This ain't ballet. Sounds like the league really wants the Wings to win. Joke! By the way, Nieminen's goal was one of the best this playoff.

First period...

• iM scared.

Second period...

• Sundin has played his best hockey this last two game in some years. Two goals and a lead.
• The Antropov penalty was a joke. This aien't ice dancing, ref.
• Almost a third goal by Sundin. It looks like Sundin and Mogilny really want the Cup.

Third period...

• 3-1, great powerplay. Good to see Tucker make a play, he's been invisible.
• MHO. The Flyers don't seem willing to pay the price on the road. Thus, they are going to have to win all four at home. Where's Primeau? Kaberle, Domi, Roenicke are all looking good. Most of the Flyers seem to be afraid and Toronto is keeping them well outside. Antropov has caughed up the puck at the defensive blueline too much.
• Mogilny penalty. Another joke.
• Reichel good.
• Gagne's penalty, another joke.
• I can't believe Sundin wasn't nominated for MVP.
• After a slow start to the series, Belfour has moved closer to the Conn Smythe.

iM so happy!

Here's an interesting thread that's getting very political. Let's start w/ a great comment...

MSXML Dude: Can't you guys just move along and produce something useful. Is ATOM 0.3 all we are going to get out of the ATOM effort?

Finally...

Atom Dude: Things I can change: I can issue warnings when such conditions are detected so that feed producers who care to have the widest possible interoperability can make informed choices.

And that's all we expect, great validators.

Because of my increase bandwidth, I upgraded accounts. As part of the upgrade, they switch my server on me. Unfortunately, they didn't give the ASP.NET user permission to write to my folder and thus any code that attempted to write to disk failed.

I guess this means that .NET doesn't scale either ;)

The server upgrade also meant an upgrade from .NET 1.0 to .NET 1.1, which I appreciate, but causes other problems, a.k.a. .NET Hell. That is, some code that works in .NET 1.0 doesn't in .NET 1.1. The case in point as the validateRequest attribute in ASP.NET. Using this attribute in .NET 1.0 fails, but is required in order to pass HTML in a post request in .NET 1.1. Good job M$FT :(

Anyhow, iM back!

Randy: Awesome! Now I can change my name to George W. Bush.

Source: Configure Dude.

First period...

• iM scared.

Second period...

• The refs are letting them play and the Leafs are taking advantage w/ rough play and two goals.
• When the Leafs need a win, Quinn has the d-men stand up @ the offensive blueline.
• Funny, they've been decapitating each other all game and the first penalty is obstruction.

Third period...

• Mogilny, our lady byng winner, crushed Markov from behind. Should've been a penalty.
• Game over. Mogilny is first star for leading the physical attack.
• Sundin rarely scores w/ a three goal lead.

Memories

About five year ago, I was playing hockey and we were up by one goal w/ a minute or two on the clock. The other team just took a penalty and called a timeout. I told everybody to keep the puck low and don't pass it to the point. Just bury it in the corner. I ended up on the ice w/ less than a minute left, wide open in the right corner, the defenseman was wide open on the right point. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

RSS Dude: I want a cigarette so bad. Everywhere I go someone is smoking. Basically I'm smoking without lighting up. Europe is far behind the US in this. I've resisted, but it's required resistence. 684 days since I've had a cigarette.

Randy: Congrats! Life is so much better than a cig.

Source: KLog Dude.

I also posted an Alpha preview in the juice browser user group. The preview has a lot of half implemented functionality and I also removed a bunch of stuff that was too buggy for the preview. I hope to have a completed Alpha soon (week or two).

RSSQuotes allows you to create and save a list of stocks, then delivers the quotes to your favorite RSS Reader during market hours. Most quotes are in REAL-TIME. Those not traded on the ECNs are 20 min. delayed.

XML Dude: Someone identifying himself only as “Mick” writes in to tell me about the recently-arrived RSSQuotes.com, which claims to offer real-time quotes. Doing that for free is a neat trick... I wonder about the business model, but the site is information-free about who they are.

Randy: They can offer real-time quotes because they are not using NASDAQ or NYSE quotes, but secondary exchanges (the ECNs). Here's a sample provider.

Quote: Date: 04.21.04 - Email from Google - "The following merchandise found on your website constitutes a list of items that must be removed from your site, ads and keywords in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Recall Bush - White T-shirt (with radio control on head)
Dumb and Dumber White T-shirt - Bush and Blair: The Movie
You're Fired - George W. Bush White T-shirt
Dump Cheney White T-shirt - "Halliburton" tattooed across head
Miserable Failure T-shirt - George W. Bush
Kerry sucks (too) - T-shirt

This list is by no means exhaustive, so other merchandise similar in nature to the items listed above must be removed as well."

Randy: Is Google Evil?

Source: Humble Opinion.

Update: Alec has a great response.

January - 1.9 gigs
February - 2.9 gigs
March - 5.1 gigs
April - 6.3 gigs already
Yesterday - 0.5 gigs

iM not certain if I should tell y'all thanks or get lost for hitting my server too much :)

Quote: #develop (short for SharpDevelop) is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. It is open-source (GPL), and you can download both sourcecode and executables from this site.

Randy: Interesting. Haven't tried it.

Review: Crap! Not much there. A popup blocker and toolbar search. The MSN toolbar (3 stars) does little compared to Google (5 stars) and Yahoo! toolbars (4 stars). iM currently using Google toolbar @ work (great search into MSDN) and Yahoo! toolbar @ home (but I hate Google).

Jim from Raleigh asked me how do you perform tasks initiated by the UI in the background. In .NET, this is trivial, simply use the QueueUserWorkItem static method. Following is an example of triggering a MsgBox from a button click, but that runs in a background thread.

private void button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
   System.Threading.ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(
      new System.Threading.WaitCallback( this.Worker ));
}

public void Worker(Object obj)
{
   System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("Hello");
}

On DimSum Friday, out w/ my wife and kids, we had a great meal followed by some entertaining fortune cookies. If u don't already know, iM a big DimSum fan and lunch on it 1-2 times / wk. The best misfortune follows w/ exact spelling. Really!

You have much skill in express-
ing yourself to be dffective.

Source: remarket.

Unfortunately, the API is far from free, which makes it unusable to me. It has per-call fees that would result in large amounts of money going to eBay for any application that is broadly deployed. Amazon, on the other hand, provides their API for free. Win Amazon. Lose eBay.

My comments.

• Support for Relax NG. Cool!
• No mention of XML-RPC. Sounds like we are going to have to continue kludging this protocol into WSDL.
• There is some discussion in the Web Services Description WG mailing list about REST. Looks like it'll be supported in an up-coming draft.

Dave Orchard: This uses HTTP POST to contain HTTP methods. However, the ATOM specification has to do exactly this because sometimes DELETE and PUT cannot go through HTTP firewalls.

Randy: Terse! Please read context.

I picked up my RV and parked it in my driveway for the very first time. What a great first year of RVing!

RSS Dude: A fantastic mosaic of pictures of soldiers who died in Iraq form an aggregate picture of the 43rd President of the United States.

I've been putting a lot of work into Juice. I hope to get an early alpha out the door b4 months end. Imagine if your browser didn't suck.

Update: iM no longer using IE. Juice is better. Lots of debugging and feature polishing in the works.

iM off to my sister's for the afternoon and pray that I make it home in time to pick up a six pack and watch our nation's anthem. Wish me luck.

