October 2003 Archives

I've been some time offline travelling around Israel with my wife, Mom and mother-in-law. Now, coming back to my mail and RSS Bandito I feel like I missed a revolution in the industry. The crowd is talking about declarative programming on Windows, Elliotte Rusty Harold likes Microsoft XAML design, hmmmmmmmm what's going on?

By the way I'm reading Elliotte's new book, "Effective XML" (check out some chapters online) right now. Well, that's the most interesting XML book I've read last years, probably becuase Elliotte doesn't try to teach us XML, but sorts out well-known XML problems and pitfalls and explains best practices how to solve them to make using XML effective. Of course not all he's writing I'm agree with, but still interesting. In fact it's java-related book, so "Effective XML" addendum for .NET world is needed. I believe it could be great subject for an article.

In the related news, by Mark Fussell:

Ubiquity and deployment! What planet are you living on! Where does deployment fit with the DOM! The DOM is a dying API, superced by improved XML stores such as the JDOM and in .NET the XPathDocument, now that this is editable in the System.Xml "Whidbey" release.

Ahhha, a honey for my soul...

To my delight, GotDotNet Workspaces have been upgraded to v1.1. Newly added features now make the environment really competing with SourceForge.net et al. Finally!

• Workspace aliases. Now I can use human readable alias URL http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/xinclude instead of machine-readable long id-based URL for XInclude.NET project! Wooohoo! (Cough, cough, actually it doesn't seem to work now, probably some time is needed to propagate the URL alias).
  Dare, book http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/exslt alias before somebody takes it!
• Documentation. Finally we can place html and images to customize workspace home page and provide online documentation for projects. A must stuff I really missed.
• Access control, by user and group, notifications, cool control knobs.

Well done guys!

It's Sukkot holydays in Israel. My mother came from Ukraine to visit us and provided that she is the first time in Israel, this week (and next three) I'm working mostly in tourist guide mode. There are plans to be in Jerusalem, Dead Sea, Eilat, Sea of Galilee, Golans, Caesarea, Negev desert etcetera. This week we've spent walking in Tel-Aviv area and lying on the beach, except for Wednesday, when we've been in Haifa. This picture has been taken there, it's Bahai Temple:

These days my blog is under attack by some insane spammers. Hehe, funny huh? I have no idea what such a comment to one of my blog record means:

Name: Sex Toys
Email Address: Dave@Dave.net
URL: http://www.sextoys######.om/

Comments:

We live in strange times, but someday I think we will look back on all of this and marvel at how crazy it was. God, I hope so. I sure wouldn't want this insanity to become the norm.

The Matrix Revolutions movie will be unveiled at the exactly the same moment in every major city around the world on November 5. It's going to be at 6AM in LA, 9AM in NY, 11PM in Tokyo and apparently 4PM in Israel.
Kinda unusual, probably the first time in the cinema history. My bet is they are just trying to amplify the effect. May be finally they'll connect Matrix reality to ours, e.g. by finishing The Matrix Revolutions in a scene where Neo's gathering all zombie people to see some movie with a title written in green on black.
Are you guys going to see a movie at 6AM? You must be geeks. :)

Does anybody have any recommendations/advices for buyng a notebook? I want to get one, something like from Compaq Presario series, which I only have an experience with. May be this one?

New MVP Awards List for 2003-2004 has been published. My sincere congrats to Christoph and Kirk!

I've been told I was nominated too, but seems like I'm not lucky enough. May be what I'm doing is not enough or I'm doing something wrong, who knows. Well, may be next time.
Today's mentallogram: