史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

Francisca Daniela

2006-12-09T17:23:00.000Z

At 10:12 AM today our new arrival was born. She is a few weeks early so she is in an incubator to help with her breathing but is doing well. Her name is Francisca Daniela and is the double of when her brother was born.

Loreto is doing fine but everyone is knackered. Time for a relaxing beer and some sleep (me, not loreto!).

Baby II on the way

2006-12-08T02:25:00.000Z

My wife's is now in hospital with our second baby arriving later today or tomorrow.

I think it's adrenaline that's keeping me awake as it is a few weeks earlier than we expected and so we have a ton of stuff to organize, not to mention a Spanish market she was involved with on Saturday.

Amazing thing is my 3yr old has slept through the whole thing and doesn't even realize yet!

SUSE Linux 10.1

2006-11-30T20:06:00.000Z

So this is my first post from my new SUSE Linux 10.1 installation, running in VMWare on Windows XP Pro. I was tempted to dual boot, but after the hassles of the last week (and to make backing up easy) i went for the virtual option.

I want to get Mono and the Mono IDE on it now. If i can develop on C# and it works, then i'll be very happy indeed. Long, long time since i played with Mono!

It's a very nice OS and i only wish it had a "Safe Mode" as i screwed up my display and had a bit of a nightmare figuring out command line options to revert it. I did - eventually.

I am tempted to go with Apache rather than XPS on Mono (XPS kept breaking in my tests in the Windows install), but i'll maybe start with XPS.

Installation Nightmare

2006-11-29T14:08:00.000Z

The last week has been a nightmare.

The idea came to me in a dream. Store all data on an external drive. Re-format the hard drive. Run everying on virtual machines. The PC has proven it can do all that with no hassle.

What i didn't account for was the hell that re-installing a Dell PC is. The result was machines running with hard drives hanging out, cables being detatched and re-attached, PATA drives in one machine, SATA in the other with a mish mash of cables....

It all happended because i removed the "factory" partitions and created my own. The Dell startup didn't like that. In fact, it said the disc was damaged "Return Code 7". My Dell setup disc would check for hardware and just go blank. So would every other disc i could get my hands on. Unless of course i turned off the primary drive and put my external drive in. This time however it would detect the drive was external and wouldn't allow me to go any further.

I just could not believe that by some coincidence the hard drive stopped working that very day i formatted it - yet many of the forums say it is broken, so give it back. Dells own hard drive utility tells you the disc is damaged. "No, I don't believe you" i said at 2 am in my underpants.

After opening up some machines and playing for a bit and temporarily borrowing some wires i managed to set up the hard drive as a slave on an existing box. I deleted all partitions, created a single partition and re-formatted. I installed Windows, took it back to my own machine and .... it fekin crashed. However, i had suspected the hardware between the two machines would be different and so i re-formmated and installed and everything worked. No damaged disc. All runs faster. I have my VM's all running and life is good.

I can now get Suse Linux installed and put Mono on as was the intention. I will leave the base alone and put put all the potentially shady stuff in VM's.

The lesson here - don't go with the crowd. If you got a hunch, then go with it. Go with it with a whisky, late night telly and your favourite underpants. Make sure you've every box open in the house with wires hanging out. Your 3rd old son gets to know what memory looks like, what a capacitor is, what resistence is (like he needed to know that) where the fan is - the only remaining question will likely be "Why is daddy doing this?".

Don't let the bastards grind you down and get that PC working.

Either that or spend the £50 for a new hard drive.

When iWoz a kid

2006-11-21T16:06:00.000Z

I've started reading iWoz - the story of Stephan/Stephen Wozniak. It's funny as my name was also written wrong on my christening certificate as "Stephen" and my mum had it changed but they just wrote a huge "V" through the "ph".

It started of really well, so i ended up reading for more in one sitting than i really had time for.

What interested me was his story about how his dad taught him stuff when he was young. His dad worked at Lockheed and would explain things in fairly technical detail, but in a way he could understand - even at the age of 4. It's not that he wanted to force him into being an engineer - it's more than he knew he'd listen and learn and that can only be good no matter what you end up doing. iWoz (alpha version at that time in his life i guess) therefore knew a whole bunch of stuff kids his age at school never knew. I certainly didn't know that stuff.

I really struck a chord as this is exactly how i am with my son. He is 3 but has a "secrets" book which is a science book and we read it quite often. He just keeps asking why and i figured i's get a book so when i don't know quite "why" i can ask the "secrets" book for help. This morning he wanted to know what happened with steam rollers and so we ended up with a discussion on how the shape of the tar changes with heat and the atoms move around, only to settle into a mor structured shape when cooled down.

Well, it wasn't quite like that - i tend to move around a bit and make weird noises as it keeps his attention more. We build a (small) robot the other week and he helped every step of the way. It's an easy way to get kids learning - don't make it a task - make it something you just *do*. I very rarely say "i'm going to learn this" - it comes as part of my day, i just end up reading or typing.

Looking forward to reading more.

Protege

2006-11-21T10:55:00.000Z

I used the Protege editor some years back and due to my issues around requiring support for multiple inheritance in my Schemas, i decided to see where it hasd got to. Well, it has added full OWL support and some excellent tutorial papers.

So, when working with OWL, here is my suggestion.

1. Download Protege 3.2 with the full plugins.
2. Create a new OWL document using OWL/RDF Files
3. Use OWL DL
4. Install Pellet as the reasoner and run the DIG Server on port 8181

With this creating and reasoning with your Ontologys is really quite simple. In fact, structuring them properly is harder than using the tools - the tools are really quite excellent now.

The cool thing is that with the reasoning engine and Protege taxonomy option, you can get multilpe inheritance indirectly by defining based on a monotonic inheritance hierarchy, but using inference through the reasoner to build your hierarchy. Now I can start looking at building some of these things now!

Your help needed

2006-11-20T15:35:00.000Z

Here's a shot in the dark!

My wife is the director of a Spanish kids toddler association in Glasgow. They are having a Christmas market next month and they ask for small donations from local businesses etc.

Does anyone know someone may be interested in donating something (not cash)? They have quite a few things, most of them from local businesses, but why should that stop you folks from the online world from participating!!

So, if any of you run an online business, would like some local advertising (even if you are a music start-up in the South of India!) and have a small donation to make then please contact me at connect AT stevenR2.com

Inheritance in Xml Schema and OWL

2006-11-18T09:09:00.000Z

I've been using Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect for a few years now and recently I have been using it to model and generate Xml Schema using UML. All was going nice until some requirements determined that I needed to support multiple inheritance.

The problem is that Xml Schema does not support nonmonotonic inheritace - that is, it only supports single inheritance. There are some work arounds, but i prefer to call these hacks and hacks always come back to bite you.

I haven't had any real issues with the single inheritance models in C# and Java, mainly as they at least support it indirectly via interfaces. However, it remains to be seen whether the current requirements for multiple inheritance cause any issues when i look at procedural definitions of the types i am creating.

However, in ruling out using Xml Schema I am getting back into the world of OWL and RDF, something i did quite a bit of work on some time ago. Gladly Stanford's Protoge editor has evolved and now has native OWL support and is pretty neat (unfortunetly i can't get their latest alpha 4.0 release to run, but that may be my lack of Java configuration knowledge - there are no instructions you see).

OWL does support the concept of multiple inheritance and much more. In fact i suppose in a way i am happy i have been driven back to it as tool support is now getting there. I'll be trying a few examples out over the weekend and it should be very interesting to start using some of the latest reasoners and see how they have evolved too.

Puskas

2006-11-17T10:54:00.000Z

I just got the news that Hungarian legend Puskas has died. I have only ever seen videos of him play and one of his greatest moments was here in Glasgow when he scored four goals in front of 135,000 people at Hampden Park in probably the best European final of all time.

Of all the players whose records i have looked at his is the one that sticks out - almost a goal a game in over 300 games for Hunary and the same in almost 500 games for Madrid.

You look around now and with Zidane going you wonder whether there is anyone near his class. Well, there isn't - but hopefull he's an inspiration for some and it won't be long until we see a new world number one.

R.I.P. Puskas

Create Xml Schema

2006-11-16T11:41:00.000Z

Writing Xml Schema by hand is good to know, however after a while it can become a bit of a burden writing everything in notepad. I have been using Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect for some years now, but only recently used their Xm Schema development tools.

They could make things a little more friendly, but not much. In the same way you create classes, relations and set multiplicity in UML, you can do the same for Xml Schema. Inheritance and more is very simple and generating the Schema is a single click.

Give it a shot and you'll be much happier in managing your schema development in a proper UML based IDE than in notepad or VS!

Mungo Bunce of Brockenborings

2006-11-15T13:19:00.000Z

You got a Hobbit name?

I read the following blogs:

Fard Broadbelt of Buckland
Drogo Sandybanks of Frogmorton
Drogo Loamsdown of Deephallow

...

ACS acquired by Dell

2006-11-14T15:08:00.000Z

ACS, the company i am doing some work for has just been acquired by Dell.

http://www.acseurope.com/pages/PressStatement.htm

Well done and best of luck!

like.com

2006-11-10T07:47:00.000Z

like.com has just launched - they allow you to discover things by appearance.

Google has acquired JotSpot

2006-11-01T09:11:00.000Z

Well this one took me a little by surprise!!

I've used Jot since the dawn of time it seems (or a good while anyway) and I never saw this one coming.

Best of luck to them!!

Windows Workflow Issues

2006-10-25T17:01:00.000+01:00

Sam Gentile posts about potential issues with the sept RC of WF. I've not ran into any issues yet, but be aware this may happen and save your entire Saturday afternoons! Some upcoming stuff from the guys at Redmond:

26-Oct
Live From Redmond: An In-depth Look at UpdatePanel
Kashif Alam
link
2-Nov
Live From Redmond: Enriching Existing ASP.NET Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions
Richard Ersek
link
9-Nov
Live From Redmond: Introducing the Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit
Joe Stagner
link
16-Nov
Live From Redmond: Building your own Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX control extender.
Joe Stagner
link
21-Nov
Live From Redmond: Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with “other” server technologies.
Joe Stagner
link
30-Nov
Live From Redmond: Microsoft AJAX Patterns - Implementing Predictive Fetch with Microsoft AJAX
Joe Stagner
link
8-Dec
Live From Redmond: An in-depth look at the "ListView" control
Kashif Alam
link
12-Dec
Live From Redmond: Team development on web applications
Jim Bresler
link

Opodo Nonsense

2006-10-25T16:09:00.000+01:00

With our second baby due this Christmas last night we booked flights for my wifes parents to come over from Chile to spend some time in the UK. After some looking around we go some decent prices at Opodo, booked them and after many failed attempts to get their paper ticket version working, we just booked the physical tickets. It was "very easy" accoring to their sales guy on the phone who had clearly never actually done so.

It was a little while later that i realised no insurance had been offered with the flight. I called them only to be told that "insurance isn't offered when your origin is outside the UK" and that "I " ... couldn't expect the system to work out that i was coming from outside the UK".

I can only imagine that a label indicating that your selected location was NOT the UK would't be beyond the souls that built the system - i even pointed out to her the fact that it displayed in a large orange box that there IS travel insurance for flights originating in the UK and that if the system can handle that, then the reverse isn't surely too tricky (the "else" part of the statement i'd hazard a guess).

She then started rambling on about reading the detailed terms and conditions, and mentioning that only important things can be placed on the front screen. Hands up who finds lack of flight and medical insurance to a country 2000 miles away a side issue??

The crazy thing is that she is saying it is MY fault even though we spent a reasonable amount of time booking. Sure, there are specific things in the T&C's you have to be aware of, but as a service provider and more importantly a company who would have possibly got repeat business from me, the fact that a fairly serious piece of information was glossed over and not even indicated by the system (or in fact by the rep on the phone earlier in the day) goes to show how bad services seem to be these days.

The response should be "Yes, we see that could be missed and we will look at putting a message to indicate there is no insurance with a link to possible 3rd party providers of your insurance".

The net result is that they are now way down on the list of companies i will any of my future trips with.

The Long Tail of Steve Jobs

2006-10-03T06:31:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading both iCon and The Long Tail. My conclusion is that Steve Jobs is himself a Long Tail. From Apple to neXt to Pixar and likely Disney, with the first PC, to iTunes, kids films and likely user generated content he seems to be gradually moving down the tail towards entertainment for the individual.

iCon was interesting - it certainly gives a frank opinion of Steve Jobs and you leave the book not sure sure whether he is a nice guy or all in it for himself, and whether he was very skillful or very lucky.

The Long Tail is an interesting read. I was amazed to read that when video's first emerged they were priced as much as $80 per film - a reaction to the fact less people would be going to see the film in the pictures - of course, the reality being video actually increased their reach.

So doesn't make you wonder how long they will react against cheaper music and film and at what point they will realize tat reducing the cost actually reaches out to a far larger audience who will consume more, for less. The key of course is getting the user to listen to that first song, or wactch that first video and then link them into a wealth of music and film they would never have discovered in the first place and which would have sat rotting away somewhere.

I even came to start appreciating how video may work on an iPod - short films really sound like something that may work. If i could watch something for 5-15 minutes it would fit nicely into my travel routines (rarely do i travel for longer, other than long distance).

Attributes in code

2006-10-02T17:01:00.000+01:00

I've rarely using the Attributes class in .Net mainly because often when i consider it's use, i can see better ways of doing it in a more dynamic way.

As an example of this in the real world, not too long ago i was discussing Windows Authorization Manager in conjunction with Web Services. In fact, what the client wanted to do, was to protect a specific method call but push control out to application administrators. Of course, .Net offers Role based security as a technique of protecting methods based on the Windows groups a user belongs to. This uses attributes and can be written something like:

[SecurityRole("Manager")]
public int Add( int operand1, int operand2 )
{
return operand1 + operand2;
}

This limits the Add() method to being called by users who are members of the Manager role which is an issue if you wish to make access to this method more dynamic and perhaps add other roles at some point in the future. Using AzMan, you can check at runtime whether the context user has access to the method using an out-of-band role management database, maintained by application administrators.

public int Add( int operand1, int operand2 )
{
(!store.HasAccess(currentIdentity, "Add")) {
throw new SecurityException("Access Denied");

return operand1 + operand2;
}

In situations where you want to interop on platforms or make calls accross boundaries such as a business component and stored procedure which may not be using SSPI, the having your role information accessible out-of-band can be hugely beneficial!

Furthermore, in most cases where I pull data for configuration purposes, i figure there is a good reason why they are configurable in the first place and so make these changeable through the web or application configuration file. Even a simple switch to move to debug mode or limit the size of soap messages can be useful in an external configuration file than as an attribute in compiled code. I suspect the huge effort that went into declarative support in WCF has this at the forefront of the original design.

I struggle to think of many places where attributes derived from the Attribute class and applied imperatively in code are useful. Perhaps "WrittenBy" or "CheckedBy" which are immutable on a per version basis, but as far as i'm concerned, anything that has more than one potential configurable value, just now or in the future, should be available declaratively.

Happy Birthday

2006-09-25T08:04:00.000+01:00

So that's me 32 today - and for the first time ever i was working on my birthday (it's a bank holiday, but the company i work for is English and don't have it).

Work has been really busy this week as it's the last week of my contract before i head off elsewhere to the murky world of web services - something i have now been working on almost daily for most of my adult life it feels. At the moment tho' it's working on .Net to Java signing and encryption with certificates in what is one of the most bizarre parts of a project I have ever worked on (at the request of a supplier i should add).

Almost finished reading iCon about Steve Jobs (opened my eyes - Bill Gates is a saint compared to this guy!) and also almost finished The Long Tail.

Before you start writing code ...

2006-09-21T06:34:00.000+01:00

After the enterprise i am doing some consultancy with spent 7 hours because of mis-configuration between development and system test, i have been asked to help them with instrumentation and tracing within their apps... something i had actually provided prototypes on (integrating MOM etc) a while back but which became less of a priority.

I got me thinking about the kinds of things that get pushed down the stack in terms of priority, but are very easily added at design time. Security, tracing and instrumentation don't offer the end user much - most of the time it's invisible to them, but the benefits are huge. So I am starting a list of things to do and think in parallel to your development process.

Security - think about the big and small. Transport, message, Code security, permission demands and so on. At least be aware and make your team aware of what is avaialble and then think about the areas that should use it. Start with key areas and get familiar and then extend to other areas.

Tracing - in ASP.Net for example, you get tracing for free. Just add some trace statements and turn it on to see the result in your environment. Put in statements for core data (connection strings is a nice example of the one that screwed people up yesterday). At least know that deploment managers can look at a simple file and compare the values with what they expect.

Instrumentation - Another of the "ah, we'll do it later" things. Make a list of 5 key areas and instrument them. Add performance metrics, such as measuring the amount of memory taken up by a particular variable (yep, stored 5k cached SOAP messages for 300 concurrent users in an Application Varible isn't a great idea!).

Versioning - If you are working with endpoints in ASMX or WCF, then think about versioning. I personally like to version the endpoint, the wsdl and the xsd, but as long as you are AWARE that you DO have to think about versioning when it comes to web services, you'll be ahead of most of the companies i go into.

This isn't complete and i'll revisit - add your comments if there are more.

It's not implementation that is key here - it is awareness!

Long Tail of Culture

2006-09-15T08:13:00.000+01:00

I've read The Long Tail and just finished reading a book about the long tail poster child, in Ebay - "The Perfect Store". A lot of the discussion is on niches and filters to access those niches, but in reading the books, something else occurred to me. Uniform access to address those tails is almost impossible - in some cases because no single person or entity can really understand all of the cultures as you move down the tails.

As i read both books, i got increastingly irritated (particularly in Alan Cohen's book) of the mixing between "British" and "English" as though they are the same thing. Now, i'm neither anti English not anti British, but i DO live in Scotland and am aware it is also apparently part of the UK. IN short, these books address long tail issues, but within them isolated readers in that long tail who happen to live in Scotland. In short, if they were content sites in the long tail, they'd lose 5 million potential customers.

I expect such issues arise across a multitude of cultures in the long tail and wonder whether it will ever be possible to provide a google type search that actually is culture aware in the long tail. It's fine searching content, but if it starts isolating or irritating consumers due to cultural indifference then they won't be using it for long.

Oh, the long tail of weird stuff gets longer every day... http://www.bedjump.com/

Continuous Partial Attention

2006-09-14T08:27:00.000+01:00

I was talking by email with Linda Stone about her thoughts on soemthing called Continuous Partial Attention which i was directed to by Joi Ito.

My views are probably orthogonal to the concept of CPA as she sees it, but it did strike a chord based on some things i have read in the last few years and how i operate day to day ....

I'm only recently reading about your thoughts so some comments may not
hit the mark on what CPA really conerns, but i'll add my comments
anyway.

In Smart Mobs, there is talk of kids (in Korea i think) that can walk
talking with their parents whilst participating in a peer based chat,
typing using mobiles in their pockets! When i read about CPA i thought
of this immediately.

My view on a distributed CPA would be this. Consider a sine wave.
Something like how you may operate through the day (it's not as
regular as that, but possibly not so far away either), every so often
dedicating your attention to things outside the norm and then back to
your core objective.

Now, consider adding some noise to that wave. These are my signals (we
all have different signals) - they all vary - things like reputation,
source, physical or electronic and so on all play their part in adding
noise. My normal daily course will then be influenced based on the
noise of others - indeed, the "noise" from Joi Ito's blog (his
reputation, good blog quality and interesting paragraph "signals")
brought me to your paper, despite me scanning over 500 blog posts in
Bloglines. There is probably a relation between the noise and the time
you have to evaluate the noise (for me it's about 5 mins every hour).

So, i am trying to stay connected as much as possible, but can only do
that through various signals i get from others - your posts on CPA
will now add additional noise - if that's not to harsh a term :)

It can be good and bad as you say. I would rarely use CPA when with my
son or wife (at least i'd try to filter out most of the noise!) but
day to day it would be invaluable for me, but i'm struggling to learn
how to stay connected, but not read everything, or try everything or
watch every video or podcast.

You know, i created something called taghop a long while back really
to try and catch the "buzz" of cyberspace so you could have some level
of feeling part of a community and staying in touch - a softer type of
multi-tasking. It works for me :) I'm actually reading about ebaY just
now ("The Perfect Store") and what *I* think of CPA (which may be
different from what the actual story is!) applies in online Auctions
in a big way.

These are just my initial thoughts mainly because i had looked into

Used underwear on ebay

2006-09-13T08:36:00.000+01:00

I'm in the last few pages of "The Perfect Store" by Alan Cohen and came across one of the classic phrases of modern writing. If ever we need to sum up our generation over the last 10 years, this has to be it:

"At first Ebay treated used underwear sales like any other used clothing sale.
But users begain to complain that when they searched for ordinary used
underwear, they came across listings designed to appeal to fetishists."

Now, in my book there must be very little "ordinary" used underwear in the world. What does it even look like and when does underwear worn by someone else become ... well, extraordinary???

My wife suggested it was underwear worn by the stars and such (erm, worrying insight into her little world), but how much of a market would there be for that and more importantly. how the heck do you get hold of it.

My view of the world is now tainted a little bit more and i'm avoiding the temptation to search for used underwear to see what's going on in that little subculture.

Reading blogs that are blocked

2006-09-11T21:24:00.000+01:00

One thing that irritates the hell out of me is corporate companies that block blogs. I use blogs constantly to stay on top of what is happening, but often in work (and for legitimate use) i try to access a blog that has been blocked... often by someone who has no idea what a blog *is*, but has added an entry somewhere.

That's what i love about the web - you don't have that kind of control. There are probably a bunch of things that should be banned through human decency, but inside the firewall, all hell lets loose (or it's diametric opposite) and you end up being unable to view the blog sites you read regularly (security topics being a favouite for me to read - as well as to be blocked .... if "hack" is mentioned it will likely be blocked).

If you are in this sitation, then just get bloglines :) It does the work of pulling in the feeds and (as of yet) i haven't seen it blocked. You can even ask it to dynamically fetch new blogs and away it goes and returns with the results.

Now, no-one in the place i consult will read this as my blog is blocked ( i don't think it *my* blog they are blocked - it's blogger in general) - so i don't expect to see bloglines blocked any time soon.. and when it is, there will be something else out there!

Oh, just finishing reading "A Perfect Store". Yet again i am amazed by the luck that goes along with pure hard work... i read the Google story and thought the same thing. In fact StartUp by Jerry Kaplan is probably one case where his luck was out. I hope to have some of that luck soon too :)

It is also amazing how there are little networks of people and companies that span all the books... Kagle, Oydimar, Whitman, Kaplan and so on... all linked together in some bizarre subnet. I feel like i know some of them quite well now!

... by a weird quirk of click, i discovered Mike Wilson (ran tech ops at Ebay for a number of years) is at There. Of all the things there is no blog which makes following it a pain :S

Orcas RC1 out

2006-09-08T08:12:00.000+01:00

The Orcas tools for the RC1 Winfx release are now out here.

Oddly they are titled "Community Technology Preview " rather than RC1, but reading further on, sure enough it's RC1.

Downloading and installing just now ....

Fixing Bloglines

2006-09-07T08:09:00.000+01:00

I am now subscribed to about 3 trillion blogs and have been for a while now, through bloglines.