Update: I didn't make the six pack and anthem. They lost. Too bad. The game was won when Mogilny missed his break away from Sundin. Where's Nolan. He better play or that McCauley trade goes down as the worst in a long time. Antropov is still sucking. Kaberle played great. McCabe had an off night. Sundin was amazing. All said, Toronto is down 2-0 because they were out goaltended.

Bloggers are talking about Google's new feed bot.

• Finally Atom
• RSS Dude

I think people are reading way too much into this. What is Google doing? I don't know and neither does everybody else, safe a collection of people at Google and maybe a handful of insiders. I'm still pissed that Google's Blogger is supporting Atom and excluding RSS - I mean how hard would it be to make a transform -  but I'd be more concerned that Google is using predictive crawling, than excluding rss.xml. Of course, if I was a major shareholder of a blogger service who published their feed at that excluded URL, then I guess I'd be pretty pissed. I suggest redirecting atom.xml and index.rdf to rss.xml.

Lessons learned in predictive crawling. Follow links and robots.txt and nothing else. Do not guess at URLs, or people will get annoyed.

BoingBoing recently added technorati support to allow their users to quickly find other blog entries commenting on this post. This has produced a new method of publicizing your blog, simply refer to all the current BoingBoing posts and you get a few sucker hits. This can be automated along w/ a ping to Technorati to get you instant blogosphere self-gratification. Unfortunately, Technorati is more often non-functional than functional, so the effect isn't continuous.

Feedster Dude: I know that people have been less than pleased with Feedster's performance as we've grown and, trust me, its bugged me quite a bit also. This hasn't been a problem with the software, its been an issue of our hardware and our hosting. With the quantity of searches with process and the limited hardware we have, I know why we're not the fastest engine in the west. So I'm very, very happy to tell you that we've just ordered brand new hardware and will be dramatically increasing our capacity and performance.

Randy: Hurray! But I've been hearing the same from Technorati for over a year and the problems persist. Here's advice, drop PHP, get J2EE or .NET. Here's some more, your Atom and OPML look like RSS. XML-RPC Dude will be happy. Bugs aside, Feedster is great!

Yahoo! Dude: What am I supposed to think of this, Dave? Is this why [...] blocks referers from your site? Did you also try to use his content against someone else you disklike in the past? Your terse linking style leave a lot of room for interpretation.

Disclaimer: Please read all links to gain context. More reading and context...

• 1 Year of Blog (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)
• Jeremy D. Zawodny - Home Page
• The History of Weblogs
• RSS History
• Dave's History of SOAP
• Dave Winer - Wikipedia

RSS Dude: Thanks to Tara, Brian, Ryan, Randy, Scott and Rogers and the others who stood up and said it's important to know where people are coming from.

Randy: Dude!

Now this is a phone. Guess who's stock is moving?

• Windows Smartphone
• MSN MSGer
• Wifi and Bluetooth
• 1 Mpixel camera

RSS Dude: I'm going to get a hard hat and a baseball bat and kick some reactionary butt.

Randy: RSS Dude, kick some ass! Everybody else, watch this video of Bush getting fired by the Donald.

Dare Obasanjo on Channel 9: Atom seems to be just a reinvention of what the RSS has done.

Randy: I like Dare.

Source: RSS Dude.

Woke up this morning, knowning I didn't have enough grinds for my usually morning coffee. I added some of my wife's decaffeinated grinds, two parts decaf for every REAL grind. The coffee is horrible. I'll drink it regardless.

I have to put a spell checker in my blog software.

A few years back, Microsoft released a new business server and a fellow architect asked me whether the server would have any use in our current project. I mentionned that Microsoft had just released the product and that I'd wait for a couple of SPs before I would jump on board. He asked why and I responded that I doubted the security of new products. He turned to a third developer and asked, "does the server support x.509 certificates?" The answer was yes. I didn't know if the architect was inferring that x.509 certificates guaranteed all around security, nevertheless, I didn't pursue the conversation any further and we never used the business server.

I think Launch just had a bad day, it's been pretty awesome since. It's much better than playing canned music, as the spontaneity adds to the listening pleasure. Launch features the following groups for me, based on my feedback of what I like and dislike; Billy Idol, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., Good Charlotte, Barenaked Ladies, Chicago, Elvis Costello, Dire Straits, The Doors. I'm not much of a Barenaked Ladies fan, but the rest is pretty accurate of my preferred groups.

Quote: Is it more likely that this is not a calculated move, but that they are experimenting with crawling feeds in general and that, if they're going to index them, they probably want as many as possible?

Randy: Instead of re-inventing the wheel, why doesn't Google just buy Feedster, which is a great service that already indexes feeds. This will encourage further entrepreneurial spunk. I would have said Technorati, but they don't actually index feeds, but rather HTML blogs.

R u ready for some hockey? 70s style?

Quinn coached a brute Flyers' team (Linseman, Leach, Propp, Barber, Clarke, MacLeish, Holmgren, Bridgeman, Dailey, Kelly, Wilson, Watson, Peeters) to the finals 24 years ago.

First period

• A quit start by the Leafs, they couldn't capitalize, but the Flyers did.
• Mogilny was flying, which is a better sign than the goal.
• W/ Sundin and Nolan in the wings, it's to the Leafs advantage, if the play is even. End of 1st.

Second period

• Stupid Antropov. Antropov has had numerous opportunities to score this game, but only put one in and it was on his own net. In fact, of the numerous opportunities he's had, he still hasn't recorded a shot on the oppositions net.

Third period

• Kaberle was a little week on the puck. 3-1 Flyers, it's over.
• Mogilny has been the best Leaf. That's a good sign.

If you look at the bottom of the individual comments pages, you'll notice a new link. Actually, it's not a link, just some blue text "passwordless signin" that you can click on. You can then fill in your name and link and they will automagically appear as your sig on all your posts. Feel free to test it a bit. Report errors to /dev/null, a.k.a. me.

Update: I dropped the last few comments as they were inappropriate, if you know what I mean.

Ben Hui: As a frequent visitor to J2ME and Bluetooth developer forums, I've noticed that one of the most frequently asked questions is "How do I get started with Bluetooth?" Despite its introduction in 1998 and a highly hyped year in 2001, Bluetooth application development remains hideous and challenging for lots of developers.

Randy: Ben was a fellow architect and friend @ 724 Solutions. Congrats! This is Ben's official Website.

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.orkut.com/Login.aspx

The following error was encountered:

• Connection Failed

The system returned:

    (111) Connection refused

The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

Your cache administrator is webmaster@orkut.com.

Generated Wed, 21 Apr 2004 23:36:49 GMT by www.orkut.com (squid)

Let me take a stab at this.

Hart - Martin St Louis. Not close. I don't understand why Brodeur was nominated. Sundin should have been.

Norris - Zdeno Chara.

Selke - I like Kirk Maltby, but he wasn't even nominated. His linemate, Kris Draper was. But, I think John Madden will win.

Vezina - Robert Luongo broke records this year, but Richard (I mean Martin) Brodeur might win. I'd prefer Luongo, but don't see how he could win if Brodeur was nominated for the Hart.

Calder - Michael Ryder had an amazing season. I think Raycroft is best qualified, but some will shy away because he's only a rookie because the rules for rookie goaltenders is flawed.

Byng - Brad Richard should win easy. Daniel Alfredsson should never of been nominated and this proves how stupid people are. Remember the Sundin stick throwing immitation. That disqualifies you for this award, don't you think.

Adams - It should be Sutter, but he's up against an American and a wanna-be American and they usually win.

