Ruby in a chair

Congratulations Sam!

Its an exciting time to be there :-)

ApacheCon Keynotes (streaming live)

I'm watching the Open Plenary & State of the Feather at ApacheCon US '08 being streamed live right now (g'morning Shane :-). Keynotes will be streamed live as well.

Streaming details:

http://streaming.linux-magazin.de/en/program_apacheconus08.htm?ann

Full schedule:

http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2008/schedule

Blue

Getting up to the Mediterranean sun out the window of the Pullman Cannes-Mandelieu during the W3C TPAC last week.

Lost and found

All my feeds seem to have disappeared this morning. I had logged out last night in another browser tab, but the error reporting sure made me wonder for a moment whether Google Reader had a Halloween prank up its sleeve.

Boo!

We went through a bunch of Halloween attractions this season. The trick to haunted house attractions, ofcourse, is to not increase your awareness by immediately scanning the surroundings in every dark room but to let yourself be surprised.

Happy Diwali

दीपावली की सबको शुभकामनाएं ।

दिवाळीच्या सग्ल्यांना शुभेछा

ਹੈਪੀ ਦੀਵਾਲੀ

દિવાલી મુબારક

শুভো দীপাবলী

தீபாவலிளி நல்வாழ்த்துகக்ள்

AJAX as infrastructure

I've been meaning to blog about some of the work being done in the Ubiquity XForms project, and it took Carsten to complain about the amount of JavaScript in web application-level code to finally get me going.

The use of AJAX, not as application-level code, but as an infrastructure upon which to implement the semantics for a much better and standard set of abstractions for authoring Rich Internet Applications is beginning to be demonstrated by the Ubiquity XForms library. As JavaScript engines get 8 vertical cylinders, all that computing power can be put to very good use. The Ubiquity XForms library aims to implement the XForms 1.1 standard and make it available to all current web browsers, desktop and mobile. The set of technologies that XForms provides thereby become available to contribute to a standard rich web backplane.

Existing AJAX libraries such as Dojo and YUI play an important role, they provide the platform that Ubiquity XForms builds upon, in terms of widgets and not so visual bits like submissions and change notifications.

Obviously the library (abbreviated as UX) is open source -- its under Apache License 2.0, and has public developer, contributor and commit mailing lists.

Just coming out of the W3C Technical Plenary last week, UX was mentioned in the session on the 'Future of XML Ecosystem in W3C Client-Side Work' discussion as an interim way to look past some of the distributed extensibility limitations in HTML(5) :-) And speaking of the discussion, it was in my opinion the most well-received discussion in the entire plenary day, in so much as folks didn't mind continuing after a break when polled about it!

Back on topic, while UX is under active development, you can try simple examples right now (though they load excruciatingly slowly over SVN):

http://ubiquity-xforms.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/_samples/

The most important thing ofcourse is the source of the samples, so without a 'View Source' you haven't really seen anything.

सुजलाम सुफ़लाम ...

... मलयज शीतलाम, सश्य श्यामलाम मातरम ।

वन्दे मातरम !!

dIon

I couldn't have said it better than Robert.

Good luck, dIon.

Legends among us

Last night's epic gentlemen's final at The Championships was one of the most enjoyable individual sporting events I've seen in quite a while. Be it Federer's surge in the latter half of the game and his graciousness in ultimate defeat, or Nadal's continued resolve to stay in the game to be the first man in 28 years to win at Roland Garros and Wimbledon back-to-back, every moment was riveting. There will be no dearth of speculations as to what this means about the era of Federer's domination on grass, but I do hope we see a lot more of him than we did of Borg after his Wimbledon loss in '81.

And just as Federer runs shy of his 6th consecutive title (knowing that it will be next to impossible to get to winning 5 more in a row again), his friend Tiger has his left knee giving him trouble yet again. I imagine that must be quite frustrating, and it utterly changes the dynamics of the entire game of men's golf for the rest of this season. There is suddenly a lot more room at the top.

Its interesting to try to analyze what makes a few so far better than the rest (in tennis, in golf, in $skill). Some combination of natural abilities, lot of hard work, great resolve, rigorous practice, experience and more. A combination that just works. A combination that eludes the rest of us.

As some hopes are dashed, other dreams begin to take shape. Come 8/8/08, I will definitely be following Michael Phelps in his quest for 8 ultimates as he tries to shatter the 36 year record for most golds in a Games, or Dara Torres as she competes in her amazing 5th Olympics.

While my prospects of playing professionally are diminishing with each passing year (not that I ever had very many illusions about that), watching last night's Wimbledon final made me pick up that racket, restring the spares, and put the clubs in the trunk with renewed vigor. There are a few athletes who have that effect on many of us, and end up improving the quality of our lives. And this is not just limited to sporting arenas, we find such motivating performers in all spheres of life.

Those are the legends among us.

Seven colors

While the weather interrupted our game last week, we did get a near perfect rainbow over the baseball field. There is something about rainbows -- I counted atleast seven cars pulled over by the side of the parkway as the occupants took pictures.

Oro

Lazy evenings and good food in Saarbrücken. Doesn't hurt to have a close EURO 2008 game going on.

At Oro, I recommend:

• Kokos-Zitronengrassuppe
• Coconut Jumbo Prawns
• Gnocchi in Ricottacreme
• Geröstetes Knoblauchbrot
• Breadpudding mit Baileys und Vanilleeis

IUIs

Spent last week in a meet hosted at the DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), University of Saarland. Caught a glimpse of a lot of interesting research at the center.

In particular, the Intelligent User Interfaces projects had some neat multi-modal technology demos.

f(n) = f(n-1) + f(n-2)

Golden ratios and Fibonacci spirals or not, those numbers make art.



As seen at the MoMA.

A unifying programming model

The Collage programming model was recently featured as an alphaWorks technology. Important aspects of the associated declarative language are geared towards simplification, evolution, composition, distribution and device adaptation. It is based on a uniform, end-to-end, RDF data model and a cascade-oriented, data-driven execution model.

The introductory download consists of:

• the programming model interpreter
• the Collage programming model Overview document (PDF), and
• a live executable tutorial (complete code samples that can be run in-place while viewing the tutorial)

And it is available here:

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/collage

A memorial hike

Memorial Day '08.

Four times a charm plus one

The fourth Working Draft of State Chart XML is out.

Quoting the status section of the document:

"The main differences from the previous draft are:

• the modularization of the language


• the introduction of profiles and


• a revision of the algorithm for document interpretation."

Tourist in Holland

Canals, windmills and tulips ofcourse.

Three wheels and a wing

First time at the front end of the aircraft. A few pointers on the Cessna 172 R instrument panel ...



... before making the wheels float.



Found the sun hiding by the edge of the frozen pond.



Passed by work ...



... and play as well.



The bridge was easier to cross with one less wheel.



We ended up with more propeller blades than when we began :-) (hard to expect more from the iPhone camera).

While its still January

There may be time for the customary new year's post. Had a few friends over who insisted on watching the ball drop at Times Square, and given that it was also the centennial for the tradition, they could only be distracted till about 11:45 pm. Got there just in time for the fireworks.