Author: andy

Microsoft have a free book available for download: “Building Interoperable Web Services: WS-I Basic Profile 1.0”

Extensible 3D: XML Meets VRML.

The “flash mob” craze has reached the UK. Sorry, but that’s just so last month.

Now that Gnomedex is done with, the PDC is the next conference that I can’t go to. Oh, okay then…

Google announced their News Alerts service yesterday. A specialised version of the independent Google Alerts service that I linked recently.&nbsp

Mark Pilgrim announces the Atom 0.2 snapshot.

Lawrence Lessig’s blog has a pointer to a good (as in careful and considered) analysis (pdf) of the SCO/IBM/Linux troubles, written by a US law professor. Interesting contrast to the rants over at Slashdot.

It seems that Yahoo Groups publishes RSS feeds for all their discussion groups. Well, I didn’t know… its not like they actually publicised it or anything… Archive.org has a page that gives you the feed URL for a given group. Neato.

Or it would be if it wasn’t totally broken at the Yahoo end. Yahoo generate an <item> for each message posted to a group, but the <title> is the poster’s name, not the message’s subject. The subject actually appears in the <description>, together with a link to the message text. So, for, say, the wonderful WinTechOffTopic group, you get this abomination.

Okay, so I understand why they don’t provide the full message text in the feed: they want people to register and view their advertisements. But this is fecking unusable! Who ever wants the messages keyed on author name? With a femtosecond’s thought this could have been so good. Bah.

I’ve whipped-up a quick Echo feed, and it validates!

It’s based on the 1st July snapshot, and specifically this example. A few limitations: 1. No topics; 2. All times are in GMT even though we’re currently on BST; and 3. The mimetype is “application/echo+xml” because I can’t find out what it should be!

Yeah! I feel so current!

Following-on from my earlier experiments in ASP.NET custom control writing, I’ve now stirred some XML into the mix. And learned a bit more about ADO.NET in the process.

Storing the contents of the navigation bar in a database table turned-out to be a pain in the butt. Adding and moving entries by directly editing the table and primary key values was just too difficult. I contemplated writing some kind of client app to make it easier, but I just don’t have the time. What I wanted was a storage format that was easy to edit using existing tools. The answer was obvious: So I modified the navigation bar control to pull the menu options from an XML file that I can edit with XML Spy and upload to the site. Nice and easy. I like it when things work.

Today I saw a Vulcan. A real one. She was behind me in the sandwich queue at M&S, and he had really slanted  eyebrows and pointy ears. Obviously part or a Vulcan reconnaissance team. Okay, so here ears weren’t as pointy as, say, Spock – but they were still pretty pointy. She’d probably had them kind of adjusted before landing (or “beaming down” – can Vulcans do that?).

I had a digital camera in my pocket, but I didn’t think it wise to take a photo. I mean, we all know about the Vulcan death grip, right?