Quote: The Make-A-Wish Foundation exists for one purpose - to fulfill the special wishes of children from ages three through seventeen-years-old who have a life-threatening illness.

Randy: Here's another great charity and as it's Belfour Day and Make-A-Wish is Belfour's charity of choice, we are blogging it.

Kent Douglas was rookie of the year the last year the Leafs won the Stanley Cup. He's also from my hometown of Cobalt, Ontario and sounds like a great person.

GO! Leafs! GO! Be like Kent!

iM cancelling my dialup AOL. I've been transferred twice already. Asked the same questions twice over. Quite the salesmen.

Update: Make that transferred three times and I don't even know if I clear.

I love WSDL, but whether it's an Object IDL or a message-level contract specification is purely semantics. It's a great solution for getting things done, correctly.

Source: Essential Dude.

You can feel the anticipation in the air. One hour. iM at work. I'll leave at 6:50 PM and still make the anthem. It's nice to work close to home.

First period...

• Domi, Reichel and Kilger have played great all series, even w/ a lack of ice time. Toronto leads. Can you picture the Leaf logo on Alec's blog?
• And Nieuwendyk makes it 2-0 on a bad goal against Lalime.
• Why does Belfour get a penalty? Other than bad reffing?
• Chara is playing a lot like Pronger was, before his injury. Nobody really wants to go in the corner w/ him. But the Leafs do and thus are winning.
• Belfour is hot again!
• Nieuwendyk makes it 3-0 and say goodbye to Lalime.

Second period...

• Oh! Oh! 3-1 early.
• The Nieuwendyk penalty can be described in one word. Joke!
• Klee got away w/ 1. Playing the puck w/ a broken stick.
• Prusek looks weak today.
• Reichel looks great.
• The penalty parade continues. Belfour refuses to relent.

Third period...

• iM not leaving for that local bar. Last time I did that, the game turned and we lost.
• It's over! McCabe makes it 4-1.
• Wow Belfour! And happy birthday (tomorrow)!

First off, Quinn just saved his job. Belfour became a modern day folk hero, along side Clark, Gilmour, Potvin and Joseph.

Now you know where the term fix bugs comes from. Long shorterned from affix bugs :) Which explains the theory that in fixing two bugs, a programmer will write a new bug.

Sources: SqlXml Bugs, SQL Junkies, Longhorn Dude.

Quote: Early symptoms of Senator Inferiority Complex (tm) include a sudden desire to hate Toronto, delusions of grandeur (belief that the Senators may win the Cup someday), and a desire to visit the Ottawa Senators fan forum, and a desire to purchase Senator merchandise and possibly even Senator tickets (and not just to see another favourite team).

Programmers simply do not understand what is meant by documenting their code. When I saw this class recently, in production code, I had a good laugh. By the way, every source file had the same comments w/ little deviation. I modified the source to make it unrecognizable to the author. But now I fear that every programmer is going to think its their code :)

// namespace includes
using System;
// Summary description for Class1.
public class Class1
{
  private int _foo = 0;
  // Constructor
  public Class1() { }
  //===================
  // public functions
  public void DoThis() { }
  //===================
  // private functions
  private void DoThat() { }
  //===================
  // Accessor functions
  public int foo
  {
    get { return _foo; }
    set { _foo = value; }
  }
}

Beyond the Leafs winning against Ottawa, this was the only series that I wanted one way or another.

Notes: Number of CDNian teams eliminated by non-CDNian teams. 1. Edmonton Oilers. And this will remain true for at least another week or two. Number of CDNian teams there will be in the next round. 3. Number of CDNian teams of the 10 currently still alive in the playoffs. 5.

I installed Quicktime to view this trailer. It was worth it. Remember, when installing Quicktime, you have to remove all the stupid associations, like as if I want Quicktime to be the default viewer for GIFs. Quicktime is a great marketing tool for Apple, as it gives them presence on the desktop. Very annoying presence. Quicktimes sucks!

Source: Ain't-it-Cool News.

If the Leafs win game 7, then you must put the Leaf logo on your blog till they are eliminated. If the Sens win game 7, then I'll put the Sens logo up. Logo must be approximately 100 pixels square and picked from the team sites.

Update: I wanna up the odds. I'll wear the team 1200 Leaf's suck t-shirt in my new blog pic, if they lose. To make this happen, just get me one of those two girls ;)

Kevin Reynen: "I decided to create a photomosaic of Bill Gates from images and logos of the companies Microsoft has bought or crushed."

Source: RSS Dude.

The Germany company Festo will unveil a humanlike robot with servo-pneumatic muscles -- exactly like the Austrian-built "Terminator" robot -- at a Fair in Hannover this week. The Robot, called "Tron X," has over 200 servo-pneumatic controllers that provide muscle-like movement.

Source: Scoble on Kunal.

I'll believe it Wednesday morning. If they lose!

Source VOIP Dude.

Update: A new song. Source VOID Dude.

Beyond any doubt, Technorati's constant issues is proof that PHP doesn't scale. Get J2EE or .NET.

First period

• Not a smart play by Bondra and de Vries. Leading to a 2-man advantage for the Leafs and the first goal. Amazing w/ all the Sens diving all over the ice, the penalty calls have been even during the series. Typical, even up the calls reffing in the NHL. This goes both ways, so the Leafs have to be wary of the next penalty, it's coming their way and the likely of a 4 minute or 2-man advantage going against the Leafs has increased.
• Ah! This is weird. The Leafs are winning both the play, the scoreboard and playing great all around unselfish hockey. You'd expect the next penalty to go against the Leafs, but they are resisting well.
• Kerry Fraser didn't fall for Hossa's first dive. I guess reputation can be used against you. But shortly after, there's the 4 minute advantage. Oops, hold the mustard, only 2 minutes. I'd love to have heard Fraser's explanation to the Sen's bench. And there's the other 2 minutes on Klee.
• 10 minutes of the Leafs, followed by 10 minutes of the Sens and the Leafs lead 1-0 on an advantage in penalty calls, which the Sens deserved. Ah! Can you say turkey and gravy too?

Second period

• After game 1, I was afraid the Leafs were going to be out early (4-5 games). Lucky that we have Belfour.
• Reichel played extremely well last playoff. Likely the best Leaf. He's one of the best this year too!
• The Sen fans are anxious and preparing to drown their sorrows.
• The Leetch penalty call was a joke.
• Wow! Belfour!

Third period

• Off to the local pub!
• Bondra sucks! Overtime. See you Game 7! iM 34 yrs old and w/out a Cup, yet!

It's a sick thing to define yourself in terms of the misery you think you're creating. It's the kind of misery someone creates when cutting a really stinky fart. Yeah, I know I'm going to survive this, but couldn't you just skip the farting part. Hey couldn't you just skip the introducing yourself part?

Randy: Winer is a rock. I don't know if I could put up w/ so much abuse.

... I dropped off a check to buy my new RV, now 1 yr old.

• Around 15 weekend trips from 100kms to 1000 kms.
• Four week trip to Orlando w/ wife and kids, 5000 kms.
• My dad and mom took it for a three week trip to Florida, 5000 kms.

iM often asked to be more like Jim, but I'd rather be more like Jack. For instance, of late, I have been asked several times by an old acquaintance to resist blogging about an occurrence, that I believe to be true, that negatively reflects on him. He hints that its unethical, illegal, immoral and that it does not create value. I disagree. Opinions?

