Hong Kong Trip Contingency Plans

I've lined up a co-worker who's supposed to be attending the conference to present my paper. I have to bring him up to speed with my work then create the presentation for him. The presentation is quite short (20 minutes talk, 10 minutes Q & A) so it's going to take some work to synthesize SiXDML into 20 minutes of Powerpoint which to me means less than 10 slides. Actually given how I've presented in the past that's like 4 or 5.

Apple Switch Parodies

Slashdot recently had a story with some a few semi-funny Apple switch parodies made by the folks at OSCON. Here's a few of the funnier Switch parodies I've found online

My dad used to beat me with his PC

I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are

There are a lot of great games on the Mac

I had to drop out of college because of Microsoft

I am an Accountant...by day

On Being a Language Lawyer

Over dinner last night I was going over the past week and realized that for all intents and purposes I am probably an XML expert. This realization is quite disturbing since I originally applied to MSFT to work on databases and I left school with a specialization in systems programming (*NIX specifically) but now work on stuff that most of my peers in school probably consider fluff technology. This harkens back to my Programmer Underutilization diary from last year.

The reason this came to mind after I realized that I've begun to spend time correcting people's knowledge of XML technologies with arcane levels of detail and knowledge. The most recent manifestation of this is my recent conversation with Clemens Vasters. This coupled with Sam Ruby's latest essay really brings home the fact that I'll probably carry around the XML expert from now on. I hope this doesn't prevent me from getting work doing some real development whenever I grow tired working with XML in the future. I'm not knocking XML or the work that I do (Lord knows that being knowledgeable about XQuery, W3C XML Schema, XPath, etc is no mean feat) it's just that I want to do some cool operating system, distributed computing or database in the future and don't want XML baggage getting in the way of that.

Speaking of being a language lawyer here's another critique from me. Don Box is wrong about how derivation by restriction works in XML Schema. I know Martin Gudgin who gave that talk and he knows his shit so I assume Don either misheard him or I'm less knowledgeable about W3C XML Schema than I thought (which isn't unlikely).

Don is wrong because what he is attempting to do is restrict an xs:any particle to multiple particles (an xs:element and another xs:any) which just isn't how W3C XML Schema works.

Austin Powers: GoldMember

A couple of took a long lunch and watched GoldMember on Friday afternoon. I quite liked it especially for the action scene and obligatory musical number in the opening sequence. I thought Mike Myers would have run out of ideas and the movie would be a retread of the older movies but I think he pulled it off quite nicely which I can't say the same for with Wayne's World 2.

Carnage4Life score: * * * * out of * * * * *

Article Idea

Reading some of the feedback to my last K5 article it is quite clear to me that a number of people don't understand the basic tennets of Object Oriented Programming. Specifically the distinction between polymorphism and inheritance seems to be lost on a lot of people whom I assume to be Java programmers. I'm tentatively titling the article An Object Oriented Programming Refresher Course until a better title comes to mind.

Your feedback and thoughts are welcome