August 23, 2004
XQuery book hidden anagram
I'm reading "XQuery: The XML query language" book by Michael Brundage. Very well written and enjoyable to read book (well may be that's because my previous one was oh-boy-1000pages-of-math-and-pseudocode "Introduction to Algorithms" ? :). Anyway, here is what an interesting stuff I found in Michael's XQuery book. On page 29 Michael presents sample team.xml document, here is small excerpt from it:
<Employee id="E5" years="0.6"> <?Follow-up?> <Name>Jason Abedora</Name> <Title>Developer</Title> <Expertise>Puzzles</Expertise> </Employee>Nothing special, huh? But look more thoroughly. Can you see an anagram here? There is additional hint on the page 136, where Michael illustrates one-to-one join of team.xml with another sample document projects.xml using FLWOR expression. Here is an excerpt from the join:
<Name>XQuery Bandit</Name> <Name>Jason Abedora</Name>Now it's easy to see it :)
del.ico.us
digg it
redditChaz Hoover = Chris Suver (Data architect)
Carl Yates = Carl Perry (Data PM, gamertag Yates)
Panda Serai = anagram of Arpan Desai (XML PM, blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/arpande/ )
Kandy Konrad = Andy Conrad (Data PM, blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/aconrad )
Wanda Wilson / Jim Barry = Jim Wilson (XML test manager) + ???
Posted by: at August 25, 2004 5:46 PMCool.
Ok, here are names for those who didn't buy the book yet:
Chaz Hoover
Carl Yates
Panda Serai
Kandy Konrad
Wanda Wilson
Jim Barry
Take a guess who is who here :)
Posted by: Oleg Tkachenko at August 24, 2004 7:28 PMNice that he *dare*d do it :o)
Posted by: Dimitre Novatchev at August 24, 2004 2:15 AMHi Oleg, I'm thrilled to learn someone found that!
There are many other similar jokes hidden in the book, if you feel like looking for them. My personal favorite is the one in the index that says essentially "XQuery complexities - see date/time functions". Incredibly that one was by the indexer (who had no prior knowledge of XQuery). :-)
FWIW, all of the other names in that sample are derived from his co-workers. If you look closely, you'll find the names of three other PMs who have blogs (one from XML, one from SQLXML, one from ObjectSpaces), as well as a PM from the data access team, the XML test manager, an architect who's worked on many different things, and a SQLXML dev.
Cheers,
michael
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