I am really bad for reading them, but noticed that i had categorized everything and that wasn't working for me. In blogs you get so many mixed posts that a category often doesn't make sense.

So i was trying to think about how i read blogs and decided to group blogs in folders from 1 to 5, with 5 being those i read a lot and 5 being a part time interest. It works a lot better because whether it's Web Services or innovation, i have my top reads and don't really care which i am reading (which is a different process from when i am researching!).

So my first morning with this worked well. I read through some important stuff... still i need to group all of my blogs before this is as effective as i want it to be.

Now, if i could tie my email to blogslines that would be nice :)

Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers

2006-09-06T21:45:00.000+01:00

Just came upon this... Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers

Been heavily into WCF the last few weeks... .Net 3.0 RC has been released, but i's a part time job just figureing out what you do and don't get w.r.t linq, ado.net and so on!

Oh, Scotland won AGAIN at football tonight...

... AndyMurry got knocked out tho' - still he'll learn.

Playing with CardSpace

2006-08-27T10:23:00.000+01:00

So i installed the WCF July CTP and started playing with CardSpace. Nice idea not too far from a number of things i have been involed in over the last 2 years.

I signed up at the netFX sandbox site before i installed CardSpace. So i already had a username and password. After installing CardSpace i would have liked to have created a card and just said "this card is the same as this username".

As it happens, i ended up getting a message saying the email address is already there and so i now have two accounts (which i guess is contrary to the intention). It's early days of course, but this is a simple example of something i think has to happen inline with using the technology. I want to have a single account and not have two usernames just because i had previously signed up with another account.

In saying that using CardSpace was pretty easy and integrated nicely. I've yet to see how this could work with other browsers and with an open API is available to allow this to be used in Linux etc as i see that as a huge benefit/requirement. I also want to see how easy it is to move between machines and certificates have historically been a pain when moving from the PC you usually work on. Mobile is also of interest.

It's exciting stuff, but i hope it's not another MS Wallet, MS Passport that is only used by larger orgs in unique applications and isn't part of the mainstream.

XLinq/XmlDocument Samples

2006-08-24T08:22:00.000+01:00

Here are some samples (based on Microsoft's XLinq document samples) that demo some things and compare them with a simialr technique using Xml Document. Download here. NOTE : Uncomment the line "" near the end - did this in testing and the code is already deployed.

I'd be interested in how you find the last sample demonstrating using linq and xslt. After trying it out, i find linq really neat and powerful for transorming things that won't change. Embedded Xslt just looks horrible.... but then i typically out Xslt's in a library or resource file, external to the code.

In the case where you can take your transforms and put them outside of your code, i prefer Xslt. I just find the template approach much more flexible than any dynamic selection technique.

The second samples, looking at namespaces leave me with some confusion. I understand namespaces so i like to have a lot of control over them, but then i know other don't. The question is whether the XLinq technique is really an improvement - i'll have a think.

Comments on XLinq

2006-08-24T07:09:00.000+01:00

Microsoft asked people to comment on their XLinq implementation and ideas. Here are my comments (written pretty hastily). Follow ups will be posted here.

In a previous post Mike mentioned he'd like comments. I just completed reading the XLinq overview and trying a few things out (i will post code that compares System.Xml and XLinq to my blog).

So here are my comments (maybe some questions) - and maybe some bugs i found. Please bear with me - i wrote this as a read, so it won't win any awards and you'll be unlikely to find it between Dante to Shakespeare, but hopefully *some* of it will be useful. I will also post to my blog.

1. [comment] "Its public data model is aligned as much as possible with the W3C XML Information Set."
This is a little concerning in the sense i may design and architect a solution, only to discover it is not supported. It also means i need to start filtering out what i do and do not know. Also I imagine that at some point i may wish to create an XLinq Xml Document from a System.Xml XmlDocument - my worry would then be i wouldn't know what queries would start to fail. A general worry is over nuances in support for things like encoding, entities and so on between the two implementations. I'm not intending to be picky here, but i am thinking of the things clients would say to me :) I'll be interested to hear how the "bridging" mentioned at the end of the document is to work.

2. [bug] When creating an XDeclaration, you can set the "standalone" property to anything. It needs to be "yes" or "no". [1]. This correctlty throws an exception in CreateXmlDeclaration() of the XmlDocument class.

3. Namespaces [comments]

I'm not sure whether i like the syntax all that much, but who really cares so long as it does its job (feels like pure string concat to me). I think it is probably easier for those who have issues with namespaces. To be honest i have found people have issues not with the namespaces or prefixes, but how they are used in XPath, and more specifically how they qualify elements. This is so common that when there is a single namespace in an Xml document, i wonder whether an queries should just inherently be within the scope of that namespace, rather than an empty namespace - or at least provide this as an option. So in an Xml document with the namespace "http://tempuri.com" at the root, the XPath query "/items" should be the same as "/p:items" and "{http://tempuri.com}items". I would likely be murdered in the Xml community for saying this, but i have now seen more uses of "/*[local-name='items]" than i care to remember... defeating the purpose of the namespace anyway!

And again, in many cases, there IS only one namespace. People just don't get that things need to be qualified and i'm unure the XLinq syntax will make any difference in that sense. When it comes to multiple namespaces things get very interesting. Perhaps education and a simpler querying format is the way to make this work (i'm still early in the doc to see if/how this is addressed).

In any case, I'd like to see prefix support added in some manner. Why not allow this?

XNamespace ns = "http://mydomain.com";
ns.prefix = "p";

XDocument contactsDoc =
new XDocument(
new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "test"),
new XComment("XLinq Contacts XML Example"),
new XProcessingInstruction("MyApp", "123-44-4444"),
new XElement("p:contacts",
new XElement("p:contact", "steven")
)
);

... using a colon in a Xml Element name is invalid in any case and it would allow for shortcuts and the qualified name can easily be determed.

I like the XDocument.Parse() method - very useful. How will it resolve credentials and resources for URL's?

XDocument contactsDoc = XDocument.Parse(@"
<?xml:namespace prefix = p /><p:contacts p="">
<p:contact>steven</p:contact>
</p:contacts>");

In this case, i'd really need to be able to specify prefixes in the Xml doc and have these resolved to a namespace, especially when creating an instance from data that is read some elsewhere (say a database - sql's new Xml column type or web service and so on). So, in the following example:

XDocument contactsDoc = XDocument.Parse(@"

<p:contacts p="">
<p:contact>steven</p:contact>
</p:contacts>");

XName xname = "{http://mydomain.com}contact"; IEnumerable en = contactsDoc.Root.Descendants(xname);

foreach (XElement x in en)
{
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Name : ", x.Name));
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Value : ", x.Value));
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Xml : ", x.Xml));

}

... i'd like to be able to do this:

XDocument contactsDoc = XDocument.Parse(@"

<p:contacts p="">
<p:contact>steven</p:contact>
</p:contacts>");

XNamespace ns = "http://mydomain.com";
ns.Prefix = "p";

XName xname = "p:contact";
IEnumerable<xelement> en = contactsDoc.Root.Descendants(xname);

foreach (XElement x in en)
{
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Name : ", x.Name));
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Value : ", x.Value));
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Xml : ", x.Xml));

}

or ....

XDocument contactsDoc = XDocument.Parse(@"

<p:contacts p="">
<p:contact>steven</p:contact>
</p:contacts>");

XNamespace ns = "http://mydomain.com";
ns.Prefix = "p";

IEnumerable<xelement> en = contactsDoc.Root.Descendants(p:contact);

foreach (XElement x in en)
{
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Name : ", x.Name));
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Value : ", x.Value));
Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("Xml : ", x.Xml));

}

In complex cases putting the full namespace in each time would be a pain and i did notice there are some methods that actually let you get at the "hidden" prefix, so i was left wondering whether the prefix was something you want to hide or expose.

Oh, i just read the section "2.3.1.1 XML Prefixes and Output" and the method of associating a prefix with a namespace looks, erm, nasty. Is there a good reason for not just making it a property?

4. Text as value

Also, in terms of "2.1.1.4 Text as value", i often wonder whether the xsi:type attribute or Schema could be better used (say a switch on XDocument) to allow the type to be inferred from the schema. So xsi:type="string" is a .Net string type and so on, but this is just to get round explicit casts on Xml Schema defined primitive types which align pretty closely with the .Net types - or can be converted as so in many cases. I do like this ability though to go from Xml node to .Net type without too much work. [ Oh, i just read the Schema aware section - this looks REALLY cool!].

5. Remove/Delete

There has likely been much discussion around this, but could we not have Remove() and Delete() methods, the second of which would actually call the ToList() for you? It is education, but i do see many tripping over this. I'd like an "optimization" (Remove) and an "it works" (Delete) so those who get it can manage it, although one could aruge you can use the "for" statement to manage it yourself.

6. Ancestors/SelfAndAncestors and Descedants/SelfAndDescedants

It's just naming, but IMHO Ancestors/SelfAndAncestors and Descedants/SelfAndDescedants seems strange to me - using intellisense, i suspect the vast majority or people will use Ancestors/Descedants and it won't be obvious this doesn't include the current node (and even then there won't be an obvious way to find out what does). Even in XPath you have "descedents" and "descedents-or-self".

7. Typo

Small typo in section 3.1.3 - first code block in page 31. You have - select new XElement("phone", - but "phone" i believe is supposed to be "Phone".

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-rmd

steven
http://stevenR2.com

net id me

2006-08-24T06:17:00.000+01:00

Came accross NetIDMe, an idetity system coming out of Scotland. It is something i have spent a faily hefty amount of time thinking about, so good to see that there is innovation in this area here in Scotland (which pretty much gives it my stamp of approval, so get signed up!).

As a (new) father these things are pretty important to me and whether their system is quite the right way to do it is something that will be determined in the future, but it is certainly needed. Here's some blurb ...

"Net-ID-me is the first Internet Age and Identity Verification System that validates the identities of individuals of all ages. A Net-ID is a secure electronic identity card that displays only your first name, age, gender, and general location and is used to verify who you are chatting with online."

Soem info about the founder.

Xml Schema Validation in WCF and Web Services - Examples

2006-08-22T22:46:00.000+01:00

The following examples demonstrate how to provide Xml Schema validation using WSE 3.0 and then WCF. Ensure that you get the correct download depending on whether you are using the WCF July CTP or Vista Beta 2.

http://stevenR2.com/SampleJulyCTP.zip
http://stevenR2.com/SampleVistaBeta2.zip

Also, make sure you specify the correct path to the Xml Schema file in the configuration documents.

Over the next couple of days i will run over what is happening with them, but it's been a 18 hour day, so this is the last i'll be posting for today.

Xml Schema Validation in WCF and Web Services - a Discussion

2006-08-22T22:19:00.000+01:00

I recently read the excellent Windows Communication Foundation HandsOn by Craig McMurty - it is an excellent read as it is practical and goes through the code at a level that lets you fill in the detail and concentrates on the code that makes WCF an absolutely amazing product. The more i have read, more more interested i have got with one of the most exciting developments to come out of Redmon for a while. If you have ASMX and particularly WSE experience, then you'll be set to start, but WCF offers a full solution and is even extensible to allow you to add many customizations.

However, one particular part of the discussion caught my attention. It came in chapter 3 and was under the title "Xml Fetish". I do agree that it is easy to have everything in Xml and go way beyond the actual requirements, but Craig (or whoever wrote that particular chapter!) says:

"... control over how data is represented in XML is generally of no use to software developers.."

The preceding sections portray a view of Schema based contract development in a relatively negative light, with a preference for software developers caring only about the interface for communication. There is also the mention of interoperability, with DataSet being a particular example, but the .Net DataSet type is in no way related to Xml Schema or even contract first development - indeed many a software developer in the past (and future) adds a DataSet as a parameter and never worries about its representation on the wire or interop - hence hitting problems that wouldn't not necessarily happened with an Xml Schema standards based definition of the types in the contract (i even remember being at Chris Sells Web Services DevCon in 2003 where a standards based DataSet was loosely discussed).

