Five Year Anniversary of XML Simplification Riot

Egad.  Thanks to Michael Champion, I am reminded of the fact that it's been five years since I took a joke seriously and started a riot that lasted years and produced a couple of XML subsets and launched other XML simplification projects like YML.

Why did the riot called SML-DEV eventually die off?  Well, we got sick of XML too early.  It took five years for complaints from the general developer community to gather enough mass.  Five years ago, it was just us (so called XML gurus) worried about ease of use and complexities.  Now it's real world practitioners, people we were worried about, complaining about their bruises.

I have no regrets about diverting hundreds of XML gurus, loving called Simpletons, off W3C's official XML bandwagon.  I met great bunch of smart folks and I had fun.  Also, our simpleton memes spread far and wide, affecting many XML formats created since then.  Besides, I am a born troublemaker and I was doing what I was born to do.  Fishes swim.  Rabbits hop.  And skunks…well…I think you know what I mean.

What I do have regrets about is the DOM API.  Although I participated in the W3C DOM activities and implemented the DOM several times to make sure people had some chance to bang on the API before it went final, it wasn't until much later that I realized how lame the API really is.  It's practically unusable without a thick coat of helper functions.  The fact that I took part in building of that lemon makes me feel really really sorry.  I must have been blind and stupid to not see how ugly and useless it is.

To the geekdom, I offer my sincerest apology for the mess I helped create, the DOM API.

Preview Delayed

The preview of one of my ideas, which I mentioned recently, will have to be delayed.  Instead of a preview, I am going to flesh it out with the help of a team of developers and launch it as a beta quality service a few months down the line.  Sorry about that.  I do have another idea I might make public soon, hopefully in a few weeks, called dropfeed.  So stay tuned.

Urgh

As of 7:31PM PST, Bush is leading in both Ohio and Florida.  I am not sure whether what I need is a stiff drink or a barf bag.

Update:

Yesterday morning started great.  I woke up around noon and took a nice stroll with my wife to vote.  It took us less than 10 minutes and I went to work happily.  It was at the office that the nightmare started.  How could the majority of this country vote for Bush after four years of miserable performance and causing, literally, a world of hurt and hate?  What are they saying?  Four more years of the same?

Urgh just about sums up how I felt since this afternoon.

Low voice and with wisdom

Did you know that there are 12,000 South Korean missionaries prowling around the world looking to save your soul?  I didn't either, although some do show up at our doorstep at least couple times a year.  Ohmygod!  They know where I live!  I guess efforts of American missionaries who dedicated their lives in Korea early on are finally paying off big.

Kim Sun Il, the first Korean to be beheaded in Iraq, was one of the 12,000.

"He is a martyr to God's glory," said Mr. Moon of the research institute. "Korean missionaries are eager to do God's work and glorify God. They want to die for God."

I think media publicity like the NY Times article is not inline with their low voice and with wisdom approach though and could get more of them killed.

P2P Turning Point

This is what is going on in the P2P world this moment.  BitTorrent is the king of P2P world.  BitTorrent download rate is one to two order of magnitude faster using BitTorrent than other P2P technologies.  For example, what typically takes a couple of weeks to download via eDonkey2000 takes only half a day to download via BitTorrent.

Unfortunately, torrents are not easy to find as other P2P technologies.  So if you want to download something in particular, you have to google around or find some BitTorrent search site.  Since BitTorrent is most effective at the very edge of what is hot and Google is not so hot in that space, you are out of luck unless you are a member of a hot BitTorrent site.

The ideal solution would be to distribute BitTorrent seed files on other P2P services such as eDonkey or Gnutella but those services currently don't handle indirections too well.  Once they do, the flood gate will open and it won't be just RIAA screaming but the Hollywood itself.

Win32 Firewall Hook

If you are a Win32 developer, this article on the scarcely undocumented firewall hook might interest you.  Unlike the network filter hook which supports only one system wide hook, multiple firewall hooks can be installed to monitor network packets.  Neato.

Red Sox

Not being a baseball fan, I probably watch no more than a couple of baseball games in any given year, but this year I watched 8 consecutive ballgames.  That's right, I started watching after Red Sox lost the first 3 games to Yankees.  Why?  Because, if an amazing story was about to unfold, the fourth game against Yankees had to be the game where it starts and I had a feeling the impossible was about to happen.

One after another, I enjoyed the excitement and the thrill continue on until the happy ending tonight.  My thanks to Red Sox for the amazing 8 games and heartfelt congratulations to generations of Red Sox fans who persevered despite all those years of agony and frustrations.  They must have felt it as I have.  There was a smell of magic in the air throughout the eight games I watched and, tonight, even the moon winked.

I'll cherish those moments as I am sure all those who watched will.

Slow

I haven't been blogging much this week because I have been busy with work and my own projects.  BTW, I am planning to release soon a preview of a new server-side news aggregation technology built around a handful of interesting ideas.

Abuse of Power

While the technologies of electronic goods have improved over the past decade, their quality have dropped to a point where it is not unusual to see things stop working after just a year.  It seems to me that analog and mechanical parts break down way before digital parts do: switches, latches, wires, power adapters, etc.

For example, AC power adapter for my laptop became unreliable in six months of use.  My typical yet odd state of being busy and lazy at the same time meant I would just wiggle the thing until it worked.  After three months of wiggling, it died.  In the course of trying to breath life back into it with ducktape, I found out that outter mesh of wires was torn somehow.

So I went to Fry's and got Targus universal AC adapter which came with a handful of 'power tips', each tailored for a particular brand or model of notebooks.  One of the tips worked with my laptop.  Again, after just a few months of use, I was back to wiggling to make it work and things went downhill from there to having to do an emergency surgery on the power tip at 3AM.

Once you open up something, it's open for good.  The power tip was designed wide for some unknown reason and was getting in the way of another port right next to the power port.  So I chopped off one of the sides and ducktaped the result.  Today, not the usual wiggling ritual would work so I did another surgery.

Afterward, I could see that there wasn't much life left in it so I ordered a couple more power tips as well as a spare power adapter.  While ordering, I found out that the power tip I had mangling into use was not the right one for my notebook.  Oops.  Feeling sorry, I gave it a name to apologize for my abuse of 'power'.

Here is Igor the Tortured Power Tip:

When Igor's replacements arrive, I will give it a decent burial at sea.  I am sure my gold fishes will make excellent tomb guardians.