Quoderat

Correction: To get the Shaw’s grocery store from the conference hotel, you do have to walk across one street outside, for about 10-12 yards.

I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of you in Boston next week at XML 2006. Many of you may know Boston much better than I do, but for those who don’t, I’m writing a few quick tips.

Getting around

Boston has excellent public transit and really horrible traffic, so the subway (called the “T”) and commuter trains are usually better choices than taxis, unless it’s a quiet time of day or you have too much luggage to handle on the escalators. The Prudential, Symphony, and Back Bay T stations are all a short walk from the hotel, as is the Back Bay commuter rail station. The Silver Line on the T connects Logan Airport to the other lines, so it’s a cheap ride in.

Internet

The Boston Sheraton Hotel has free wireless Internet and public computers available down in the lobby, and we hope to provide wireless access in the conference area. To access the Internet from your hotel room, however, you’ll need to pay an extra fee (about $10/day, I think), and you’ll need to have an Ethernet card — there’s no wireless available in the guest rooms.

Shopping and dining

The Back Bay area is big for stores and restaurants The two most important areas are Newbury Street, which runs east-west about three blocks north of the hotel, and (for those who prefer malls), the Prudential Center, a large upscale mall and food-fair connected to the Sheraton Hotel. The Prudential Centre includes a Shaw’s supermarket and a Barnes and Noble bookstore, just a few minutes’ (indoor) walk from the conference. If you need to make any emergency computer purchases, there’s a Best Buy about a 20 minute walk west along Boylston, just past Fenway Park.

Exercise

Sure, the hotel has a gym, but why bother when you can go walking or running around The Fens, through Cambridge along the Charles River past MIT, around the Boston Common, or up and down the steep, narrow streets of Beacon Hill? Bring your winter running gear, but don’t overdress — it’s not going to be that cold (see next).

Weather

Current forecasts call for daytime highs from 2 to 6 degC and nighttime lows from -3 to 1 degC over the week. If the forecast for sunny skies holds up, it will actually be very nice for walking around Boston (an amazing walking city), as long as you dress for the weather. Thicker pants, warm socks, and a light lined jacket that can keep out the wind, and maybe a light hat and gloves will be sufficient: unless you’re not used to cooler temperatures, there’s no need to show up in full ski gear. Leave the thin ankle socks and sandals at home. An extra tee-shirt or sweater will let you layer up if you need to.

(Old) New Age Religion

Just in case you’re interested, the headquarters of the Church of Christ Scientist (aka Christian Scientists, not to be confused with Scientology) is located in a large plaza across the street from the hotel.

With the XML 2006 conference just over a week away, I took another look at the server logs to see what presentation summaries were getting the most page views:

1. Web Services Policy Expression Alternatives
2. W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding
3. Social Semantic Mashups: Exploring Social Networks with Microformats and GRDDL
4. XQueryP: An XML Application Development Language
5. Getting There — The XML/XQuery Ecosystem (opening keynote)
6. The ODF Plugin for MS Office
7. Panel: XML Pipeline Processing
8. Panel: XML Project Management Best Practices
9. Making the Most of XML with Adobe InCopy and InDesign
10. JSON, The Fat-Free Alternative to XML

Vendors, consultants, journalists, and book publishers, take note. XQuery, in particular, makes the list twice (congrats to the W3C working group on its recent release), and there clearly is an intersection between the set of people who care about MS Office and the set of people who care about ODF.

So you’re going to speak at a conference. Congratulations!

I cannot help you much with making your presentation interesting, but at a minimum, you want it not to suck — “suck” is what happens when you annoy dozens or hundreds of people by making them wait 15 minutes while you deal with easily-avoidable technical problems. Incompatibilities between laptop computers and projectors are still common with all types of hardware and operating systems, so it is never safe to assume that your computer will work this time, even if it has in the past: I’ve seen Linux, Windows, and Mac users, in roughly equal proportions, all fall flat on their posteriors muttering phrases like “but it’s always worked before…” Things will go wrong, but you can minimize the damage by following some simple guidelines:

• Carry an extra copy of your presentation on a CD-ROM or USB memory stick. If you have a last-minute technical problem, you can always borrow another computer and finish your presentation after only a very brief delay. Mailing a copy to yourself at a webmail address is also a good idea.
• A screen resolution of 1024×768 is usually safe. Higher resolutions may or may not work, depending on the projector, so know how to change your resolution quickly if you need to. Seriously: practice changing your resolution at home.
• Disabling screensavers and screen blanking will improve your chances of a successful presentation.
• Have a backup plan if network connectivity slows down or fails (e.g. a local demo) — even if it tests OK beforehand, it might not work when there are 100 other people in the same room, using the same hub, during your presentation.
• Start all programs (web browsers, editors, live demos, etc.) and open all windows you need before you start, and then switch to them as you need them. Murphy’s law clearly states that trying to launch a program during your presentation will fail in the worst possible way.
• If you are using programs other than a slide presentation (such as a text editor with source code, or a web browser), set the fonts to a much larger size than normal so that the audience can read them. 18 point text is the absolute minimum, and 24 point is generally better; 12 point text or smaller is completely unreadable, especially for audience members near the back.
• Make sure that your battery is fully charged, even if you plan to plug in your notebook during the presentation.
• Create a separate profile or account on your computer for presentations, so that all your regular icons, bookmarks, etc. are not sitting on the screen in public view, an IM window doesn’t pop open in the middle of the presentation, etc.