I also read an MSDN article that hinted about these issues without really mentioning any [1] :

"There are several more sophisticated XML Schema concepts you can apply when using XmlSerializer, but using these more advanced features can often lead to interoperability problems across frameworks."

I'm not sure whether these issues relate to Xml Schema (a W3C standards), or some proprietary data embedded in the Schema. I'm sure there are

issues as the author of the article writes excellent articles, but there is just no detail of what these are. Further, in the same article, one can read:

"The result is great flexibility. You're free to define new data contracts in either XML Schema or .NET code and you can easily convert to the other. If you're working in a situation where the XML Schema definitions already exist and you need to support them, you can simply start with svcutil.exe. If you're defining new contracts and need to quickly, start by writing class definitions."

There is an obvious grey area in here - where you don't "need to start quickly", but don't have existing schemas. If you could go back and forwards between .Net and Xml Schema, then one may argue "whatever you are most confortable with". However, Xml Schema is inherently more powerful than the .Net types for defining contracts, mainly because you get some level of business validation on all platforms - in .Net you really only get the Interface.

As a simple example, consider a user ID. Perhaps you have a restriction that the user id is at least 3 charcaters and at most 20 characters. Your contract may accept a .Net "int" type, but that leaves the possible values that can be sent to be ANY valid .Net integer. With Xml Schema, you easily get validation that the value is within the contraints defining the length of the user id. Xml Schema can provide quite complex validation rules and through patterns, regular expressions can be used.

So why do this? Well, if you have a number of clients calling your services, it would be good to ensure information has at least gone through some basic validation before it hits your server. It's very similar to how client scripting helps in web browsers - not as a last resort as validation is still done on the server, but exceptions for example are expensive to raise on the server, so you can get a performance improvement here alone. There are a host of reasons why this would also be useful at the server too, such as providing an external validation before hitting your core internal services and so on.

If Microsoft allowed you to decorate your properties and so on with some equivalent of the configuration validation attributes [2], you may be able to get something close to what is available in Xml Schema - at least at a primitive level - the DataContractSerializer MaxItemsInObjectGraph uses exactly this technique.

At a basic level, would it not make sense for Microsoft's WCF to provide a behavior that could be switched on to says "validate against schema"?

My view at the moment (and hopefully i can get some feedback on this) is that using Xml Schema for contract based development offers some fairly hefty benefits, with pretty much zero work. In fact, the only reason there IS work is that the Microsoft web services frameworks require you to do quite a bit of work to USE your Schemas for validation (certainly outwith the skills of your casual web service developer). Please see my net post for some implementation details and samples in WSE 3.0 and WCF.

At the moment i am working with a set of services within a financial organization that is called from a Java service and a Win32 C++ application, the latter passing pure soap messages. In both these cases Xml Schema validation is useful as the actual call is expensive only to discover your "city" is not a valid entry (and so on).

I'd like to hear arguments and examples of why Schema should be so difficult to turn on and then perhaps i will start to understand these problems - in my *simple* examples, other than the code to perform the validaition itself, i ran into no problems, so i'm open to suggestions!

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/08/ServiceStation/default.aspx
[2] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.configuration.configurationvalidatorbase.aspx

Glasgow 2020

2006-08-15T20:02:00.000+01:00

Demo, a publisher who i have read more than a couple of books is organizing Glasgow 2020.

Glasgow 2020 is the non-institutional story of Glasgow’s future - a project to
collect-together the imagination of the city through workshops, competitions,
events and creative-projects.

I'll be there - should be interesting to see how others see the future. Haven't seen a mention of technology though - seems to be concentrating on the arts ("poets, writers...") which is odd considering the future will largely be about technology - off course combined with these other areas.

Monitoring, WS-Policy and WS-Management

2006-08-08T21:08:00.000+01:00

I've been looking into the various techniques available to monitor applications in ASP.Net.

My first attempt was the Logging Application Block - this seemed idea and it is, for middle tier and winform applications. However for ASP.Net and ASMX applications, your best bet is the System.Web.Management namespace that comes with ASP.Net 2.0. This provides a wealth of techniques that are easily configurable to instrument your application.

I finished the day looking at WS-Management - i am looking for a primer, especially as relates to MS implementation. Josh Cohen of Microsoft directed me to winrm, which is MS's WS-Management implementation that is part of WMI. It looks really interesting, but i'm looking at the potential that web services can help centralize logging and instrumentation across multiple apps - the fact there are now so many ways to implement logging and instrumentation make a final decision tricky.... but a suite of WS-Management derived classes that can be used based on the context of your application to call out to centralized services (over any given soap channel) seems the most plausible to me. Even if you could configure the provider now to save to a datasource, but to save to WS-Management endpoints which can be integrated into other applications for users.

I also enjoyed reading Understanding Web Service Policy by Asir Vedamuthu and Daniel Roth. It opened my eyes to how much of policy i have still to grok. Thanks to Daniel who followed up my queries by email almost immediately - seems i really need to get the WCF July CTP release.

Collaborative Music Journalism from Virgin

2006-08-07T20:18:00.000+01:00

Signed up to have a look - reminds me of some of the other "hot or not" sites - but i've always figured these would get vertical at some point (which is why taghop uses communities).

http://www.virginradio.co.uk/music/beta/news/index.html

Web Tests with Team Suite 2005

2006-08-07T19:57:00.000+01:00

Today I had to write some web tests in Visual Studio Team Suite 2005. It isn't overly intuitive to get started, but after using it for an hour or so i started to really get how it would be useful and how pattern orientated it was. The solution itself isn't based around patterns, but almost everything you do have a base pattern to it with some extensions based on what you specifically want to test. Now i've started i can see myself using it all over - te difficulty in getting started was that the place i am doing some work for at the moment use Anthem and so there is a bunch of attributes and properties that need to be set to get things working.

Making sure you are using Team System for Testers, add the following to your test class:

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Rules;

Next, derive your class from WebTest:

public class MyWebTest : WebTest
{}

You can state whether to authenticate requests via the PreAuthenticate property in the constructor.

public AlertWebTest()
{
this.PreAuthenticate = true;
}

Finally, override the GetRequestEnumerator() where you build the tests that will be evaluated.

public override IEnumerator GetRequestEnumerator()
{}

At this point, put yourself in userland. If you click using a postback or anthem (or Atlas), you need to simulate it in code. So let's initialize my page and capture the ViewState - this is needed to allow the application to flow as it would in a browser - keep in mind the things that happen underneat the covers (such as hidden variables) and relate these to your code.

WebTestRequest defaultRequest = new WebTestRequest("http://domain.com/default.aspx");
defaultRequest.ThinkTime = 10;
defaultRequest.Method = "POST";
FormPostHttpBody defaultRequestBody = new FormPostHttpBody();
defaultRequest.Body = defaultRequestBody;

//get the hidden variables, such as ViewState into context
ExtractHiddenFields rule0 = new ExtractHiddenFields();
rule0.ContextParameterName = "0";
defaultRequest.ExtractValues += new EventHandler(rule0.Extract);

yield return defaultRequest;

Notice the use of ExtractHiddenFields to get the viewstate into a context you can later refer to. Also, the yield statement adds this request to the enumerable collection of webtests that will be evaluated.

Now, we have the page loaded and Anthem initialized, we can simulate clicking a link which will call an Anthem method to update the page with some data.

//now click the inbox link
WebTestRequest getRequest= new WebTestRequest("http://domain.com/default.aspx");
getRequest.ThinkTime = 7;
getRequest.Method = "POST";

FormPostHttpBody inboxRequestBody = new FormPostHttpBody();
inboxRequestBody.FormPostParameters.Add("Anthem_UpdatePage", "true");
inboxRequestBody.FormPostParameters.Add("__EVENTTARGET", "ctl00$PanelView1$LinkButton2");

getRequestBody.FormPostParameters.Add("__EVENTARGUMENT", "");

//set the request
getRequest.Body = getRequestBody;

//create a validation rule to check whether we have "my text" anywhere
ValidationRuleFindText myTextRule = new ValidationRuleFindText();
myTextRule.FindText = "my text";
myTextRule.IgnoreCase = false;
myTextRule.UseRegularExpression = false;
myTextRule.PassIfTextFound = true;
getRequest.ValidateResponse += new EventHandler(alertTextRule.Validate);

yield return getRequest;

Notice this time we need to pass some Anthem related stuff as it isn't a diect ASP.Net postback. Finally notice probably the coolest part which allows you to add validation rules that are evaluated and pass or fail the test - in my case i am just asking whether "my text" is in the output response, although it can be much more complex than that.

Very cool work in any case, but there is a bit to be done to make it more friendly i think. However, is does take the old NUnit style of working to a new level and will soon be a critical part of testers - and developers - toolkits.

Microsoft Startups

2006-08-05T21:00:00.000+01:00

Folks - today i found a gem of a site over at http://microsoftstartups.com.

In most of the startup projects i have done, except in my early Perl days, i have used Microsoft software - that is innovation inside and outside of the firewall. My frustration is that the software is always a language or a framework that they built rather than an idea on top of an existing framework. So there is a new "shopping cart application" from the ground up rather than building on top of an existing application to create a new way to do it (without re-writing the basics). When it does exist, it's often based on Perl or Java and even then you rarely hear of the framework in all of this (of course it doesn't always have to be based on a complex framework, but there are cases where re-writing a transactional web services infrastructrure should just be regarded as insane).

Well, I am really interested in innovating ideas and *when* that required writing code and so on then great - but i'd rather do the innovation part than writing the framework that exists... which is why Microsoft (in my case) looking closely at startups is really exciting.

My current project is farily low level, but wants to remove some of the complexity from end users... but still, to accomplish this I really need a bunch of framework stuff and based on my background there are some obvious solutions. Unfortunately in the past i have seen these solutions are part of a corporate or ISV environment rather than in startups - outside of the OS, database server and the .Net framework, i've never been convinced that building higher level products into my solutions is a good idea - so you start writing things from scratch.

It's probably why Google decided to build their own hardware and OS and run everything from that (or at least one of the reasons). Perhaps when they started had a particular framework solution been more inviting/obvious then they could have spent their time on innovation of ideas rather than low level stuff (although like Google News, they get their employees to help out there now things worked out). Google worked, but there must be many others writing stuff from scratch aswhen you are a startup in software you really ask what the basis for your product is and that comes down to how closely aligned you see the other baseline products with your own goals ... which is probably why LAMP works well with the Open Source community of lot of whom are happy to provide their own free time, but less well with entrepreneurs who want to create a business.

In any case this is a very cool move by Microsoft and my bookshelf now makes sense - technology + business at my architectural/code level thinking is somewhat linked. It is a possible move to SaaS as the basis for other SaaS products that are themselves an incremental innovation! Surely that is what Web Services were all about a few years back :)

Some WSE Problems and Solutions

2006-08-02T13:39:00.000+01:00

Here are some solutions to problems i ran into which were not particularly well documented anywhere. I hope they are of some use - let me know if they are.

Problem 1
Ran into a fairly well documented problem when working with the WSE 3.0 quickstart samples which i had used baceause i was getting some weird errors in the Kerberos implementation i had written myself.

"Microsoft.Web.Services3.Security.SecurityFault: SecurityContextToken is expected but not present in the security header of the incoming message. "

The problem, in my case, was the there was a Worker Process configured in the app pool that somehow got confused with the *actual* worker process running the virtual directory - that's right, it said two different accounts were running it. Something that happened to me before when upgrading to ASp.Net 2.0 from 1.1.

Solution - remove the App Pool worker that is causing some virtual diretory to run under a different process and things work fine. My best bet is to use one worker in app pool per web site - when they are mixed odd things seem to happen.

