4] http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/desc
[5] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/ws/desc/test-suite/index.html
A few days shy of four years after the effort kicked off, the W3C Web Services Description Working Group released WSDL 2.0 as Candidate Recommendation! This is a major milestone, representing the disposition of all issues raised by the members of the Working Group, and comments from the public. Here’s a combined graph of our public comments that resembles a cross-section of the Himalayas.
Candidate Recommendation means that we’ve summited, and we need to do now is hope there are no sudden storms on our way back to base camp…
Hugo led me to the Kodak EasyShare V750 announcements, and while nothing could shake my pride in my Casio Exlim Z750, the specs on the Kodak are pretty cool. It seems to have everything the Casio has (big screen, scene modes, full video), and more (wide-angle, in-camera panorama stiching, auto-rotation sensing, etc.). Even the size compares favorably with the Casio, at 1/2 an inch wider but smaller in overall volume.
The only spec not up to par seems to be battery life, which is exceptional on the Casio. Did I tell you my wife took the Casio to Switzerland, took over 400 shots over three weeks, and didn’t even pull out the second battery I’d purchased for the occasion?
I bopped the last two gophers in my Windows Media Center 2005 upgrade (see part 1, part 2, and part 3) last night - DVDs wouldn’t play within Media Center interface, and the correct association of icons on my auxiliary "drives" (SD, CompactFlash, Memork Stick, and SmartMedia) after adding a secondary hard drive.
The DVD playing problem, as expected, succumbed to the installation of a new DVD decoder, one that advertised support for MCE2005 (the one that comes with the Gateway was apparently released in 2002). I chose NVidia’s PureVideo decoder since there were prior reports of it working and it was half the price of an upgrade to the WinDVD decoder. The free download is working now and I have 30 days to drop the $19.95 for the basic version. (Or decide like a technological lemming that surround sound is in my near future and get a pricier version which supports it.)
The icon challenge was a little trickier. While you can change icons on folders and shortcuts through the "Properties" dialog, there is no such interface for the name and icon of a drive. A search of Help and Support was not actually helpful or supportive. After searching in vain for icons that might be squirreled away in hidden system files on the C: drive, I decided the association of drive letter to name and icon must be stored in the registry. Start/Run…/"regedit" gets you the graphical interface to the registry, but the registry contains thousands of entries, and searching for the text "icon" resulted in hundreds of matches of which I eventually wearied of wading through.
An MSN Search on the full English phrase "How do I change the icon on the disk drive in Windows XP?" led me to a useful site with tips and tweaks for XP. Tips 119 and 237 offered scripts for changing the icons on the primary and secondary drives. While I would be extremely wary of running scripts off a random internet site, I did download and look at (not run) the scripts, and found that the last one modified a registry entry of:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\
With this path I was able to find the pretty self-explanatory registry keys which associated the drive letter with a name and icon. By shifting the drive letter up one, (D: -> E:), the icons and names were restored to their rightful places. Except H: still seemed to be taken up by the DVD drive, which overrid the Memory Stick Icon. After some fruitless search on registry entries to reset the drive letter, I simply moved the Memory Stick icon to I:.
It’s pretty amazing though that this particular rabbit hole (OK, I hear you! I’m quitting the small animal theme already!) still exists - dynamic allocation of drive letters combined with static descriptions of those drives in the registry. A mismatch as awkward and poisonous as a platypus (OK, so I lied about the small animal - call me a rat). Not only was adding a second hard drive completely painless, but I can’t meaningfully assign a Camera icon to drive J:, because sometimes J: is associated with a USB key or a Rio Muvo. I remember the old Mac days (probably hasn’t changed much) where you simply pasted your new icon into the Properties window and you were set. And you didn’t have to name your primary disk drive "C:". Ironic to call that the "old days"!
Anyway, I think I’m done with the upgrade. I’m sure you’re tired of reading about it! Before trying this at home, stock up on patience and persistence, take good notes, and share your success back with the community so others can follow your footsteps.
I see Charlton has started blogging, and his reference to the "most dangerous idea" is a sign that it will be worth subscribing too. Even if he then immediately stumbles into Semantic Web fireswamp from which no one has ever returned. (Hope Charlton ducks that swipe and it connects where it’s meant to ;-).
From Paul (who else?) comes a couple of interesting ways to look at the year in review. First, he pointed me to his year in travel, as mapped through Great Circles. My air travel for 2005 is mapped below. With multiple trips to Seattle, and fewer trips than in past years, I’m still well over 50,000 miles for the year, roughly around the world twice.
In addition, Paul summarized his year of blogging through a monthly cut-and-paste of the most memorable phrase. That’s easy for Paul, whose wealth of British venacular and love for words gives him lots of material to choose from. My list isn’t nearly so interesting, and doesn’t even start in January! Perhaps I should resolve to use more colorful language in 2006?
- May: or is it Prii?
- June: subject to decades of Pavlovian associations
- July: "base" does seem to be an apt term.
- August: the parallels between Wonkaland and [Michael Jackson's] Neverland are difficult not to infer.
- September: double bag [DEET] if it’s near your toothbrush
- October: first rain of turkeys of the season
- November: like a demented torpedo
- December: flashback outro
Just to continue documenting the details of my homebrew upgrade, I fixed one of the previous unresolved areas - Google Earth now works again!
 For New Year’s Santa brought a new Dell 37" LCD TV ;-). Not only is the size wonderful, but it can be clearly driven as a monitor at 1280×768, making reading of text and web pages, not to mention photos, work! And the clarity of DVDs is amazing compared to the two-decade old Sony.
However, I did have a little bit of strange behavior when driving dual monitors off my single display adapter when one is VGA and one is DVI (through an HDMI adapter), instead of VGA and SVideo. When waking from sleep, the secondary display doesn’t come on. Sometimes it seems to get confused which monitor is which, and it takes some fiddling with the display control panel to get the display back up. So I thought I’d try updating the video drivers.
I first found and tried to install a newly released version of the Catalyst drivers (5.13) from the ATI web site, but the install failed, complaining about a corrupt or missing video driver. So after reverting to a system restore checkpoint (how cool is that anyway?) I then installed the drivers recommended by Windows Update (which I previously found to be incompatible with the Media Center functionality), and then redid the Catalyst install. Media Center seems to be working fine, and I haven’t yet seen any recurrence of the snooze problem(time will tell if it really is fixed), but the reinstall did allow Google Earth to start working again!
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