Quote: St. Jude is unlike any other pediatric treatment and research facility anywhere. Discoveries made here have completely changed how the world treats children with cancer and other catastrophic illnesses. Donate.

Randy: Moving TV commercials.

Quote: The Hospital for Sick Children, affectionately called Sick Kids, is one of the largest paediatric academic health science centres in the world, with an international reputation for excellence in health care, research, and teaching. Donate.

Randy: Canadian counterpart.

Quote: Amazing news coming from the US this morning where Pentagon Insiders have tipped off the Blog Herald that CIA agents will be raiding BloggerCon 2 today to question Dave Winer in relation to terrorist activities. Agents were disturbed to discover links between Dave "Osama Bin" Winer and facism after doing an image search on Google and discovering the following disturbing link:

Click to pop up large image.

CIA spokesman and international man of mystery Ben Trott said that Dave was also being investigated on charges of treachery against TypeKey.
"As a nation we cannot stand by and allow bearded men to upset Mena over breakfast" said Ben.

"All we want to do is help people, and Bin Winer asks all these questions: its just not American."

AOL spokesperson John Mcblognotalot, stated that Bin Winer was not on their payroll: "As much as we'd like to see SixApart fail, Daves doing this of his own back, and not off our payroll". Harvard was not available for comment.

Randy: Funny!

Source: bin Winer.

Interest in a SOAP Blogging RPC was obvious when I first released PaSSAPI and got a lot of great feedback, so iM moving it forward w/ some new initiatives. Here's what's next.

• BloggerAPI/PaSSAPI gateway in ASP.NET
• MetaWeblogAPI/PaSSAPI gateway in ASP.NET
• PaSSAPI client in C#

Later,

• Tighten up an HTTP/GET and HTTP/POST implementation.
• AtomAPI/PaSSAPI gateway in ASP.NET

Quote: ... he told me I’d been auto-unsubscribed because my ISP had decided, deferring to the SpamCop Blocking List, that the IMC’s SMTP was a spam source and (temporarily) blacklisted it ... to quote Paul: “If you trust spamcop, you will continue to lose your mail randomly without knowing why.”

Randy: Email is becoming an unreliable delivery service. There's lots of money in either replacing email (IM) and fixing it (SpamCop).

Quote: Tim Bray joined the beginning of the meeting and announced that he is resigning from the TAG due to W3C Process constraints on the number of participants from the same Member. The TAG resolved unanimously to thank Tim Bray for his contributions.

Randy: I missed this one, because I was in Florida for a month w/out Internet access. I think TAG should ask itself an important question.

"Is it more important to follow this process rule or to have Tim Bray on the team?"

The answer is obvious. Mind you, Tim and TAG may have had more reasons, unknown to most of us, for this disastrous move. On the other hand, Tim's resignation from TAG is great news for Atomites. He brings a lot of sanity to the Atom process.

Quote: The motivation for doing this was to get rid of the type="multipart/alternative" feature in the current Atom drafts, which strikes me as a “wouldn’t-this-be-nice” kind of thing that doesn’t do a good job on the most common use-cases.

Randy: Le awesome. This is finally gonna make Atom much more XSD friendly, tool friendly and Simple.

At first, Launch was giving me really high quality suggestions. I suspect that my preferences causes this. When you sign up, you pick a few groups and types of music that you like. This seeds Launch and allows it to start playing some of your favorite music. It then asked me to rate songs. I have found that as I rate the songs, the quality of songs being suggested is decreasing. In fact, I can no longer find a song I like. Quite often, I'd grade albums and groups really high. You'd think that would be an indication to play more from those groups and those albums. I guess that's not accounted for in their model. People who like songs from Chicago like other songs by Chicago.

Sounds :) like their associative matching algorithm is mucked.

I added quickSub. Doesn't look pretty in some older Moz. You can see what it does by hovering over the word Subscribe in the right sidebar. It allows users w/ certain RSS clients to quickly subscribe to my blog feed. I've modified the code some.

Update: I removed quickSub, it was causing other parts of my blog to malfunction. It's way too much code for such a small feature. I think I'll just learn from it and write a Javascript function that does the same, in much less code and that doesn't kill other Javascript.

Quote: The OSVDB is an independent and open source database created by and for the community. Our goal is to provide accurate, detailed, current, and unbiased technical information.

Source: Carey Dude.

Asbjørn on MSGer: Sam Ruby's comment system is probably the best ever, besides that it sends you to the front page after posting. Other than that, I think it's as close to perfect as is possible.

Randy: Agreed. Asbjorn also suggested I allow non-designMode browsers to post comments via TEXTAREA and preview. Hmmm! The first step is to detect designMode support. You could do this via user-agent, but me no like HACK. Any suggestions?

Update: Looking for feedback from various browsers on this page. Tell me what OS/Browser/Version you have and what the alert popups say. Thanks! For example IE on XP report "Hello" then "designMode is 'Inherit'" and finally "designMode is 'On'".

Update: Page changed w/ working code for designMode and other.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie and note that you get redirected to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp. Why not setup the Web server to return default.asp as the default page for that folder?

You might ask why I care? Well over time, Microsoft has changed the page from default.htm to default.asp and iM certain default.aspx in the future and others in the past. Algorithms that are based on associative links (like Google's Page Rank) would have to account for the numerous redirections to provide perfect results. I doubt this is important to Google and Microsoft's link counts suffer over time. iM picky.

Quote: World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee today was named recipient of the first-ever Millennium Technology Prize.

The honor, which is accompanied by one million euros, is bestowed by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation as an international acknowledgement of outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people?s quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development.

"The Web has significantly enhanced many people's ability to obtain information central to their lives," says Pekka Tarjanne, former secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union and chairman of the International Award Selection Committee. "The Web is encouraging new types of social networks, supporting transparency and democracy, and opening up novel avenues for information management and business development."

Source: FOAF Dude.

Quote: Ed Belfour took matters into his own hands once again as he stopped all 21 Senators' shots for the 2-0 Game 5 shutout at Air Canada Centre Friday. Tie Domi opened the scoring for Toronto thanks to a lucky bounce off a Senator while Joe Nieuwendyk potted the insurance late in the third after missing Game 4 as a precautionary measure. The Leafs now lead the best-of-seven Quarterfinal 3-2 heading into Game 6 Sunday in Ottawa.
» ECQF Game 5: Recap | Photo Gallery
» Leafs Today Update: Fri.: 300K

Randy: This is the best single playoff series goaltending that I've seen since Curtis Joseph. Curtis did this on 4-5 occasions w/ St Louis, Edmonton (poor Dallas) and Toronto. Belfour is the last remaining goalie this year who has previously won the Cup. He has 6 shutouts in his last 8 games, 4 of them against the Sens.

Quote: Star New Democrat MP Svend Robinson took a sudden and stunning leave from federal politics Thursday -- stepping down from the job he's had for 25 years after he admitting he stole jewellery last Friday.

Randy: Wow! I really like Svend. Disappointing. But, it might be a good move for him. Now he can be a politician south of the border.

I'll tell y'all why when things settle down.

Update: iM unretiring and taking a full-time job w/ a software development firm very close to my house. iM no longer a startup junkie, at my wife's request.

source senators fan who didn't want to post it on his blog.

Update: I took the song offline as it was costly $$$ bandwidth. Feel free to request it via email.

Watched the game w/ a friend of mine and blogger from Ottawa. Belfour can't stop them all. Hopefully, the team will play better in front of him in the best of three.

Quote: We will be relaunching soon. Stay tuned.