I'd love to spend more time looking right into the issues as it affects everything from UserToken to Kerberos, but i've got a demo to write :)

Problem 2
"The network path is not found."

I found the source of this one to be that the targetPrincipal in the policy for Kerberos when the server name (or AD object) specified as the SPN just doesn't exist on the network - or is unreachable as it was in my case .. doh!

Problem 3
"Header http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing:Action for ultimate recipient is required but not present in the message."

I found the source of this one to be that the targetPrincipal in the policy for Kerberos was either when (a) pointing at the wrong ServicePrincipalName - or server - (http/servername) or (b) you had set the wrong host application type.

Windows Disaster

2006-08-01T19:29:00.000+01:00

Well, after having prepared my environment and a significant amount of code for a demonstration of WSE, ADAM and AzMan on Friday, today my Windows installation went nuts. Basically, i had put the trial edition in a few days ago and suddenly it said my time had expired (long before the actual 30 days) and despite our best efforts of putting in product keys and phoning the support centre, i have had to wipe my installation and start from scratch.

Looks like i will be using kerberos in house and protocol transition with constrained delegation for internet principals authenticated against ADAM with X.509 client certs for non-repudiation.

Well, that's if i can get Windows installed again ...

Security Training

2006-07-28T06:45:00.000+01:00

Well, it took me all of yestdarey (despite being busy) to recover from a marathon 5 hour security talk on Wednesday for a UK bank.

Everything from ADAM, AzMan, WSE to LSA, CAS, SQL Injection, Cryptography and more was covered, with some areas of detail. It was easily the hardest talk i have ever done as usually these things last an hour. But the day was very successful and some good things came out of it. Everyone seemed happy that they were more aware of security in .Net and the Web in general. Now we can drill down and get to the good stuff.

The one thing i need to look into is using ADFS and synching AD and ADAM accounts where possible - using automation. This may be hard as Kerberos doesn't store the actual password (unles you set reverse encryption) so i don't know that it will be possible to add AD accounts to ADAM all that easily (the ADAM instance will be in the DMZ for home workers).

All good stuff tho'.

Contacts at the PC

2006-07-25T07:56:00.000+01:00

If any of you wear contacts you may know what it feels like when you wear them too long.

I had them on for the whole of Friday as it was a very busy day at work. Since then my head has been pounding - think i'm going to stick to 8 hours wearing contacts when in work and no more. Hopefully today will be the end of it!

Hacking Web Applications

2006-07-25T07:18:00.000+01:00

Hacking Web Applications Exposed arrived yesterday and i'm reading thrugh it whilst preparing for a discussion on security i have coming up over the next week.

It is an excellent book, but maybe not for those of you very nervous about security on the web.

Monkeying Around....

2006-07-13T21:43:00.000+01:00

Seems someone screwed up when playing around with email templates. I got this the other day which i found quite odd, but not being a marketing expert wasn't sure whether some neural link was being made to my behaviour at football games.

Not long after i got this:

Dear Sir/Madam,
Apologies if you received a strange e-mail from the
Cairngorms E-Mail Bulletin system yesterday. This error occurred during server
maintenance by the website's development company (Heehaw Ltd). We were fixing an issue which had arisen with the system and, during which time, an internal test
e-mail accidentally 'misfired'.
If you any further queries please do not
hesitate to contact us via the e-mail address below.
Sorry for inconvenience
caused.
Regards,
......

I had to love that misfired was in quotes. I'm not really even sure what significance the quotes give - it almost reinforces the "we screwed up" which you know they are trying to say - without actually saying it. The test issue only makes it worse and even makes you cringe. I'd love to hear them say - "We were moneying around and screwed it up, but we hope it made you smile".

The worst part was i suspect they made the individual who screwed up the guy who signed his name to the email. Doh!

Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs

2006-07-13T21:20:00.000+01:00

InformationWeek interviewed five accidental entrepreneurs, including the founders of del.icio.us and Digg and the author of the blog Dooce, to find out how they freed themselves from the paycheck-to-paycheck grind. More.

Versioning

2006-07-13T06:34:00.000+01:00

David Orchid has updated the W3 TAG document on versioning. It is a document i read yesterday as i'm looking into versioning just now w.r.t WSDL and Web Services i am creating.

I found i have major, minor namespaces, but kept updating the minor every 5 minutes in development to keep track of what dev release i was on. I decided on the following:

In development you may create many WSDL documents per day which may be consumed by multiple clients. To that end I added a development version which was appended to the end but won’t be in production. So my practice identifies namespaces versions something like:

http://mydomain/appnamespace/servicename/V2_5_7324673246

I suspect the last development identifier could be auto-generated by tools in the future, but I did find it restrictive to use only major minor before I’d released anything.

In Web Services i feel this is pretty important as your "clients" may not be under your control and there may be many of them. Sure eventually you want them all on version "VX_Y", but to avoid screwing their build it's nice to have continuity.

Blogging in the Enterprise

2006-07-12T05:11:00.000+01:00

Phil Windley of IT Conversations said:

I've been asked to give a training session on blogging to employees of a
mid-sized public company, so I'm looking for ideas and materials. One resource
that was both informative and entertaining was this IT conversations
presentation by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Together they wrote a book on
corporate blogging called Naked Conversations.

This is something i had a go at at the start of last year, so i had a reponse in minutes:

I actually tried to get some blogging done in a large corporate here in the UK
last year, with limited success.
The key for me is not the technology but the culture of writing information down. It has to be top down and not bottom up. If it done bottom up you only get one or two really interested souls blogging, but if they see their bosses dong it, it seems to motivate some others to start blogging. It's really only after this quasi-forced motivation do some of these bloggers actually start to "get it" and then enjoy it. After that you can let them run with it and the best bloggers will shine through. It really provides the opportunity of opening up borders between projects in the enterprise.

But - if the folks at the top don't take it seriously or see value in it - I'm
afraid no-one else will either.

Zindane loses his head

2006-07-10T07:32:00.000+01:00

What was that all about? Matarazzi must have said something really bad to Zidane and until he tells everyone what it was, it is hard to really judge. Easy to say he shouldn't have lost it, but it really does depend on what was said - if it was something so low that it caused that reaction.

Whatever, i will remember Zidane as the best player since Maradona and his 1998 performance will be remembered forever. Seems that the best payers in the world always have to leave us with some controversy (the exception seems to be Henrik Larsson!).

Well done Italy - they were the best team througout the tournament and having lived in Milan I know how crazy it will be. They did deserve it and they held their nerve for the penalties. No outstanding individuals at the tournament, but i really enjoyed it and the Italy v Germany game was out of this world! Well done Germany on a great tournament.

Forza Italia!

Whisky Night

2006-07-08T09:49:00.000+01:00

Last night i met up with some friends and had some excellent Chinese food. Afterwards we went to the Potstill in Glasgow and had a Whisky or two. I'm a novice and they're both experts on Whisky so i learned a bit.

The highlight was a 33 year old single malt (can't rememeber the name) that was very nice and also very expensive (a note to myself to ask the price before asking for one!!!). It was so good that we all had another. The guy behind the bar just looked the part and knew everything about each bottle where it came from, who bottled it and so on.

Today i'm feeling it a little, but it was an excellent night!

XPathNavigator

2006-07-03T21:12:00.000+01:00

A dicussion today reminded me that i shuold point out that XPathNavigator operates differently depending on whether it was created based on an XmlDocument or XPathDocument.

If you wish to edit the document using XPathNavigator, be sure and load an XmlDocument and create the navigator instance from this.

If you want an optimized read only version, use an XPathDocument.

Microsoft - don't use popups when shopping!!

2006-07-01T12:04:00.000+01:00

I was quite surprised that the folks at MSDN never noticed the problem with their final stage of purchasing.

Basically (and i'm using IE 7, but could be most browsers) you get a final confirmation and a message during the processing says "please don't re-submit" - i guess you may get charged twice. So, all is well and my order details are finalized - i think.

You see the problem is that at the very end it pops up a new browser window - and, as you may have guessed, most software now stops popups, typically asking if you want to see it. Well, of course i do... but, that will repost the page. So i can't view what may be important information bacause the page will be resubmitted and i have been explicitly told not to do that.

I only hope it was nothing important, but some real world testing would flag this almost immediately i suspect!

Virtual TechEd

2006-07-01T10:20:00.000+01:00

At last - i asked for this last year and for Mix06.

Email Thread Visualization

2006-07-01T10:04:00.000+01:00

I thought this was really cool. It is some work from the IBM Watson Research Centre that shows how email threads can be viewed visually.

Nodes are messages, arcs are message relations and the colors dictate various attributes such as time, contributor and so on.

Some more info here.

First Contact

2006-07-01T09:34:00.000+01:00

This is my first week with contact lenses. I really thought sticking my finger in my eye would be an issue, but it turns out i have no problem whatsoever doing it. They have made an amazing difference and although i still wear my glasses sometimes, i'd more often choose contacts.

I did have an interview for a contract this week (which i got) and prior to it i had been getting training in putting them in and out. My eyes were quite sore and to be honest i must have looked like i was partying 'til the early hours (i wasn't!).

It was great to be able to come in from the rain (oh, it was reaning yesterday here in Glasgow, but that's like telling you the Atlantic has water in it ...) and watch the football without glasses. Even travelling home on the train i noticed much more (your view width is much with contacts too).

So if you're in the position i was and thinking that you couldn't put things in your eyes, just give the one day soft disposible contacts a go - it's definitely worth a try!

World Cup surprise

2006-07-01T09:11:00.000+01:00

With one or two refreshments i caught the end of the Argentina v Germany game yesterday (I have started doing some work for a local financial institution who actually have plasma TV's IN their offices with the World Cup on?!).

The result really surprised me as Argentina looked on fire at the start of the tournament. Germany though, have gone from strength to strength and now look like the favourites to me. They don't have any outstanding individual players, but as a team, and with the crowd behind them, they are playing some good football.

But, for me the Argentinian manager (now resigned) threw the game away with his bizarre changes. It's ok to take your best players off in the last few minutes when you're 2-0 up, but at 1-0 and with 20 minutes to go he made some very bad decisions which ultimately cost them the match... and the world cup - no game will be harder than against the Germans.

It's getting interesting, but i expect a Germany Brazil final, but i'm not sure how to call it. If Ronaldinho wakes up Brazil will win it, but if he doesn't, it will be very, very Klose.

JumpCut, SketchUp

2006-06-30T06:01:00.000+01:00

JumpCut allows you to create/upload and edit your movies entirely online. It looks pretty simple as it even allows you to email your video to their servers.

After that, everything happens online. That is the real differentiator - you edit the entire movie using their online tools - you can even mash and remix your video as well as share with the community and friends.

Also, Google is offering SketchUp as a free download.

"SketchUp is a simple but powerful tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying your 3D ideas."

Entity Expansion

2006-06-29T19:05:00.000+01:00

Oftentimes when loading an entity, say an Employee entity, you have a set of contructors which either take an ID for an object to populate or a set of values to poopulate a new Employee.

In many cases you populate part of the object rather than the entire object at this point, avoiding certain fields which may incur some performance penalties (perhaps you have Manager as a field, but know that a call to some separate "Organization" web service is required to get this - you wouldn't want it to happen for every object constructed). On top of this you may have lists which are part of the Employee (e.g. CoursesAttended) which also require more work than is typical.

Of course you can do null checks or have a simple boolean to indicate when a field has been set, but sometimes it is quite useful to have a blanket set of fields updates for a given state. In my case i call this entity expansion, which has 4 enumerated levels (but can be easily extended):

ID - set the ID and do nothing else
Basic - load the basic data
Detail - load detailed information
All - load the entire object (useful in serialization)

I'm sure there are many techniques for this kind of this and you could create a whole host of levels to determine what has been loaded, but find this has worked quite wll in practice and i can easily get the more course-grained "by field" if i wish.

