Quoderat

We’re getting ready to sort through the enormous number of late-breaking submissions for XML 2006 (Boston, 5-7 December) — we have over 5 proposals for every empty slot — but a quick count shows that we already have 98 speakers and instructors lined up. Follow the links to see the lists. We hope to add the late-breaking presentations this week to finalize the programme, but I think there’s already good-enough reason to register. See you in Boston!

It’s just over a month now until XML 2006, so make sure you register and reserve your room soon.

Web site stats

For a slightly different look at the conference, I popped dug through the web site’s server logs to see which individual paper descriptions were being viewed the most. Note that these are not necessarily the best presentations, or even the ones that will have the highest attendance, but they are attracting some web traffic. Here are the top five as of yesterday:

1. Prud’hommeaux and Le Hegaret, Web Services Policy Expression Alternatives (3,491 hits)
2. Halpin, Social Semantic Mashups: Exploring Social Networks with Microformats and GRDDL (756 hits)
3. Edson and Stevenson, Making the Most of XML with Adobe InCopy and InDesign (158 hits)
4. Chamberlin, XQueryP: An XML Application Development Language (147 hits)
5. Hahn, Peaceful Coexistence: The SGML/XML Transition at Cessna Aircraft (137 hits)

Several other paper summaries have attracted more than 100 hits, as have two of the tutorials:

• Bourret, Tutorial: XML and Databases (175 hits)
• Jayasinghe, Tutorial: Apache Axis2 in action (113 hits)

Do you think your presentation or tutorial should have been in one of these lists? Then do something about it — talk about it in your blog or on mailing lists, post the link to your company intranet, etc., and make sure that people who would want to come and hear you know about it.

What’s popular, and why?

So what can we conclude from all this? Certainly, given the disproportionately high number of hits for Eric Prud’hommeaux’s and Philippe Le Hegaret’s presentation (about four to five times as many as the second-place one), there’s a lot more interest out there in Web Services than some of us might have suspected. Otherwise, the presentations seem to be spread nicely among the three thematic tracks, publishing, web, and enterprise, suggesting that the conference will be a good meeting place from people coming from those three different worlds.

I recently upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft (which is about to be officially released). The upgrade was almost 100% painless, except that I had to reselect the gnome-desktop package after it got deselected somehow. Everything just worked, before and after I rebooted.

There’s a small change in Edgy that means a lot to people like me, who have been building kernels (first Minix, then Linux) for over a decade and a half: all of the specialized X86-related kernels have vanished from Ubuntu, and now there’s just a linux-generic: no more linux-386, linux-686, linux-k7, linux-686smp, etc. Have the Ubuntu people decided to make us all live with substandard performance, just for the sake of simplifying installation for beginners? No. Instead, someone actually went and tested the different kernel variants, and discovered that there was no measurable speed benefit for any of them.

This is a huge disappointment, of course, for people who build and optimize their own kernels (I gave up on that a year or two ago), but it’s also symbol of the change in focus from techie tinkerers to more general users, whose main goal in life is not to be able to boast that they got 0.1% more bogomips out of their system after only three nights of hacking.

This year at XML 2006 we’re going to try something new. On Tuesday night, Michael Smith will host a Vendor PechaKucha night [Wikipedia article on PechaKucha]. Any XML software or service vendor who is registered to attend the conference is welcome to participate, at no extra charge. Here’s how it works:

1. Each presenter submits, in advance, exactly 20 slides.
2. During the presentation, we will show each of the slides for 20 seconds while the presenter talks.
3. When the slides are done, the presentation is over (we should consider hiring the orchestra that plays to cut off Oscar speeches).

That means that a each talk is guaranteed to last exactly 6:40. PechaKucha (roughly, “yackity-yack”) is — you guessed it — big in Japan, and we think that it will be a fun and fast way for people to learn about a lot of products and services in a short amount of time. We encourage people to come and go during the evening and, generally, just to have fun.