Randy: I'm waiting.

Buy the official iBLOGthere4iM bumper sticker. Support my blogging habbit :) Thanks to Lucius for the artwork.

I decided to manage my friendster account today - by the way, add me as a friend, I only have 3 - and I get 20+ javascript errors on the user.jsp page. Most users wouldn't see that, as they don't have a javascript debugger running, but it's definately not a good sign for the big boy of social software. It's also very annoying, if you have a javascript debugger. I decided to view source. Ahhhh!!! The HTML is horrific to say the least. I decided to run the HTML thru the W3 validator. The validator doesn't believe its HTML :)

I checked my blog homepage too! Not bad, I should clean up a couple items though.

DEAR _Citibank Cleints,
ThIs email was _sent by_the Citibank_ serevrs to verify your _mail adress_. You must complete this process by clicking on_the__link bellow and entering in the smmall _window your _citibank_ _Debit Card_number and Pin that you_use_ on ATM_Machine. That_is done_ for-your protection becourse some of our members memmbers have access to their _e-mail_ adderss and we must verify it. To verify your_ _mail addres and acces _your OnlineCitibank account, clik on_the__link beelow.

Randy: Before u phish, learn to spell. I got this phishing email last night. Link was removed for your protection.

...in the NHL playoffs. The refs are buying the dives, hook, line and sinker.

Update: Kovalev fakes an injury to try and draw a penalty, inadvertently takes out a teamate, leading to the winning goal for the Bruins :) Happy!

• NHL IceCast is reporting results a half-hour delayed. Not exactly worthwhile.
• Sportsline.com GameCenter is reporting the score pretty much as it occurs.

Darla: I just wanted to comment on your blog. It's awesome! Is it a "standard" blog or something your did yourself?

Randy: Thanks!

Dave: What's next after the Google API? 

Randy: And no movement forward in those two years? Arggg!

This is the best simplest ASPX file, I've ever written. From here, I can now run any of my XSLTs on any XML on the Web. So...

• Danny, here's your RSS in Winer flavor.
• Oleg, here's an upgrade.
• Don, but not so funky.

I said: My thought is that Microsoft is currently losing ground in the war of the browser. Not only are they delivering bad product, but other companies are taking steps to discredit them, i.e. Opera. If Netscape can just push a little harder, they might find themselves back in the race.

From over 90% market share a year ago today, they are now below 60%. Trouble in Redmond.

CBC is running a contest to find out who is the Greatest CDNian. My vote goes to Terry Fox. Hope you'll join me.

TERRY FOX 1958-1981
After losing a leg to cancer, he set out on his 1980 Cross-Canada Marathon of Hope, raising millions for research and inspiring millions to follow suit every year. He gave the disease a human face and when he died at 23, all Canada was united in its admiration and sorrow.
(PHOTO:NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF CANADA)

Notes

• The Leafs are struggling against the Sens, but Belfour and Nieuwendyk have combined to give Toronto a 1-0 lead.
• How is Leetch's penalty interference? Hossa just finished shooting the puck when Leetch pushed him to the ice. Good play by Leetch. Joke call by the ref.
• I don't think I've seen Belfour play better.
• What a great goal by the new leader for all-time playoff goals, Sundin. 2-0 Leafs.
• Leafs lead the series 2-1 on back-to-back amazing shutouts from the Eagle. Belfour has allowed goals in only one of his last six games.

 Quote: PayPal Sucks is an anti paypal site to expose the nightmare of doing business "the paypal way."

iM currently working on an any feed to RSS 2.0 converter for a small project. Here'tis. It's actually RSS 2.funky, as I'm using the dc:date because it's easier to handle programmatically. I was originally going to use the research produced in a recent article until I realized it was more misleading than helpful. I also updated my RSS 2.0 to Atom XSLT.

Update: iM getting zero negative feedback, so I'll introduce this to the world on the listserves. Done.

Happy!

Quote: Gary Roberts had a pair of goals and that's all the Leafs would need as the Eagle stopped all 31 shots for the 2-0 Maple Leafs' win Saturday night at Air Canada Centre. Both Darcy Tucker and Ken Klee returned from injury for Toronto. The first-round series is now knotted at a game apiece as the teams head to Ottawa for Game 3 Monday at Corel Centre.
» All The News: Playoff Index
» Game 2: Highlights: 300K | Photos
» Leafs TV - Quinn Post-Game: 300K

Quote: Shtoom is a open-source, cross-platform VoIP softphone, implemented in Python.

source Social Dude.

Randy: Every morning, I get a nice email from Dave telling me my feed validates.

The feed validates.
http://rss.scripting.com/?code=50.33700&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com%2FiBLOGthere4iM%2Frss.xml
Thanks for using the RSS Validator.

Actually, usually about once a week it says that it doesn't validate. Thanks Dave.

Wladimir, who at 28 is four years younger, won an Olympic gold in 1996 and was thought to be the best of the two until he suffered a shocking knockout loss to Corrie Sanders last year. A few months later, Vitali made a case for himself as the top Klitschko by brawling with Lewis in a fight he was winning when the ring doctor stopped it on cuts after six rounds. Little brother concedes the edge. "My brother is better than me, I can tell that right now," Wladimir said. "He's better than me, he's the real champion."

Vitali Klitschko already knows where he belongs. His heart was questioned after he quit on his stool after injuring his shoulder against Chris Byrd, but his bloody brawl with Lewis put that to rest. Klitschko practically begged Lewis for a rematch, but Lewis decided retirement was a better plan. Now, Vitali will fight April 24 in Los Angeles for the vacant WBC title against - now take notes - the same fighter who knocked out his brother.

Essential Dude: Kirk has a nice photo of most of us who lasted the entire night.

Randy: Not another WS-* courtesy Don ;)

Just an enumeration of errata from Mark's article. Forgiving the errata, the article is quite good.

Does not validate.

1. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample67.xml
2. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample56.xml
3. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample51.xml
4. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample48.xml
5. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample44.xml
6. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample41.xml
7. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample23.xml
8. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample18.xml
9. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample14.xml
10. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample6.xml
11. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample3.xml

Wrong namespace URL.

1. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample37.xml
2. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample36.xml
3. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample31.xml
4. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample30.xml
5. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample20.xml
6. http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xml.com%2F2004%2F04%2F07%2Fexamples%2Fexample19.xml

17/68=25% had validation errors and warnings.

Example does not match up.

1. /rss/channel/item/dc:title (example 14)
2. /rdf:RDF/rss10:channel/dc:relation/@rdf:resource (example 18)
3. /rdf:RDF/rss10:item/l:link[@l:rel="permalink" and @l:type="text/html"]/@rdf:resource (example 19)
4. /rdf:RDF/rss10:item/l:link[@l:rel="permalink" and @l:type="application/xhtml+xml"]/@rdf:resource (example 20)
5. /rss/channel/item/l:link[@l:rel="permalink" and @l:type="text/html"]/@rdf:resource (example 24)
6. /rss/channel/item/l:link[@l:rel="permalink" and @l:type="application/xhtml+xml"]/@rdf:resource (example 25)
7. /atom:feed/atom:entry/atom:summary[@type="text/plain"] (example 51)

Nobody is perfect.

I've having a lot of trouble w/ the following bit of code. If anybody has any ideas on what the problem might be, known error or what, I'd appreciate any help.