Avoid Cyclical Dependencies

2006-06-27T08:37:00.000+01:00

Cyclical dependencies can be a pain when you are decoupling your entity classes from the objects that build (or populate) these entity classes. Sure, you can use interfaces and a factory class and return an instance of an object that implements the specified interface. However, it is the creation of that concrete object that can be tricky.

If you add a reference to the interfaces in the entity classes and factory classes you are ok. If you intend to use the factory class only from the builder classes then again you are fine.

return new MyConcreteType();

If you intend to use the Factory classes in the original entity classes then you run into a circular dependency issue. Your factory class references the entity class so that you can create concrete instances of your objects and your entity class would then reference the factory class. There is the argument of why you wouldn't just create an instance of the type directly in the entity, but factory classes can have their uses even in such situations (maybe the selection of the concrete type isnt straightforward as it simply implements a certain interface which can be implemented by more than 1 concrate type).

In this case you can use dynamic loading and reflection to create an instance of your type, without having a physical reference to it in the factory class. Simply store the location of the assembly in a config file and at run time the factory is passed a flag indicating the assembly to load. This is done and the following code can be used to create an instance of that type.

Assembly asm = Assembly.LoadFrom(AssemblySettings.GetConfig()["MyFactory"].ToString());
System.Type t = asm.GetType();
return Activator.CreateInstance();

This will then return a new concrate instance of your object that implements the IMyType interface. Now, when you add a reference to the factory class in your entity class you won't get a circular dependency issue.

If you need to pass parameters in the construction of the object, simply pass an object array with the boxed parameters:

int someid = 12345;
return Activator.CreateInstance(t, new object[] { someid});

You should think about caching the creation though as reflection is expensive, but two factory assemblies, one for concrete creation of types and another for dynamic loading of types may be the best solution long term.

Knowing

2006-06-27T08:23:00.000+01:00

I had emailed Michael Munowitz, author of Knowing - i always email authors as having written myself in the past one great thing is knowing that right now, someone, somewhere is reading your work. I think it is important that such people reply and he did.

Steven: Many thanks for your kind words about Knowing, and I do appreciate the
review you posted on Amazon. As an author yourself, you undoubtedly understand
how gratifying it is to learn that a reader has benefited from your work.
Sincerely, Michael Munowitz

You can find my review here.

f(x) = weather.dt

2006-06-26T09:35:00.000+01:00

We went to a kids birthday party over the weekend (sat) and so i checked out the weather on the BBC. Sure enough, it said rain until around 4, which amde everyone change their plans from outdoors to pretty much indoors. So come 1pm, then 2, 3, 4 there was no sign of rain. Sure enough, no rain all day.

Checked the BBC and sure enough, it was changed to "sunny".

Now, on that principle could we not all start some community retrospective weather service and just charge less than whoever gives the BBC their data and make a bit of cash?

I have came to the conclusion over the past few months that they really have no clue what the weather is going to be (you start to notice this more when you have kids and when you go up mountains!). The best solution is to just open your window, look up and decide for yourself, or, if in Scotland pack a suitcase with something for each season.

Taghop and Spam

2006-06-26T09:28:00.000+01:00

Well, taghop now has over 150 users who have created more than 2000 posts. Things are hoting up and certain subjects seem to be getting quite popular.

I have noticed that someone has decided to create a robiot to add items to the site - not sure if i should be completemted someone took the time, but sure enough there are some automated usernames and automated posts appearing - although not too many.

Automation on the web is an interesting thing. On one hand it is needed as the level of content and sydication of it makes it impossible to authenticate and validate every source. At the same time, you want to somehow maintina a level of integrity about your data.

Creating a SPAM solution is fairly easy - i have created quite a popular one in the past. I will just need to keep an eye out and see if it gets out of hand. If it does, then the SPAM solution will be added.

If you are wondering what taghop is, then at the top of my main blog are my latest hotlinks from taghop. Browse them and get an idea of what is going on.

Anthropic Principle and Infinity

2006-06-24T12:22:00.000+01:00

This isn't my area of expertise, but having recently read a number of books on infinity, spacetime, universe and so on i figured i had some things to say.

The question is around how the universe exists, what caused it and the various "lucky" equations that surround us that make it all possible. Starting with the Anrthopic Principle, we can at least get a start on it.

" ... if a billion universes existed, with a multitude of laws of nature, then humans would only be aware of those in which humans could emerge, and (no matter how many versions of laws of nature existed) the laws of nature humans saw would only be the laws of nature of those universes in which humans as we know them could emerge.

In other words, the reason we exist is because things so happened so that made it possible that we could exist.

But of course then people argue that the likelyhood of this and all the combined things in the universe is so unlikely as to be absurd. It would take "forever" for such a thing to happen.

The question whilst reading Knowing that ocurred to me is that we are dealing with massively large and small numbers. Indeed numbers in string theory is so small as to be incredulous. They don't quite extend to infinity, but as far as we are aware time does - or rather time as we know it (the universe doen't really have a concept of time as far as i'm aware). Sure, things happen, but the net difference is zero.

Now, if we are to consider time as infinite and if the universe is around 13.2 Billion years old, who is to say that is all that old. 13.2 billion is a pretty small number in string theory. In terms of infinity you can argue it is an infintesimally small number... like the difference between 1 and 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. In infinity every number can be regarded as small.

So..... is there really any reason why the entire combination of variables that make up the universe at this point in time are simply not the luck of the combination of them at some instance in time? In the same way it may take me a million tries (at that is a low estimate btw!) to make a decent dinner with varying combinations of ingredients, gradually changing them when no-one eats, is it not just possible that the universe now exists simply because an "infinite" number of tries over an "infinity" of time has just finally found something that works? Perhaps at one point gravity was a little too strong so next time it changed a little. The equation that would be required to suggest how these things all interact would be so complex as to be impossible to comprehend, but my reading recently has made me wonder whether such a ridiculous idea couldn't be reality (or some abstraction of it).

Where did all this start? How did the ingredients get created and who set the values in the first place, or changes them? This is where you may start to really wonder what the control centre of everything is and who is controlling it. I find it quite hard to believe or understand these things just happening.

Save money via your mobile

2006-06-20T10:52:00.000+01:00

LoftLab over at taghop today bookmarked mobsaver.

The idea is that you can send an ISBN (for example) while in Borders and it will check Amazon (for example) to see whether you can save money, and how much.

It is a free service, but SMS charges apply, but i'd like to give it a go next time i'm in Amazon.

I personally still think the cost of an SMS is prohibitive to an uptake on the web (still 12p each or something), but surely with these apps coming along it iwll get cheaper

Squash

2006-06-20T08:45:00.000+01:00

So now i'm almost over a month playing squash again and last night was the hardest game yet. My legs really are aching, but the noticeable difference in the performance of both of us was quite incredible. We are now starting to play some of the shots we used to play and we each never stop running around.

It finished 4-4, but the momentum flipped back and forward between us and i even managaed to break my raquet (i'm not the worlds best loser of a point!).

EBayWiki

2006-06-14T09:29:00.000+01:00

So JotSpot and EBay are working together to create a pretty big Wiki implementation.

They have created a collaborative knowledge community where you an link into relevant Ebay topics. Looking at it i can't immediately see its benefit, but if they can get decent knowledge base and link it into their catalogue then they may have something.

Still, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of typing people do for free - or rather to publicize their online profiles!

New BBC Feature

2006-06-13T16:11:00.000+01:00

The BBC have released a realtime map of their site usage. It sllows you to see what and where people are viewing stories. Here is a screenshot below:

You can click to change regions of the world and see what kind of traffic they get - so you can make your own conclusions on why certain stories may be popular.

Combine this with taghop and something even more useful could emerge!

New Laptop

2006-06-12T09:29:00.000+01:00

I'm pretty sure i'm going ot have to get a new laptop soon. The Vaio i have may blow up soon - it gets very very hot quite quickly and the keys don't wory so well at 100 degrees. I also need wireless in the house as my son keeps tripping over the plethora i wires i have in the room. It's getting so ridiculous now that's it's become his navigation system....

Send me any recommendations.

Also, an amusing quote from the BBC says :

Pauleta, who struck after just four minutes, insisted Portugal must improve
if they are to make an impact in Germany.

"Angola fought their socks off and made things difficult for us," said
the Paris St German marksman. "

Do the Portuguese really have an expression for "fought their socks off"?

World Cup Tickets

2006-06-11T11:07:00.000+01:00

Still interested in a ticket to the final of the world cup? For only €6500, you can buy a single VIP ticket.

It should be a good world cup - Argentina looked very good and are by far the best team i have seen yet, although the Ivory Coast looked good too. I can't see any of the other teams i've seen before them going very far. Still, Brazil, Italy and Spain are still to come.

Vapps, Blogger and Innovation and the WORLD CUP!

2006-06-09T08:24:00.000+01:00

Vapps is *very* cool. It is completely free and works with Skype to allow up to 500 people in a conference call - god forbit they all start talking at the same time. Thanks for Tom Keating for telling me about it and pointing me to his recent blog post.

Radio Handi also looks worth a look for SIP calls and conferences of up to 20 people. Cool.

Anyway, use it. Here is why i want to use it:

Since last summer I have been thinking about getting something akin to the old HomeBrew Computer Club started in Silicon Valley by Steve Jobs way back [1][2], here in Scotland.

But, open it up a little though to what’s happening (e.g. “What is blogging and why bother?”), ideas, research, disruptive goings on in your field and so on – a thinktank and discussion of ideas in either research or early stages. It’s not necessarily about building business, but sharing ideas that may be the foundation of them.

I’d guess at a level whereby you can get the idea over to a reasonable audience in an informal manner. It would be fully inclusive so a decent idea could actually get heard. I have been to too many meetings where just to get heard you already must have a business plan.

Btw - how many of us have broadband and use audio/video online? Doing this online may open it up a little and discussions could be saved and posted online for people to listen to offline.

Initial Topics? Blogging, next gen media, nonomedicine, outsourcing, id fraud etc?!? Please suggest.
Say 3 x 10 minute topics (with some slides) to get started?

What a pain it is when i can't blog the fact that blogger is screwed for two hours - because it was screwed. And it's happened a few times this week. btw BloggerGods, it's still broken - i tried this 5 times.

I blame the captcha stuff. Just use this....

Also, interested in the World Cup? Pick your team here. Hre is my starting team!

Ripple of Hope

2006-06-06T18:15:00.000+01:00

Aldon Hynes is promoting a web site he has created to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the following speech:

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Definitely worth having a look at - some of the footage is excellent and the trailer is worth watching.

The bookshop around the corner - why I think Amazon could be a bad thing

2006-06-05T14:04:00.000+01:00

I read a hell of a lot - i also buy a lot from Amazon. I bought a book about Amazon - on Amazon. However, over the last year or two i have purchased far more than before and i no longer exclusiverly buy computer books. I buy entrepreneurial, business, marketing, maths, psychology, physics, sociology and more - oh as well as computer books :)

Many computer books tend to have a very short shelf life in comparison with these other topics (preferred programming langauges have moved up and down in the recent past, but Gravity, ironically, hasn't). So what is more common is that the scientific books can carry themselves over a number of years.

So i saw a book in Borders and came home to add it to my wish list on Amazon (i did also buy some books at Borders i should add) - "How to solve mathematical problems" by Wayne Wickelgren. All very normal i hear you say, until this (and this is now not the first time this has happened to me). I tend to "check out" the authors of books - i go beyond the simple reviews - i like to know *who* wrote the book, what their interests are, what they are doing now - mainly as i can get a better idea of whether they are the kind of author i will associate with and hence there is a higher chance of my liking the title.