I know that this is obvious, but almost every failed presentation I’ve seen failed because the presenter didn’t follow one of these steps. Go figure.

Stefano Zacchiroli and Paolo Marinelli of the Università di Bologna are the winners of the 2006 XML Scholarship: they will present their paper, Co-Constraint Validation in a Streaming Context, during the plenary session at 9:00 am on Thursday 7 December at the XML 2006 conference in Boston. Special thanks to our judges, Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Dr. Henry Thompson, and Dr. Mary Fernandez, for their hard work.

Why it matters

(Note: this is my opinion, not the judges’.) Compared to using DOM or XSLT trees, streaming XML (as the SAX API does) is very efficient for both time and — especially — memory usage. However, some problems are very difficult to solve without random access to an XML document. One of the best-known examples is validation using co-constraints, where one part of a document is or is not valid based on something in another part of the document, such as an attribute value or another element (possibly a part that came before, in a long-discarded part of the stream). As XML moves from its traditional territory of single-source publishing, some projects will need to be able to validate and process it very fast, at near-network speeds, and a way to validate co-constraints using something like SAX or StAX will be the key — I’m looking forward to hearing Paolo and Stefano share their ideas in Boston.

(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.)

The term AJAX originally stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has made huge inroads in interactive Web apps, often displacing XML completely: we’re trilled that Doug himself will be coming to talk to us about it. <XML 2006> is a place to learn about XML, not an XML cheerleading rally, and Doug’s presentation will give you a chance to decide when XML does and, more importantly, does not make sense for your web application. Enjoy!

Last week, after a lot of agonizing, the planning committee managed to pick nine late-breaking presentations (plus one to replace a last-minute cancellation) from the 60 excellent submissions:

• Sam Hiser, OpenDocument Foundation. The ODF Plugin for MS Office
• Peter Meirs, Time, Inc. Creating Intelligent Workflows with PRISM Metadata
• Patrick Chanezon, Google. Fun and Profit with the Google Checkout API
• Susan Malaika, IBM. Resistance is Futile: You will store XML
• Douglas Crockford, Yahoo! Inc. JSON, The Fat-Free Alternative to XML
• Joel Geraci, Adobe. Mars: A First Look at XML Friendly PDF
• Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media, Inc. Managing Content with the Atom Publishing Protocol
• Scott Tsao, The Boeing Company. Building and Sustaining an Enterprise-Wide Community of Practise
• Quyen Nguyen, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. XML Metadata For Digital Records Archives
• Bob DuCharme, Innodata Isogen. Relational database integration with RDF/OWL

You can find the complete programme online at http://2006.xmlconference.org/programme/. Thank you to everyone who submitted, and don’t forget that the XTech 2007 call for submissions is now open (Paris, 15-18 May 2007).

Like many Canadians, I grew up in the Protestant United Church of Canada [Wikipedia] and then stopped going after confirmation, though in my case it was not apathy but teenage experimentation with Christian fundamentalism (I didn’t inhale, much) that kept me away. Today, while our American cousins to the south enjoy their election day — at least, those Americans with access to working voting machines — I’d like people to reconsider some of their negative stereotypes about religious organizations by taking a look at the United Church’s new ad campaign, featuring such attractions as a shopping mall Jesus, a bible filled with Post-it bookmarks, and whipped cream intended for non-gastronomic purposes. Enjoy.

Update: corrected Encyclopedia Britannica link.

A lot of people — publishers, the press, public figures, and bloggers — spend a lot of time agonizing over Wikipedia, and the general conclusion is either (a) Wikipedia is dangerously untrustworthy (from its detractors), or (b) Wikipedia is great, but don’t trust everything you read there (from its supporters).

Here’s a different perspective: don’t trust anything you read or hear anywhere, guys. If you have the stomach for it, take a look at the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article for NEGRO, remembering that this edition was published within living memory, 48 years after the American Emancipation Proclamation, and 104 years after the end of slavery in the British Empire, in what was probably the world’s most authoritative and trusted reference source. What do you think the odds are that our grandchildren will react with the same disgust and disbelief when they look back at how our mainstream media and other publications covered the issues of our day, from their almost total ignorance of Iran (guys in black with long beards and nuclear bombs) to their glorification of war (support our troops, too bad about [non-first-world] victims) to their lazy republishing of the spin and just simple lies from the press releases of just about every public-interest pressure group (from the environmental to the gun lobby, from the gay rights movement to the fundamentalist Christian movement).

If the occasional (and rare) error or vandalism in Wikipedia finally teaches people that they are responsible for verifying everything they read, that will be a good thing. Wikipedia is still usually my first source for information, but nothing is ever my last source. Overall, however, because Wikipedia has an international authorship, I find that the information in it is generally of a much higher quality than I can get from the mainstream North American publishers or media (and I’m not talking only about Fox News).