Pie/Echo/Atom Final Name Vote

As requested on the Pie/Echo/Atom Wiki, this is my blog post to spread the news:

Final Name Voting is in progress and will end on August 15th.

There are only seven cleared candidates so far and not much of voting is going on either.  The choices are:

  • Barbwire – 1 vote
  • Dada – 1
  • Elbo – 2
  • Feedcast – 7
  • Loki – 0
  • Sygnal – 0
  • Wyre – 2

Of this bunch, Feedcast is the only one that doesn't make me cringe.  My only complain about it is that it's a bit long and it sounds like a mundane product name, not a cool standard name.

I proposed SIX before but there were some negative feedback.  How does Seven sound?  Six plus me is Seven.  Seven feed, Seven API, Seven-enabled.  Hmm.  Is there Seven Part, Inc.?;-p

Zeroconf Rising

I love the zeroconf stuff and am happy to see more open source zeroconf projects and products emerging.  Why?  Because my instinct tells me this area of technology is going to explode soon.  Mix zeroconf with location services and WiFi.  Kaboom!

Check out the screenshot of Howl on right by Swampwolf (via je_apostrophe via Ted Leung).

For information on zeroconf and related IETF specs, go to http://www.zeroconf.org.

Technical information about Rendezvous, Apple's Zeroconf implementation is here.

More zeroconf infomation:

If you have links to other zeroconf implementations, please let me know via comment.  I also haven't been able to locate Howl source code on Swampwolf website.

As Joe Cheap walked into Seoul's Yong-San district, he flipped his PDA on and queried his Bargainer 2.0 to see if any of the stores have the new Ding-a-Ring gadget for sale.  Finding five, he activates the Live Auction task.  Within a second, he receives five bids and direction to the store with the lowest bid.  As he strolls to his destination, he receives a 'they'll kill me if they found out' offer from another store via IM.  Joe taps on cancel auction button and turns around with a smile on his face.

Meanwhile Doug Hardball arrives on a bicycle and activates his PDA to harvest the local prices which are not available outside this district.  Scanning the prices, he notices that the prices are higher than the district that hired him.  As Doug moves on to the next shopping district, Sam Sneak, the district's disinformation manager snickers.  He tagged that harvester just last week on instinct.  Now, the harvester is carrying away fake prices with stealth beacon tags that will help him collect evidence to present to the national e-commerce association.

TypePad Launching August 4th

Last bit of info released by Six Apart was the launch date and the price.  It's August 4th 11:59pm so if you want your TypePad blog starting date to be August 4th, you will have exactly one minute to do it.  Check it out.  Feature chart showing the three service levels alone is worth some pondering since the missing dots on these types of charts tend to show more than those inkblots psychologists use.

Contratz to Anil, Ben, and Mena.  TypePad looks good.

Update #1: TypePad  beta blogs are using RSS 1.0.

Java3D Dead?

According to this java.net weblog post by Chris Adamson, Java3D is done for in favor of JOGL, an open source Java binding for OpenGL.  JOGL, now why does that sound familiar?

I wrote an open source Java binding for OpenGL way back in 1996 called JOG (Java OpenGL).  After releasing it, I moved on and it eventually got lost during one of many ISP changes.  I am sure I still have the source code somewhere on a floppy, but I barely remembered its name.  Only trace of JOG left on the web was this OpenGL Language Bindings page which was updated last in 1997.  I wonder if any of my JOG code made its way into JOGL…

Zen Addicts

I like meditating and reading Zen books, but I am uncomfortable with the formality of Zen monastaries because I can't help feeling that they are making a religion out of Zen.  I suppose I could shift my views into seeing them as a hospital of sort, but I am lazy.  To me, Zen is no different from Cindy Crawford's exercise video.  It is just a way to feel good, or at least, not feel bad.

Certain body positions that are more comfortable than others.  When you sit on the ground, there could also be some pebble under you, forcing you to shift your butt until you find a comfortable position.  This is what Zen is to me except it is about how your mind sits rather than your behind.

Body position also affects how you think or rather the extent of control over mind.  As for me, I don't like the way I have to hold my body and breathing pattern in certain ways just to feel better.  It's like moving and holding TV antenna in a certain position to receive better TV signal.  While I like watching PBS, I don't mind being stuck with watching soap operas.

Zen koans helps you move your mental butt.  It works by being obscure, same mechanism that provokes mammals to tilt their head slightly whenever they see something they don't recognize.  Zen koan makes you tilt your mind to understand words that make no sense otherwise.  In doing so, you change your perspective and you change as well — you are where you sit.

Frequently, I run into people are obsessed with Zen.  Some of them become monks.  Shaving one's head, aside from the symbolism and marketing side of it, is just a way to focus.  Avoiding meat reduces the chance of being swept away in a flood of emotions triggered or aided by certain chemical.  Still, I don't see the point of bleeching all the colors out of your life.  Being addicted to tranquility and illusion of clarity is a real danger for Zen practioners.

Of course, there are a number of wilder strains in Zen as exemplified by famously crazy Zen monks dotting the history of East Asia.  In Korea, there was a monk who practiced calligraphy with a brush attached to his penis.  Amusing and admirable in a way, but still trapped by the desire to be enlightened.  Very few ever experience the enlightenment.  Even more sad, few talk about how fleeting enlightenment might be.

So, I would like offer this piece of advice to those interested in Zen:

Take what you need and no more.

XML Namespace Ownership

During a discussion with Mark Pilgrim over some Atom extensibility issues, I ran into some questions which are likely to be controversial:

Who owns a XML namespace?

A XML namespace URI is supposed to be just an opaque string that is unique enough to identify a namespace.  It is not a place so the question of ownership is different the question of link ownership.  I suppose one could apply trademark or copyright laws to XML Namespace URIs.

If one can exercise legal control over XML namespaces, what are the legal implications of standard organizations like W3C owning key XML namespaces?  I am not a lawyer, no can I think like one so I'll punt this question.  But we are likely to see clauses appearing in specs related to XML namespaces.

Should XML namespaces be Open or Closed?

An open XML namespace allows third-parties to add new names according to a strict naming design pattern.  Are there use-cases where there is a need for XML namespaces to be open?  What about nested XML processor plugin frameworks that uses XML Namespace URI?

There is also the question of rogue tags being carried as a hidden beacon of sort across the Net and into Intranet.  If unknown tags are ignored by default everywhere, what are the security and legal implications?  If my web service logs all invokations and someone slips in copyrighted or illegal information into a SOAP call, am I liable?  There is a whole new type of cross-scripting issues in web services.

An Example of Emergent Markup Languages

This morning I came across a great example of Emergent Markup Languages I posted about in the past while scanning through Marc's blog.  In a post about social webware  and Burning Man, I saw this paragraph:

We'll have to provide a small extension to MT so that MT can help people semantically tag their blog entries with <want> and <have> as well as <geo:Point> and <geo:Time>.

Wow.  What a powerful pair of emergent meta tags or metags.

Update #1: A recommended reading, Sean McGrath's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Manuals.  Thanks to Phil Wolff for the reminder.

Software Update/Distribution Pipeline

Macromedia has released a public beta of Flash Player 7.  Guess what, Flash 7 adds automatic notification and update.  QuickTime has it, Real Player has it, Java has it, and now Flash has it.

Could we please get together and build a SINGLE public pipeline instead of all these private implementations each of which waste memory and bandwidth unnecessarily and configuration and usability mess?  One pipeline and one UI for everyone is what I want.

We can either arm-wrestle Microsoft into giving us access to its Windows Update facility, or build out own.  Anything but this everybody build their own private pipeline nonsense.