System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager mgr = new System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager(e.OwnerDocument.NameTable);
mgr.AddNamespace("atom", "http://purl.org/atom/ns#");
mgr.AddNamespace("dc", "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/");
foreach(System.Xml.XmlNode node in e.SelectNodes("descendant::atom:entry", mgr))

I'm currently walking the tree to accomplish the same, but would much rather the above XPath. The code below is equivalent and works. Use Anil's feed for the sample.

if (e["feed"] != null)
foreach(System.Xml.XmlNode node in ["feed"].ChildNodes)
{
   if (node.Name != "entry")
   {
      continue;
   }

RSS Dude: Anyway, I've had several email exchanges and one conference call about formalizing the specification for RSS with a standards organization.

Randy: I hope he goes w/ a rubber stamp standards organization. I'd hate to lose the simple in RSS, as was done to SOAP.

Thoughts...

• How do you do address in FOAF?
• What about emotional state, as in, iM depressed?
• I see projects, but what about failedProjects?
• How do I identify previous companies?
• What about previous failed companies?
• Or worse, a company that barely ever existed?

• After winning the first period 2-1 even though they were on the short end of the bounces, the Leafs have played awful, talking stupid penalties and generally looking like they are not interested.
• Ottawa is diving at every opportunity. They haven't been called for diving yet, but have drawn a couple borderline and phantom (Mogilny's) penalties.
• Wow! The reffing is horrible. Another phantom call, this time against Phillips.
• The Leafs looked better late in the 2nd period, hitting the Senators really hard.
• Belfour is not sharp and it's now 4-2.
• That was horrible. If the Leafs continue to play like this, then Pat Quinn is finished.

I created an MSI using WiX for a product (that will remain undisclosed). The install creation is quite painless in XML and you can track changes to your installation source (all in XML), which is cool. Definately a great lightweight installation process.

iM ready for the Leafs' run for the Cup.

AltaVista and Yahoo and Google are give lots of hits on the Humble Fred Ottawa Song.

One thing that just doesn't fly w/ developers is restrictive Internet policies, including overly tight firewalls. Developers live on IRC and other chat clients. They surf the Web for code sniplets. They run P2P clients that are not firewall friendly. The like to use FTP and many non-port 80 HTTP traffic transports. So when a restrictive IP policy clashes w/ developers, then you lose productivity and lower morale. Simple.

Aljazeera: Aljazeera television has aired a videotape showing three Japanese citizens captured by a previously unknown Iraqi group that vowed to kill them if Tokyo does not withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Randy: Not very exclusive. You can find them on my blog too! The Iraq situation is really boiling over. I think the al-Quaeda sees this year as an opportunity to rid themselves of a miserable failure.

We all know those cute little computer symbols called emoticons", where  :) means a smile and  :(  is a frown. Sometimes these are represented by :-) and  :-( respectively.

Well, how about some "Assicons"?  Here goes:

(_!_)      a regular ass
(__!__)    a fat ass
(!)        a tight ass
(_*_)      a sore ass
{_!_}      a swishy ass
(_o_)      an ass that's been around
(_x_)      kiss my ass
(_X_)     leave my ass alone
(_zzz_)    a tired ass
(_o^^o_)   a wise ass
(_E=mc2_)   a smart ass
(_£_)     Money coming out of his ass
(_?_)   Dumb Ass

Quark: I’m not sure the title says what I feel about the program, or even what program I’m talking about. Well, to be clear, the program is Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and I don’t like it.

Randy: I use TortoiseCVS which kinda emulates ClearCase. I love ClearCase, but $$$. My problem w/ Source Safe is that it’s not TCP/IP, Internet-based. I love the SourceSafe reporting and simple interface. Yes, the DB really sucks. Big time.

Mindplex: Bloglines, for example, can tell you who is subscribed to your weblog (see their top weblogs list). 

Randy: This has great value for advertisers.

I was trying to figure out how to checkout in CVS via Tortoise command-line. It's not that hard, once you spent several hours researching all the kibbles-n-bits.

Create a batch file and set the CVS_RSH environment variable to this batch file. The contents is as follows.

"C:\Program Files\TortoiseCVS\TortoisePlink.exe" -ssh -pw mepassword %1 %2 %3 %4 %5

Now let's see if it is reproducible on computer #2.

Update: Works!

I also built up a set of commands to kick-off the whole CVS checkout.

SET CVSROOT=:ext:username@mydomain.com:/data
SET CVS_RSH=plink.bat
cvs -q checkout ./

where plink.bat has the TortoisePlink command shown above.

RSSBandit Dude: I wrote about the various approaches to achieving one click subscription to ATOM and RSS feeds a few months ago which led to drafting feed URI scheme.

Randy: Must add Dare to subscription list.

or so Froogle thinks :)

Update: Now $25,000. Froogle sucks!

I need to build some VC6 projects on my basement server. Half sleeping in living room w/ six-year-old daughter watching Crazy Quilt on TreeHouse TV. I really don't want to go down stairs and install software in my basement. Insert CD in laptop connected to network via 11g network. Run Remote Desktop to connect to server in basement. Run setup. Of course, it wants to install an older JVM, whatever! Reboot.

I installed VC6 on my laptop earlier today, along w/ SP5. Ya, I know. SP6 was recently released. Found out that you can't install VC6 anymore. Something wrong w/ Visual Studio Analyzer installation.

I don't need VB, Foxpro, Interdev, Source Safe and of course, I'll remove Visual Studio Analyzer, just in case. Did you know Foxpro is still alive and that they are developing a new version along-side Yukon, Longhorn and Whidbey. It's called Europa.

Auto-update is telling me I need to install some new updates that have recently been downloaded. I told Auto-update to remind me again in 4 hours.

The installation is progressing. I can hear my CD spinning. Install is finished. Rebooting again!

Yikes! I just got comment SPAMmed!

Installation is complete. Now swapping in the VS6 SP5 CD. A little hicup w/ Remote Desktop. Killed the remote Explorer.exe and restarted it and one Explorer window. Another hicup. Arg! Not so much a hicup, just a long pause. I don't think I had to kill the previous Explorer. Impatience. Start VS6 SP5 setup. I agreed to something. Setup running. Rebooting! Done. Sleepy time.

Now if this wasn't the most useless blog post ever. OLLEEGG!!! Whadda ya you think?

iM no longer interested in sites that make me register. How many communities do we need? Need another password.

source ummm that would take all day.

Randy: Dave forgot Atom, released by IETF group led by Sam and Tim. 4/1/10.

via Scoble Dude.

Essentially CDF: After reading these well-intentioned histories at Microsoft and Harvard, I wanted to get an accurate timeline on the Web so people could find it when they search. The dates are obviously pretty interesting.

1. Microsoft submits XML-based syndication format called Channel Definition Format (CDF) as a W3C note. 3/10/1997. This format groups <Item> elements under a common <Channel> element to describe the synopsis web content. What a novel idea!!

Randy: The truth is revealed, Microsoft created XML syndication. Is there anything they haven't done?

FOAF Dude: MCF, which was around in 1996.

Randy: Ok, maybe not!

Tim: I guess we’re friends with Microsoft now, and even though we’re direct competitors in the office-suite space, because we’re friends I’m gonna pass on some free advice. Please show your developers and customers some respect and get those incredibly-lame Great Moments At Work ads off the air. The message, insofar as there is one, is that people who work in offices are clueless doofuses, and that being around Microsoft Office will encourage poor grooming, juvenile behavior, and generally coming across like a complete moron. Microsoft is a smart company, and smart companies shouldn’t run dumb ads. It disgraces our whole profession.

