Quoderat

In conjunction with the XML 2006 conference from 5-7 December in Boston, IDEAlliance will be awarding the first XML Scholarship. This scholarship is open to anyone who is enrolled as a student in a diploma or degree program at a post-secondary institution.

The scholarship winner will receive the following:

• An award of USD 1,000.00.
• A travel stipend of USD 500.00 to attend the conference.
• Free conference registration.
• Two nights accomodation in Boston.

A team of well-known XML specialists will choose the winning paper: for 2006, the scholarship committee consists of Dr. Mary Fernández (AT&T), Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C and University of Bergen), and Dr. Henry Thompson (W3C and University of Edinburgh).

We encourage the submission of case studies and project reports as well original academic research. This is a great chance for a student to present her or his work to an audience of industry specialists, including senior people from many large technology companies; it’s also a great chance for us in the XML community to learn about and encourage the next generation of specialists — I’d like to encourage people to publicise this as widely as possible, especially if you have connections with an educational institution. Full details about the scholarship are available at http://2006.xmlconference.org.

(Technorati: xml2006)

The first draft of the website for the XML 2006 conference (Boston, 5-7 December) is now online at 2006.xmlconference.org (xmlconference.org redirects to it). This site will grow as the conference gets closer and will eventually get a proper logo, but I’ll try to keep it simple, fluid, and uncluttered.

Please let me know what features you think would be most useful. One that I’m considering is a comment page for every paper abstract on the program (each with an RSS or Atom feed), so that people can talk about papers, make suggestions, and ask questions before the conference even starts. I hope that at least a couple of the papers will spark some interesting conversations that people can continue at the conference in December.

Watch for a surprise announcement later this week.

(Technorati: xml2006)

I’m tired of software-development frameworks — they seem always to be optimized for the way someone else works, or for the way someone else thinks I should work. Granted, it’s fun to write frameworks, and it’s almost as much fun to learn them, but as soon as I try to do anything non-trivial they either get in my way or lure me off the road into blind alleys.

Is this a serious defect in my own skills and practices, or do others feel the same way? To paraphrase an almost-famous saying by Tim Bray, here’s what I want most from a development environment:

• Turing complete;
• good library;
• get out of the way.

As most of you probably already know, Dan Brown, author of the (unintentionally) hilarious novel The Da Vinci Code, has won a copyright-violation case suit brought against him by authors of one of the books he used as a source (CBC story).

When trying to explain the absurdity of software patents, I’ve often used the example of books and movies. Imagine if someone could patent the idea of, say, a guy starting out badly and then redeeming himself, or of a man and woman appearing to hate each-other and then falling in love. While the Brown case used copyright rather than patent law, it came terrifyingly close to my example, since two authors (who do not deserve to be named or linked to here) accused Brown of stealing the idea of Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having kids, etc. from their book. Fortunately, the judge seems to have laughed the plaintiffs out of court, even referring to them as “authors of pretend historical books.”

There’s something else here that you might initially miss, however. Not only did the plaintiffs lose, but the judge ordered them to pay Brown’s publisher’s legal costs — that’s very common in Canada, and apparently also in Great Britain (where this case took place), especially when a judge believes that a lawsuit was unjustified. The two authors who sued Brown will have to pay a few hundred thousand pounds now. If U.S. courts commonly did the same thing, then maybe spurious law suits fishing for big settlements would be a lot less common down there.

Take a look at this SUV commercial parody, sent to me by an acquaintance (quickly, before GM pulls the link).

General Motors has a new online marketing campaign for the Chevy Apprentice, where you can design your own TV commercial and play it back using Flash. You can also enter your commercial into a contest. Inevitably — especially with the SUV’s reputation (deserved or undeserved) as a poster child for environmental destruction and a high roll-over fatality rate — such a contest can attract, say, less-than serious entries.

The parody linked above is side-splittingly funny, but I’m posting about it here because the Flash always begins with the message “Loading XML…” That led me to a few observations:

1. GM is using XML to save the scripts for the customized commercials (does any Flash-type know how to get at the raw XML? I’d love to see the markup.)
2. GM is advertising the fact that they’re using XML to save the commercials (or else Flash is forcing them to, but I don’t remember seeing that message with other Flash animations).
3. Perhaps XML is so cool that people want to point out that they’re using it.
4. Or, perhaps GM wants to make sure that XML gets the blame if the commercial loads slowly.

Statistics Canada has just published statistics about Canadian television viewing in Fall 2004 (via CBC). I loved TV once, and as I sit by its deathbed, I’m torn between wanting to hold onto it just a little longer and hoping for its suffering to end.

Not many years ago, before panicking about the Internet became fashionable, Moms-Who-Like-To-Worry were concerned that their kids were watching too much TV. Many moms even restricted or banned TV in their houses, ensuring that their kids would spend most of their after-school and weekend time at friends houses doing <so-called>homework</so-called>. Well, it turns out that by the middle of this decade, kids couldn’t care less — Canadian teens spent only about 12.9 hours/week watching TV, half the average for all ages. Men 18-24 spent only 12.4 hours watching TV. That still represents nearly two hours per day, which seems to me like a lot, but it’s been declining steadily over the years.

In contrast, now that their kids have left the nest and it’s safe to turn the TV back on, the Moms-Who-Once-Liked-To-Worry cannot tear themselves away — Canadian women over 60 watched 35.6 hours of TV a week, which is pretty close to a full-time job in North America or three full-time jobs in France. I wonder if their now-grown, formerly TV-deprived kids phone home once in a while just to yell “HYPOCRITE!” at them.

Teenagers don’t watch much TV, I think, because it cuts into their text messaging time (except maybe as background noise). Young males would rather play videogames or misrepresent themselves on MySpace. So who watches TV? Same as it always was: the Baby Boomers. TV was born with the boomers and perhaps it will die with us, even if we don’t get most of the jokes on the The Daily Show.