Quoderat

The real attack on Christmas and Christianity

Here are some people who might need help understanding the idea of Christmas and Christianity:

• the school parent(s) who decided to take this to the media
• the newspaper columnists who made a primary class holiday concert into a national culture battle
• the talk radio hosts who urged listeners to go after the school and ended up putting the lives of hundreds of small children at risk
• the hundreds of people who called or e-mail messages of hatred (and a bomb threat) to the nice women working in the school office

According to the Christian New Testament, Jesus didn’t have anything good to say about people like this — he far preferred the company of prostitutes and tax collectors to the religious self-righteous. If you are religious (any religion), pray, meditate, or just hope that their hearts can still be opened this season.

The letter of the law isn’t enough

That this isn’t a legal thing. It doesn’t matter at all if your e-mail list is opt-in or opt-out, if the “Send me announcements” checkbox was checked by default or not, or if the recipient originally clicked 10 screens of disclaimers before buying your product/signing up for your service. If they don’t like the e-mail you’re sending them, they’ll just click “Spam”, even if you had a legal right to send it; and if enough of them do it, the e-mail value of your domain fast approaches nil.

You’d better make sure that your mass e-mails have stuff that people actually want to read:

• I don’t care that your company just won five awards — SPAM! (even if I said before that it was OK to send me e-mails)
• I probably do care that someone wants to connect with me on a social networking site that I actually use.
• I don’t care that a merchant I did business with from 2 years ago has a Christmas special on something I’d never buy — SPAM!.
• I don’t care that your web site has a new look — SPAM!
• I don’t care that your company has a training session coming up in Tulsa, since I don’t live anywhere near there (and probably wouldn’t go anyway) — SPAM!
• Yes, I am interested in the tracking info for the books I just ordered. Thanks.
• I do care that there’s a substantive change to a site that I use a lot.
• I don’t care about a change on a site I haven’t logged into for a year — SPAM!.

And so on.

This new collaboration is an unexpected side-effect of the shift from desktop e-mail clients to web mail, and it would be foolish for companies not to pay attention. If you consider your domain name to be a valuable part of your corporate identity, don’t piss it away by sending out poorly-targeted mass e-mails, because no matter what prior permission you have, people now can … and will … punish you. After all, it takes only a single mouse click.

Amazon’s announcement

Dear AWS Developers,

This is a short note to let a subset of our most active developers know about an upcoming limited beta of our newest web service: Amazon SimpleDB, which is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.

Were excited about this upcoming service and wanted to let you know about it as soon as possible. We anticipate beginning the limited beta in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can read more about the service, and sign up to be notified when the limited beta program opens and a spot becomes available for you. To do so, simply click the “Sign Up For This Web Service” button on the web site below and we will record your contact information.

Not much there, though

It’s not SQL, or even SQL-like, though, supporting only the operators “=, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH, AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION”. I’m no relational expert, but I don’t think Codd would have been impressed. A distributed database is one of the big missing pieces from Amazon’s services, but I’m not sure if this will be it.

Cold

It was cold this time, colder than XML 2006 last December in Boston. I brought suitable clothing with me, so I was still able to get outside for some long walks around the city, but with wind chills dropping well below -10degC, a lot of visitors probably weren’t equipped and had to spend most of the conference indoors. That’s not as bad as it sounds, since the hotel is connected to, literally, kilometers of indoor shopping, with pedestrian bridges across major streets. Unfortunately, they probably didn’t make it the 2.5 blocks outside to have banana or cranberry pancakes for breakfast at Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe.

We also had snow — only a dusting of about three inches in Boston the night before the conference started, but since Boston’s not a snow city like Buffalo, Syracuse, Ottawa, Montreal, etc., I wasn’t sure if they’d have the roads clear and people would make it to the opening plenary. Fortunately, while many schools closed outside of Boston, the downtown kept moving as usual. We had over 200 people in a packed ballroom, and there was good audience participation.

Evenings

We had excellent 45- and 90-minute presentations during the day, of course, but some of the conference’s greatest energy was generated in the informal evening sessions. John Boyer’s XForms evening on Monday, and Ken Holman’s Standards and Specs Lightning Rounds on Tuesday both played to packed rooms with noisy audiences.

Both featured rapid-fire sequences of short presentations (15 minutes each for Monday, six minutes and twenty seconds each on Tuesday) giving the people there a chance to hear lots of different speakers and ideas in a short period of time. If you weren’t there on Tuesday night, you’ll find it hard to believe that an evening of standards talks could be exciting, but it was.

Consideration

XML is no longer mainly about a circle of people who know each-other and meet at conferences and committee meetings a few times a year. With so many new people, the change sometimes comes out as a lack of consideration — for example, speakers who wouldn’t bother showing up to hear the other presentation in their sessions (also leaving the session chair wondering if there would be a second speaker) — but overall, I think that people were back to being a bit more considerate than I’ve seen in the recent past. I saw fewer session chairs and speakers sitting in front of the room checking their e-mail while someone else was giving a presentation, had less trouble with people talking loudly in the hall outside while presentations were in session, and audiences tended to be friendly and supportive. Almost every presentation had a decent-sized audience ready to ask questions, and with all the work the speakers put in, they deserved at least that.

I experienced an example of consideration above and beyond any call of duty, when one person took time out from a serious family crisis to track me down, call me in my hotel room, and let me know about a change affecting the conference. You know who you are — thanks, and our thoughts are with you.

Boston

I love Boston. It’s a lot like Toronto, where I lived for six happy years and first learned how to love big cities properly (from near but not right in downtown, moving around on foot or public transit, and dealing with small stores and local merchants who get to know your name), but with its own special treats, like the antiquated trains (?) on the Green Line, a decent subway system that actually goes to the airport, truly fanatical baseball fans, and the Charles River. I’ve made a good number of visits to Boston over the past two years getting these conferences together, and I’ve come to feel very comfortable in the city.

Next year, I leave the conference to new people, and the conference leaves Boston for Arlington, VA. I hope that my life brings me back in contact with both the conference and Boston in the future, and I wish the best of luck (and stamina) to next year’s organizers.