Randy: Tim uses StarOffice :)

Part I - Part II - Part III

source Pirotcar.

Quote: The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft Releases Source Code on SourceForge.

Scoble: Is this as significant as I think it is?

Alec: I don't think it's that significant, other than as a public relations exercise.  The company has been giving away non-essential source code for years.  So this time around they deposited it in an unusual place.  It'll be a long time before you see Windows sourcde on SourceForge...

Randy: Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into turning around its reputation.

Sam: People who want to produce a syndication feed in a consistently correct manner will find that they will need to master not only the syndication format, but also HTML, and XML.

Randy: People who want to produce a syndication feed in a consistently correct manner are in for surprise. Software has bugs. All software developers write bugs for a living. This is because humans are not infallible. A software developer who claims not to write bugs, likely spends an inordinate amount of time testing his code. There's no reason a mundane user needs to understand HTML or XML or RSS in order to produce a reasonably correct syndication feed. Software like Movable Type, Radio, Blogger and Typad are doing a great job. Sure an occasional bug is revealed, but to suggest that bloggers need be concerned is kinda over-the-top.

This would be an interesting test. Try to reproduce the same Atom and Rss titles that are in Sam's samples w/ Blogger and Radio. I picked those two because IMHO they are the most tightly bound to Atom and Rss respectively. Now view these titles in your favorite feed reader and tell me what happens. The results are interesting. None of the samples convey any information. That's because they are all contrived.

Don Box responded to my constant non-proliferation of standards ramble. This is the power of blogs. Blog it and great guys like Don will respond. Now, it's time for my rebuttal.

I challenge the said great men to put actions where their words lie. I challenge the said great men to say no to more standards and to move forward w/ existing standards. The challenge is simple. Say no to REST and say yes to SOAP. Tell the Atom community that you believe that another standard is just a waste of our time. I don't care that the Atom community is REST-less. I don't care that some of us are XML-RPC. Let's agree to move forward w/ one standard. Sorry Dave.

Update from Dave: Today is the sixth anniversary of XML-RPC. "On this day in 1998, after a brief collaboration with Microsoft, we opened a new protocol to Frontier developers that allowed applications running on Windows to communicate with apps running on Macintosh, and vice versa." 

Randy: Congrats and thank you Dave and Don for leading us down this path.

Scoble: Here's one program: I've been enabled with an "ISV Buddy" program. I can sign you up and adopt you as my ISV buddy. You'll get some goodies if I sign you up. If anyone is interested in having me be their "ISV Buddy" drop me a note at rscoble@microsoft.com -- I'll give you the details. The program is designed for everyone from a shop Loren's size to Adobe or Macromedia.

Randy: An old one that I wanted to bookmark and send to a friend.

Goatee is growing.

1. Thursday, April 8, 7 p.m., Ottawa at Toronto
2. Saturday, April 10, 7 p.m., Ottawa at Toronto
3. Monday, April 12, 7 p.m., Toronto at Ottawa
4. Wednesday, April 14, 7 p.m., Toronto at Ottawa
5. *Friday, April 16, 7 p.m., Ottawa at Toronto
6. *Sunday April 18, 7 p.m., Toronto at Ottawa
7. *Tuesday, April 20, 7 p.m., Ottawa at Toronto

Don Park is a real Dude. He likes RSS 2.0, .NET and his camping algorithm is very similar to my own.

drive, unload, setup
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
  sit, eat, sit, eat, fire, drink, sleep
tear down, load, drive

My own algorithm involves a couple more drinks.

Everybody is talking about Kunal. What's Kunal? Who's Kunal?

• Scoble twice or thrice
• Jamie Jameson
• HMK's Spurious Thoughts

Update: Kinja is making an even bigger splash.

This page shows you which members of Bloglines are subscribed to my blog.

Update: Click this link to add me to your bloglines subscription.

Bloogz has me ranked #49. That has more to do w/ the quality of their rank, then the quality of my blog.

I'm getting a lot of Joi.Ito.com referrer hits. I have no idea why. I don't think he's posted any links to me. Must be his technorati links and my referrers playing ping-pong.

Feedster's service is great. Here's a link to a search page that gives me all mentions of my domain kbcafe, except it filters out my blog. Unfortunately, the RSS link for this search is incorrect, but you can always hack one together.

The Leafs are going to play either the Senators or the Canadians in the first round of the playoffs. All depends on the Boston/Jersey game tomorrow. Jersey needs a win as they may lose the division title and home-ice advantage. If Boston wins, then Toronto finishes 4th and plays 5th place Ottawa. Otherwise (tie or loss for Boston), Toronto finishes 2nd and plays 7th place Montreal.

Notes: Goatee (my playoff beard) in progress, I shaved yesterday.

If you run Microsoft's XSD.EXE tool (to generate classes) on HR-XML's Resume.xsd, then you get a rather strange error message.

Error: Error generating classes for schema 'test'.
  - The datatype '' is missing.

The Resume.xsd is 2610 lines long, so figuring out where to start is a rather daunting task. After an hour or two of remove this and recompile, remove that and recompile, I figured out the problem. It was with the following definition.

<xsd:simpleType name="ExtendedSpeakingTypeType">
   <xsd:restriction>
      <xsd:simpleType>
         <xsd:union memberTypes="SpeakingTypeType xStringPatternExtensionType"/>
      </xsd:simpleType>
   </xsd:restriction>
</xsd:simpleType>

Removing the restriction class and making the simpleType a union solves the problem. The problem is that restrictions require a base type. That matches w/ the error message. Could anybody please confirm this? A further question: How come XMLSpy doesn't report this problem when I load the XSD file?

Note: Sent to Chuck and Paul.

Update: I got a reply from Paul and he indicated that their were better tools than XSD.EXE that worked w/ the HR-XML schemas. I investigated further and built up more evidence that the HR-XML schemas were in error. The restrictionType definition in the XMLSchema.xsd indicates that the base attribute is required. Mind you, this XSD may be in error and may have changed.

Update: Paul responded further and pointed out that restrictionType is not always used to define the restriction class.

I implemented a block list on my blog. I now block any referrers whose URL contains some undesired substrings. You may have noticed some less desirable URLs in my referrer list (see bottom of right sidebar). Now if the URL contains any of these strings, I bounce you back to wherence you came. Is wherence a word? Doubt it.

Update: I also added a pubDate and lastBuildDate to feeds. Archive feeds that no longer change won't be affected.

Update: The referrers are now all cleaned up. Sorry, no more free porn ads on my Weblog.

I just added a Send-2-a-Friend link to all the blog entries. So, if you find anything interesting, then click on this link and you'll get a form where you can send the item to a friend.

Update: Renamed this feature Tell-a-Friend.

Update: The tell-a-friend feature is quite powerful. Very worthy.

Shelly: I came away from the symposium with the sense that the most exciting research in the space will occur with a) the integration of web services and mobile technology -- taking your network with you b) always on, multi-level communication, blogging/chatting/IMing/SMS/email/web surfing/ all in one moment, and c) implicit social "computing"; processing social metadata across people through implicit, inferred behavioral patterns.  The biggest problem to be solved in a social networking, profile-centric age is the control of multiple personas/identities across private, public, and social spaces.

source Sam.

Quote: PowerBlog is a Windows desktop application that runs on a user's workstation (not on a server).  It is a web logging application that enables anyone to instantly publish fresh content on their web site with just a click of a mouse.