So, i go check out Wayne Wickelgren. The first Google result is here. If you read this, you will see that he has just found out he has Motor Neruon disease (like Jimmy Johnstone and Stephen Hawking). That comes as a bit of a shock. Until you start to read what he has been doing since he found out and his intentions.

A link on the page leads you to a new updated site, where upon i discovered that he unfortunately passed away last November (2005). A bit of hunting around can give you further information about him which i won't go into. In short, i was a little taken aback, especially as you read his text in the present tense, but discover it was written 9 years previous.

So how does this relate to Amazon? Well, if you type in the book name, or visit the authors titles on Amazon (and all the other major online stores i tried), you basically get an unemotioanl list of books. So maybe you argue that Amazon is just an online bookstore. Well, this worries me a little - mainly as it has now happened on more than one occassion. You don't get ANY background (what you do get seems very mechanical once you realise the additional context that is missing). In this case it was quite significant detail (if like me you tend to lose yourself in the books you are reading rather than viewing them as black and white text). In other cases you just may not know where they are now relative to what is said in the book, their opinions, other peoples opinions (other than some basic reviews) and so on. In other words, you miss a whole bunch of context around the book which can really bring it to life - the story behind the book itself. This is often a huge influence i the reading of the book and especailly your choices afterwards (its the most effective cross-selling technique for me).

Now, the "bookshop around the corner" doesn't really exist (well, one doubtless does exist, but not one for a specific title), but what i am getting at is the context can be added (in the physical sense) by people who know their stuff and work in these places. The "did you know" type of people who seem to know facts, metafacts and so on. This *should* be even more effective online, but the more i think about it, the less i beleive it actually happens. I am increasingly hesitant to buy any book now without a reasonable background search which is a problem considering the number of books i (try to) read.

So, Amazon is a great online database. But to become a book store i think some magic has to be added.

∞++

2006-06-05T08:39:00.000+01:00

This weekend i read "Everything and more" by David Foster Wallace.

I am still recovering. I actually enjoyed quite a bit of the book, but i can't really believe that simple High School maths would be enough to get you through it... unless you did stuff like advanced Fourier Analysis and Riemannian Geometry in high school.

I have a Physics background, but found the way soe of the maths was thrown in and just stated for the record (with sometimes a footnote) a little hard to deal with. However, with a bit of effort i was able to do so.

What i found hardest was some of the prose - particularly as related to some of the theories of inifinity and some of the solutions to given paradoxes were explained to get round other oparadoxes that had caused them.

The eird thing was that i did come out with a fairly solid picture of what is going on with inifinity as well as a much better idea of where it all came from. It's also quite a funny book to read and when he says things like :

" (“Parts of E.G.II are going to be brutal . . . regrets are hereby conveyed”)"

and

... “inaccessible ordinals,” “transfinite recursion”—are “fun to say even if one has no clear idea what they’re supposed to denote.”

i do appreciate where he coming from having come through many a Quantum Physics class - there ARE topics that have significant amounts of material, but ultimately no-one really knows what they mean. I would argue inifinifty is perhaps teh best example of that - certainly that's where i stand now.

For all the proofs, equations, solutions and ideas, i don't yet know what ∞ actually IS - and i don't know that there is an answer that would satisfy me anyway. If we do take ∞ from the abstract mathematical sense into the "concretete" universe, then i'd have to ask where the universe (or time) "ends" and in many cases that isn't even a sensible question.

But that fact that you can have larger infinities (via their power set) is just as mad as it gets for me.

Read an in depth review of the book here.

Road to Reality

2006-06-02T12:00:00.000+01:00

I am reading The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. He spent 8 years writing probably the most important book i have ever read.

It has started to answer so many of the fundamental questions i had in maths and science and in my opinion, the stuff you just don't get told at school. The reason why you are learning certain things. I cannot just learn something - i don't have to know the theoretical derivation, but i have to at leat know the starting point, the assumtions and the end point. I also have to know why bother.

I remember learning Calculus and it took me a long time to really understand why. This book is giving me even more reasons. Wy are complex numbers actually useful? Now i know - or at least I am starting to know. I remember during Physics that these numbers just appeared but i really *hate* memorizing formulas for the sake of it. It's like learning to speak a language by remembering sentences rather than knowing how to *build* a sentence. As soon as something new comes up you have NO idea on how to extend that knowledge.

Read this book. Get your kids to read it. You don't have to understand it all, but when you start looking at its applications you will at least have some idea where it all came from and, more importantly, you can start to form your own ideas and you will have some idea of how various concepts relate and can be extended.

It's hard to put down!

Codie Award 2006 Final

2006-05-16T11:36:00.000+01:00

I was a judge in the first round of the Codie Awards 2006 and today the finalists will be announced at a Gala in San Francisco (how i wish i could have had time to go!).

Companies such as Amazon, Ebay, SalesForce.com and more at all going to be there.

I see quite a few of the companies i judged in there, so it should be very interesting to see who wins. Best of luck to all!!

Why Do Kids Watch Movies Over and Over

2006-05-16T09:11:00.000+01:00

This is a great insight over at FamilyMediaGuide into why kids watch programmes over and over by Joanne Cantor, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Interesting points I got from it :

it may take many, many viewings to pick up the essential elements of even a simple program
children can discover more and more details as they watch again and again.
enjoy the empowering feeling of being able to predict what happens next
They are usually overwhelmed by the visual image and can’t follow the underlying story
children can overcome this inability with repeated viewing and increase their understanding substantially
Viewing TV with a child is a very good way to engage her in a productive conversation.

VodeoBlog

2006-05-16T09:05:00.000+01:00

I've been speaking with Nathan over at VodeoBlog the last few days - i originally had trouble getting my username/password working and now i'm no longer sure if it is really my fault. I hope not.

However, the interesting question i was asking was why i choose the completely free option over the temporarily free option (one month). Here was my reasoning.

OK, here's the reason I chose the text only option. I had two options - one is free and the other is conditionally free. I'm quite wary of things being conditionally free, mainly coz I do a bunch of things and then my times runs out, I decide I want to stick with the free option but I lose stuff from my other blog titles and vaults.

Personally (and this is just my thoughts, you guys have done the research on it!) I'd rather see the free options combined and some way of knowing that when I am creating something that I can optionally choose to use the premium service *if I want to*. I know this is just User Interface and Semantic issues, but it's how I call it. I think it's nice to have the "main" option, with an extended set of options (so not to confuse me!). In other words most times I am pointed at the (free) default blog, but there are options allowing me to use the premium service in one click (with something telling me what will happen it I do so). The reason is that I will only KNOW if I want extra space once I am hooked - same with blogs. I only started seeing a use for multiple blogs on blogger once I started using the default one. Sure you'll have some people who do this a lot and will know what they want right away, but newbies will want to play a bit without consequence.

Can I give you a good example of what I mean. Try out http://jot.com It just says "get started" and then worries about convincing me to pay once I've become hooked. I don't yet pay, but I would. What I happening is that with a few colleagues we are in early stages of working on something and the Jot services will become useful and I will already have used them, so it will be an easy step!

Interestingly VeoTag came up too - a service that allows you to add comment to video. Nathan mettions being able to define areas on top of the video (like an imagemap for video - i.e. a videomap) which you can add comments to. This really got me thinking...

In fact, imagine being able to identify people via a videomap (an imagemap for video) in the videos. So you already have the IMDB movie database - you link this into the moving video. You can then say "show me the exact locations in videos where Person X is involved" across thousands of videos. Would sure make it easy to find Salma Hayek ;)

Anything that can help me find Salma Hayek can only be good.

Small Worlds

2006-05-15T16:44:00.000+01:00

Today I finished Small Worlds by Duncan Watts.

It was a good book, but i really felt i needed a reference sheet to make the best of it. I found i kept jumping back to trya nd understand what references he was making and was a little irritated that i had to keep checking the definitions of variables when i forgot.

A nice cheat sheet in the centre would have been very useful.

Things hvae moved on since that book and he is due to release a new book soon, but it is always good to know the roots of what you are reading!

London tomorrow

2006-05-11T19:27:00.000+01:00

I'm in London tomorrow at 5AM - back at 11 PM.

Was a last minute thing so apologies if i miss you tomorrow - i'll get back to you over the weekend.

- steven

tagging your videos takes off

2006-05-11T11:27:00.000+01:00

If you follow my posts then you'll know about click.TV - well i have have just been informed about a very new (beta) site doing something similar (some differences) called http://www.veotag.com.

The idea is that you can select parts of video or audio and add your own text commentary to them. This allows search engines to be able to discover things in your video. I was interested in their differences.

Mike Lanza, CEO of click.TV told me his offering as more multiuser focused, allowing other sites to use the UI.

Howard Seibel, VP Marketing at VeoTag said to me that he sees some similaries but as his their site is now live and running, they are ahead of the game (and hard to compare against click.TV just yet as it it not fully live - it is expected to be live shortly).

I can't yet play with click.TV (i have seen a demo) - but VeoTag is *very* usable. I was able to create a tag of a Bugs Bunny movie without having any real learning curve (ok, i had to be able to click).

Go have a look and a play. I am going to recors something this week and have a proper play. I have been working on ideas so i don't sound too goofy (i doubt i'll avoid that anyway), so stay tuned.

C# Type Reference

2006-05-11T08:38:00.000+01:00

Source

Localizing ASP.Net 2.0 Web Apps

2006-05-10T09:20:00.000+01:00

I woke up at 5 Am this morning fairly sane. By 7AM i was in the street, naked, talking Japanese (which i don't speak a word of) to small invisible snakes.

Why? Because of ASP.Net 2.0 resource files. They are NUTS and really need to be made easier. If you are localizing your web app then you can use resource files in .Net to take care of the correct ouput. Let's skip that though and get to the crux of the problem and how i solved it.

You can just creat a resx file in the App_GlobalResources directory and ASP.Net takes care of it for you. BUT, if you want to programatically access that resource file you are in for a headache and it is a dynamic assembly and so you don't actually know the full namespace until compile time (and then it's too late - i'd be interested if anyone used reflection successfully to get the dynamic namespace and loaded the resource file). Quite simply i tried a few things and then stopped, deciding there must be an easier way. You see i wanted to do this :

CreateFileBasedResourceManager(...);

I just kept getting this :

Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture (or the neutral culture) on disk.baseName: BlahResources locationInfo: fileName: BlahResources.resources

I'm sure it worked the first time - seems so long ago that i can't be sure anymore. Anyway, I followed a host of sites saying "add the project name" - well because the aseembly is dynamically compiled then you cannot state what the final name will be. So none of these "solutions" were working (i think most applied to .Net 1.x to be honest).

So here is my solution:

1. Create a .resx file and add your localized data in the normal way. Create a neutral file and then language specific files as desired (myresource.resx, myresource.en.resx, myresource.es.resx ...)

2. *Important* - Compile each resx file to a .resources file using ResGen.exe.

3. Place this .resources file in some other directory (say a "resources" directory).

4. In CreateFileBasedResourceManager() reference the .resources file location.

e.g.
CreateFileBasedResourceManager("MyResource", Server.MapPath("/resources"), null);

That's it - it should work fine now. That gotta make this easier!

Consumer companies that "get it"

2006-05-10T07:20:00.000+01:00

Here is a list of "to be expanded" companies that target consumers are are very usable. That it, your mum/mom would (a) want to and (b) be able to use it.

1. Google - type in some text and click go - my mum uses it
2. Pando - very easy to send large media files to friends and family
3. Hotmail / GMail - both are used by non-techhie members of my family

Real-time Mapping

2006-05-10T06:41:00.000+01:00

This is an interestig article about MIT's involvemtn of real-time location aware services at senseable.