So if you’re selling an XML-related product or service and you plan to register to attend XML 2006, why not take six minutes and fourty seconds to tell everyone what’s special about what you have to offer? If you’re coming to learn more about XML, why not sit in on a few quick talks?

For more information on participating, please see http://2006.xmlconference.org/pechakucha.html.

(In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (5-7 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks.)

Even before we read the abstract and realized what a great presentation this was, the planning committee was kidding me that they knew the paper would make it — after all, I keep a flying blog and had flown my own small airplane (not a Cessna) down to Boston for the planning meeting.

In fact, what attracted me most to this paper was not my own flying, but my work on large, SGML-based documentation systems during the 1990s. These systems, which often cost many millions of dollars to create, are still running and doing good service for organizations in sectors like automotive, aerospace, and the military, but it has been many years since vendors released new products for SGML, and support for old products from the 1990s is dwindling fast, as is the pool of people with high-end SGML skills. At what point is it worth tearing apart and rebuilding a working system to upgrade to new technologies? What are the pitfalls? This presentation could just as easily have ended up in our hands-on track, and it’s a strong incentive to make sure you arrive Monday night, so that you’re ready to drop by and hear Michael on Tuesday morning.

[Update: Newmatica is closed.]

Thank you to those of you who have visited and used my new consumer-product-discussion site, Newmatica Barcode, since I announced it on Friday. I had an exciting Canadian Thanksgiving weekend dealing with all the bug reports (especially browser-related) and suggestions, and it is indescribably gratifying seeing real members joining and people entering products and comments.

Following one member’s suggestion, I’ve added a privacy policy to the site. I decided to write something short in reasonably plain (if slightly technical) English, rather than the typical 2,000 tome of lawyer-ese. I’d be grateful for comments and suggestions about what should or shouldn’t be in it.

[Update: I've shut down the site after nearly a year of inactivity. No regrets — it was a good learning experience, and cost very little (aside from spare time).]

This summer I had an idea for a site where people could tag and discuss basic consumer items (like, say, boxes of pens, or breakfast cereal) the same way that they can discuss books or CDs on Amazon or tag web pages on del.icio.us. The first version of the site is now online here:

http://www.newmatica.com/ No longer available

I’d be grateful if a few of my blog readers could try it out and give me their opinions (either in comments or by private e-mail). Here are some good starting points:

• Search for food
• View the tag cereal
• Look up the product with the barcode 0 11361 50506 6
• Grab a Web-2.0-y XML view of a product, with XLink links suitable for web crawling.
• Subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed for a product’s comments.

The IDEAlliance XML Scholarship is now open for submissions until Monday 30 October 2006. The winner — a student enrolled in any degree or diploma program at a post-secondary institution — will receive a prize of US $1,000, a US $500 travel stipend, two nights’ accommodation, and a chance to present her or his paper in front of industry leaders at the XML 2006 conference in Boston from 5-7 December 2006.

Judges for the scholarship include Dr. Mary Fernández (AT&T), Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C and University of Bergen), and Dr. Henry Thompson (W3C and University of Edinburgh).

I’d be grateful if people could spread the word to anyone they know who is a student or who teaches students who might be interested in participating. Submission details are available here, and papers should go to scholarship@2006.xmlconference.org.

(In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (5-7 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks.)

One of the most powerful techniques in early Unix work was using programs or scripts to automate the creation of other, more complicated programs or scripts: tools like lex and yacc massively simplified programmers’ work and vindicated Unix’s use of plain text as its primary data format, rather than the binary formats used in most other computing environments. In this practical, hands-on presentation, Michael Kay — renowned XSLT guru, book author, and the creator and maintainer of Saxon XML processing engine — showsthat the old Unix spirit is still alive in the XML world, when shows attendees how to use XSLT stylesheets to generate other XSLT stylesheets that would be excessively complex or tedious to create manually.