Review: This is a neat little blogging client. It has both an RSS reader and a BloggerAPI blogging interface. So you can subscribe to a bunch of RSS files and post to your BloggerAPI capable blog. It also supports MetaWeblogAPI extensions, but does not read Atom or RSS 1.0 syndication files.

Last night, I joined the NegaSphere, the negative part of the Blogosphere and posted some negative blog entries. This was in response to a flame war on some other blogs. I've always tried to be more positive and here was my chance. I deleted the posts and vowed to myself that I'd be more positive in the future.

That got me thinking about Scoble. Scoble takes more abuse, solely for taking a paycheck from M$FT, than anybody in the Blogosphere, except maybe Winer. Scoble's responses are always positive. I think he stands firm in the middle of the PosiSphere, the positive part of the Blogosphere.

So, I vow to be more like Scoble and to write more positive useless crap and less negative useless crap. Not that Scoble writes useless crap, that's my job.

He can watch this one page continuously-endlessly-forever.

Evhead: Holy crap! How can they tell it's bulk email? Yahoo, via the help of this so-called "automatic filter" is reading your messages!

Randy: Oh, did your company just release a Webmail client? That opinion is so shallow, I can't believe Evan would embarrassed himself in this way. I'm thinking I'll remove him from reading list.

Roland: Healthy baby boy delivered at 1:50 a.m.Saturday! More at www.barbandroland.com soon. I will be off until April 12th. Email, blogging, etc. will take a back seat until then!

Randy: Congrats!

Go to Google, type "Resume XML", no quotes and click on I'm Feeling Lucky. I guess I'm now the authority.

The biggest problem in forward movement on the Web is the ignorance of existing standards. Rather than using the existing stardards like HR-XML, companies rather invent new standards where similar already exist. Atom is such a standard. Already we have RSS and MetaWeblog API, but we rather invent something new. After Atom, somebody will inevitably work on a new Atom and so-on. Movement forward is not possible as we keep falling back into the pattern of more and more standards. Funny is that the authors that complain about the proliferation of standards are the authors responsible for this problem.

Why don't we just re-use standards? Or better, why don't we just use the existing standards. PaSSAPI is such a re-use. It implements existing XML-RPC standards in WSDL. That's it. It doesn't do anything new. It just combines two existing standards. This is called respecting prior art. As oppose to re-inventing the wheel.

Tim: Extracted from the valuable list at CBDI, and omitting those marked superseded, we find BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), WS-Addressing, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), WS-CAF (Web Services Coordination Framework, including WS-CTX, WS-CF, and WS-TXM), WS-Choreography, WS-Coordination, WSDL (Web Service Description Language), WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management), WS-Eventing, WS-Federation (Web Services Federation Language), WSIL (WS Inspection Language), WS-Manageability, WS-Notification, WS-Policy, WS-Provisioning, WS Reliable Messaging, WS-ReliableMessaging (not the same as the previous), WS-RF (WS-Resource Framework), WSRP (WS Remote Portals), WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy (an addendum to WS-Security), WS Security Services, and WS-Trust. Hey, they missed WS-MetadataExchange, and now I see that we have WS-BaseFaults and WS-ServiceGroup as of yesterday. Is this the future? Is the emperor dressed?

Randy: There's no Simple in SOAP. Tim extends Don's thought on the proliferation of specs.

Quote: Welcome to the web site for the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division (DMRD), currently located in Newark, Delaware. The controversy surrounding dihydrogen monoxide has never been more widely debated, and the goal of this site is to provide an unbiased data clearinghouse and a forum for public discussion. Explore our many Special Reports, including the DHMO FAQ, a definitive primer on the subject, plus reports on the environment, cancer, current research, and an insider exposé about the use of DHMO in the dairy industry.

source Jax Dude.

My nomination for April Fool's Best of 2004.

source Scoble.

Quote: I've got an announcement to make: Thanks to some help from Robert Scoble and some contacts I made while attending Microsoft's Mobile DevCon last week, I've received and accepted an offer to become a technical evangelist for Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform!

Randy: And I'm the new technical evanglist of Microsoft's new social application called SixDegrees.com.

Thursday, April 8 @ 7:00PM at Timothy's World Coffee, 2098 Yonge Street, Toronto, ON (info) (map)

Dave on Mota: I was going to do an April Fool joke myself but decided not to waste the time. It was going to go like this. I was going to kill my RSS feed and invent a new format called Mota. The top level item would be called deef. Under that would be knil, eltit, enilgat, di, deifidom, etc. For one day I would only support this format, but I was going to say it was forever. People would be shocked. They'd think I had lost my mind. Then they'd realize it was a joke and they'd laugh. The next day I'd go back to RSS, and deprecate Mota once and for all. Goodbye Mota. It's been fun. Then a couple of days later when it was time to write the code I said kcuf ti. I had my laugh. That's all I needed.

Randy: Let me try...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deef xmlns="http://www.kbcafe.com/mota"
   eltit="iBLOGthere4iM"
   knil="http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/"
   noitpircsed="The Real Geek's Blog">
      <meti>
         <thgirru/>
         <krowhcum2/>
         <tikcuf/>
      </meti>
</deef>

Quote: John Kerry has supported a 50 cent increase in the gas tax. Use our calculator to find out how much Kerry’s gas tax would cost you at the pump on a specific trip or each year.

source Joshua Claybourn.

Quote: When Microsoft first started working on the .NET Framework, MSCorLib.dll was an acronym for Microsoft Common Object Runtime Library. Once ECMA started to standardize the CLR and parts of the FCL, MSCorLib.dll officially became the acronym for Multilanguage Standard Common Object Runtime Library.

source .NET 247.

Quote: P2P Sockets makes it easy to write peer-to-peer applications based on JXTA. P2P Sockets allows programmers to gain much of the power of JXTA, such as NAT and firewall traversal, without being exposed to its complexity. It does this through ports of popular software projects, such as a web server and web services stack, to work on the JXTA peer-to-peer network.

Randy: Interesting, we seem to be getting closer and farther from a viable P2P network all at the same time. Just as tools are becoming viable, network admins are learning to shut them down and users have generally given up.

source Chris Double.

Quote: [Justice Konrad von Finckenstein] compared the action to a photocopy machine in a library. "I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service," he said.

source XML Dude.

Quote: A slower then expected rollout caused by technical problems and staff training delays means that only 25,000 of the small cards have been issued, compared with an expected 50,000 by this point. Dexit is accepted at 225 stores in the GTA, including retailers such as Timothy's, Second Cup, McDonald's and Krispy Kreme, with hopes that 1,000 merchants will sign on by the end of the year.

Randy: The sign-up process is so lengthy, requiring a lot of reading, choices and data entry, that many give up before the sign-up is complete. Many, like me.

Quote: Welcome to the future! XCP - the XML Control Protocol - is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. XCP has many advantages, some of which are outlined in our rationale section. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML.  XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP.  It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable - the Internet of today!

Randy: Doubt announcing and XML transport to W3 on April Fool's Day is a good idea. Unless of course, it's a April Fool's Day joke :)

Quote: The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.

source quark.

Quote: My friends, let us all come together on the one day of the year that unites us all, regardless of color, creed, or nationality, and join voices in harmony to sing the message that stirs all of our hearts: Stop with the goddamned stupid April Fool's jokes on the web, already. Nobody wants to waste all day tomorrow looking at that crap.

Randy: Anil calls for an end to all the Dash on April Fool's Day. Anil is one of the 22.