"That's the basics, but what is more interesting, when you see all the dynamics of the city in real time, is not only to optimize your trip but also to really get the pulse of the city -- you can see where people are, where you can go and get a drink. Maybe you can also see tourists and the concentration of different nationalities in the city."

Magic Idea

2006-05-08T09:50:00.000+01:00

I made the mistake of showing my 3 year old a "magic trick" i saw on TV many years ago. It involves ripping a piece of paper and then showing how it magically comes back together. Of course you actually have two pieces, the connected piece buried in your hands.

Of course a 3 year old with a Harry Potter t-shirt on just assumes it is actually magic and his face when it didn't work (he tried it by himself) was funny. So now we need to help him by distracting him as we replace the ripped piece with the connected piece.... maybe i'll just show him how it works - it's getting out of hand now. Hope he doesn't try it with cash!

Rambo goes to cat heaven

2006-05-07T14:47:00.000+01:00

uhjjYesterday May 6th 2006 i got a phone call from my mums to tell me my cat ("Rambo") had passed away in the middle of the night. She was going to be 21 years old in August.

I was given the cat as a present when i was 12 and she was the most active pet i have ever known of, chasing dogs down the street if they got too close. Unless you have a pet and one for so long, it's probably hard to imagine how close you can get. When i think back over the years from my head getting cut open by a flying brick to me falling on the fence in the back garden a load of memories come back. Some of the most prevelant are:

that we couldn't think of a name, deciding on "Rambo", only to find out 6 weeks later she was a "she" (too young for me to tell when we got her)
her getting stuck on the roof (on a number of occassions)
watching her run up the side of the house (we had stones on the side and she somehow was able to get her claws into them)
when she had kittens (literally, 4 of them) on my bed one night only to carry them downstairs to the cupboard the next morning
how she used to almost rip my hand off as i teased her... she enjoyed it, but she often got carried away
that she used to chase my Sister's feet when she walked down the stairs
how she took to my son Xavier when he was born, always looking out for him and sleeping next to him
many other memories that i'll never forget, and for that i will always be thankful.

In truth she got very old and frail and wasn't her normal self, but she always retained her character and i'm glad she went peacefully rather than any long-term illness and having to be put down.

This weekend i'm pretty sad, but happy that i had such a great cat. Having found out we are to have a baby only the other day, i'd like to think Rambo's spirit will carry on, although i think i'll resist the temptation to name the new baby "Rambo" - maybe a nickname ;)

Baby Name Wizard

2006-05-05T12:27:00.000+01:00

After the news yesterday of a new baby on the way, i decided to check out some names. I really love the BabyName Wizard. This is a tool that allows you to type in a name and see how popular it is and has been over the last hundred years or so. I tried "Xavier" - my sons name. Around 1000 babies in every million are called Xavier.

Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

2006-05-05T09:30:00.000+01:00

"El Cinco de Mayo ("The Fifth of May" in Spanish) is a national celebration in Mexico. It commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French expeditionary forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5,1862."

More...

Interestingly, the one of the places the French were defeated was in Loreto, my wife's name.

btw, a zillion points for anyone who correctly guesses the first letter in this blogger verification (tip - it wasn't a "b").

Please, don't encourage them, go here.

A baby on the way and VideoString

2006-05-04T21:45:00.000+01:00

Well folks. We did it again - we're expecting a new baby (is there any other kind?).
We found out this evening so we're really happy that my son may now have a play friend - he tires me out!

I was told of VideoString today and it is very cool indeed - grad and drop words which create a pieced together video of things related to those words. It’s quite a neat idea – imagine being able to extend it to personal videos and so on so you could create a draggable video of your life.

Here's a screenshot :

To celebrate our news, here is mine - as i found out, the actual videos are not always what you expect when you place the words!! Part of the fun of it all :)

some work on taghop

2006-05-04T15:26:00.000+01:00

I did some work on taghop to clean up the UI today. It is actually for my own use as i don't find delicious quite as intuitive when it comes to communities. I tend to work with a set of community orientated blogs and tagging them just to indicate the community is a bit of a pain.

It's just my preference and only 100 odd other people seem to think the same way, but i DO feel community adds context to the tags. Does not one else? Am i on my own here? Throw me a life jacket!!!

We Media

2006-05-04T09:33:00.000+01:00

After yesterday On Hollywood event, i decided to tune into the We Media event at the BBC.

Yep, in the UK we still have a lot to learn from the US. The On Hollywood stream wasn't perfect, but i got a great video and audio with the exception of a 5 minute spell. The stream from less than 500 miles away is a different matter... it keeps cutting off, then comes back for 10 mins and cuts off again.

Still, what i've heard of the conference is good so far. Participatory media is something i'm interested in through my work at vidyo.org.

Resume Fun

2006-05-04T07:46:00.000+01:00

I just updated my resume to send to Wallup.

Whilst doing it i realized just how crap it sounds - it isn't easy to put down half the stuff you have done as an entrepreneur. You have the feeling you should just add "big company INC" or "My Huge Company Corp." to the list, but then for a start-up this make no real sense. The big guys are usually the last guys, you need people who think differently. My time in large enterprises taught me that (and amazed by just high up you can go in a company with no real idea on what's happening in the future world).

So this is a conundrum - how do you create a good CV when all you have is what you have worked on? If the leading edge stuff is what you do then saying you have worked for company X, Y, Z where you did the day to day stuff, the stuff to keep the cash coming in the door, just doesn't strike a balance for me.

In saying that i read about 50 CV's in my last place and they all looked the same. The best way to do these things is just to get to know the person IMHO!

I haven't applied for a job for about 3 years now ( i personally knew or was referred for my other positions), but these guys sound interesting, it's what i have been doing and they're located in a good place. Always good to do it yourself, but when you work with great guys you learn a lot and that's what i'm going for! There are always good ideas you just need to know how to find them!

btw, i've started adding some things to http://vidyo.TV - feel free to add your own vlogs.

Pando - simple P2P file sharing

2006-05-04T06:26:00.000+01:00

I'm playing around with Pando today after i caught the CNN Money story.

Now this does address a need - from personal experience. P2P has traditionally focused on just getting files to you, but the real power is in the application of the technology.

Now, Panda allows you to send a large file to friends via email, but the email contains a link to the sender. Click the link and the download happens direct from the sender - no limitations (other than your broadband connection). It's real easy and does solve the issue that most users have no idea how to use software, so the easier you make it, the more likely the masses are to use it.... and Pando is pretty easy!

What would be nice would be to do this from mobile devices too. Not sure how it would work, but sending video via phone can be tricky - this may be a nice solution.

Search is dead?

2006-05-04T05:46:00.000+01:00

Steve Gillmor says "Search is Dead" :

"Search is dead. The amount of viewing/listening time is finite. It's not about
finding stuff; it's about throwing stuff away."

While the "time is finite" part is spot on, there is no way search is dead.

You can only throw content away once you know what it is. It's like SPAM - i don't want to have to read everything just to know what to throw away and then run out of time, missing some good stuff in the long tail. If you attempt to stream the web you will fail, there's just too much (takes Google a month to index it all) - the best way is through context based selection and this only works if you have parameters to search on.

I've got 760 blog posts to read - i won't read them all obviously, but the time just to scan them is significant and it's only a very small part of the things i'm probably interested in.

On Hollywood has been good - i liked click.tv!

AlwaysOn Hollywood

2006-05-03T20:31:00.000+01:00

I've been watching AlwaysOn Hollywood today live from LA.

There have been some great presentations. One that i was able to viewright away was click.TV which is a cool idea of user generated content to markup video.

I tried it out but perhaps comments have been turned off on the test versions on the blog as i couldnt' add any. However the demo was nice and it's something a bit different and user generated content is big just now as it has been obvious that pure automation doesn't work when it comes to true context and meaning.

Other sites to keep an eye on:
blinkx
podzinger
navio
castpost
videoegg
bitpass

Also, shout out to:

vloggercon
Secrets of Videoblogging

Finally,
Media Data
http://www.industriouskid.com

Jerry Kaplan's Winster

2006-05-03T16:26:00.000+01:00

This may already be hugely popular in the US, i don't know, but not heard of it here in the UK.
However, Jerry Kaplan's latest concept is called Winster and is where you can win prizes by playing social games online. Very addictive for some people i know (nudge).

I played for a little while, but i have a million things to do, but it's quite cool but i suspect there is a lot more to it that may emerge in the next few months.

I also see they're looking for people. If you read his book and know games, you'll want to get involved.

Venture Fair

2006-05-03T14:13:00.000+01:00

It's worth reviewing some of the companies attending the Internet Venture Fair this June in San Jose.

Some of the sites are active - others aren't but there's an interesting mix.

One thing for me to note - the short, 1 paragraph companies were the only ones i spent much time with - or rather, if there was nothing in the first paragraph i never bothered. Interesting... i think i grok the term "elevator pitch" now.

Capturing Ideas and the next big thing

2006-05-03T09:21:00.000+01:00

I'm afraid i'm one of those peolpe who can't do without the following:

a. A notepad in my pocket (no matter where i am)
b. A zillion sheets of paper with diagrams (randomly ordered)
c. A whiteboard

It is (c) that i really love. The problem is that once you've scribbled things down, you need to store them somewhere (and no, i don't have a fancy electronic whiteboard). So i decided to use my phone camera to caputure images of what i have written and just store them within my project. So that means i can now easily caputure the "next big thing", as shown below.

Things to watch however:

1. Make sure you test it ot first. My camera resolution is pretty hopless and you don't often get what you see on the screen!

2. Write (quite) big. I have a tendency to write very small text when i have an idea and don't want to miss out. You can't do that when using a phone camara as it's very unlikely to show up. So write down, capture, save and continue.

3. Name and order your files. You need to know what your thought process was.

Maybe I should get a better camera at some point, but this one does me find just now - so long as i know its limitations!

I'm sure there are a load of people doing this kind of thing, so let me know how you do it!

Discovering Complex Relationships in Semantic Web

2006-05-02T16:23:00.000+01:00

Nice semantic web demo from the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems group at the University of Georgia.

I like the idea of the time spent to create some simple examples - a lot of the time you just get two boxes and are asked to provide two random URIs. Interesting work to follow.

Sleepless in Seattle Mashup

2006-05-02T13:34:00.000+01:00

If you want to see what mashups in Web 2 are all about, i suggest you have a look at this from here.

Excellent. Film will never be the same again.

Sales Based Marketing

2006-05-02T12:31:00.000+01:00

I read "Time for Software Marketing to Grow Up" by Tom Hogan over at Sandhill.com.

It's not the kind of thing i read every day, but a quick scan got me interested. In particular, point 3 is as follows:

3. You must be able to identify your target, know the problem they're facing,
and reach them with a compelling offer or solution, or you haven't got a chance.

This is something i have started to adopt in my day to day work and it was nice to see it formalized so i know i am somewhere in the right direction. I'm at R&D stage just now, but here is how my thought trails work....

(a) Understand the big picture (this is actually ben quite tricky, with (b)).

(b) Put in place a design that supports flexibility in each area, but accomplishes the goal of allowing you to extend in detail into those areas when required

(c) Start plugging in the areas that can give most visibility to customers and get early feedback. This is the part where SBM comes into play for me.

In short we have to start somewhere. Some of us are lucky to fall into an idea. Others have an idea that they thing may work. Two diametrically oposing starting positions. However, in the same way that you need to provde your idea is doable even when it shouts out at you, if you have some technology conept, you have to figure out whether it is sellable.

I'm the latter, with a technical idea i hope works. However, i do believe by adotping some of the ideas in SBM, even a start-up can quickly figure out what customers will buy, what people want and whether your initial direction was wrong.

They key really is flexibility in the big picture. If you really have an idea that you think will work, chances are someone will make it work. The problem usually happens when your idea is so far down the road that being agile enough to change to new customer requirements isn't possible and so someone else comes in and steals your wind.