When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · October
· · · · 21 (4 entries)

Better than Theatre · Everybody loves a story, everybody loves drama in a story, everybody likes the pain and anguish to be in the middle and the happiness at the end. It is ridiculous, just ridiculous, how worked up a couple of dozen people in the bar at a geek conference in rural Washington state can get over a baseball game three time-zones away. Let’s just all suspend our disbelief and our knowledge of the corruption and abuse and ugliness in professional sports, and just soak in that happy ending. Do the Red Sox have the best hair in pro sports or what? Recommended: Colby Cosh’s Keep telling yourself it’s just a game.
 
Showing Off · At the Sells Conference, Jeff Barr just gave us an hour or so on Amazon’s latest web-services offerings. The one I liked was the Alexa Web Information Service, which gives you a programmatic hook into the big, nifty Alexa database. Here’s how cool raw HTTP+XML web services are: while Jeff was talking, I went and got myself an Amazon Subscriber ID and cobbled together a CGI script with perl and curl and sed so you can type a URI into a web page and it’ll bounce back with a nice display of its Alexa rank. I’d post it here at ongoing for your pleasure, except for curl doesn’t seem to be installed. Jeff didn’t get to AWIS until he was three-quarters of the way through his talk, but that was plenty of time. The point is, as several people here at the conference have said, it isn’t about REST or SOAP or WS-* or .NET or Java or whatever, it’s about easy.
 
¡Viva 2396bis! · After an incredibly-long and twisted journey, with oceans of arguments and mountains of examples and endless testing and validation, with contributions from a crowd a people but most of the hauling-up-the-slope due to Roy Fielding (the world thanks him), RFC2396bis is an IETF Internet Standard. Read it here (to hell, I say, with the IETF’s idiotic 66-lines-by-80-column ASCII), and rejoice. There is now actually an official definition of what we mean when we say “URI” and when we say “URL” we really mean “URI” so it applies there too; an official definition, I say, which cleans up the fuzzy spots and goofy spots and absent spots, and on top of all that it’s somewhat human-readable.
 
The Fifth XML Developers’ Conference · I spent Wednesday and Thursday at Chris Sells’ fifth XML Devcon. This is a high-level gathering of the .NET XML (and thus Web-Services) community. It’s being blogged to the max (nicely aggregated on the conference site), and there’s an eWeek person here journalizing in realtime. It’s been fun and educational ...
 
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