The personal and professional ramblings of Nicholas Chase
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"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created
them." -- Albert Einstein
January 28, 2006
JSON: Ajax without the cross-domain issues
I've just posted an introductory discusion on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). What's itneresting about it is it provides away to get around the cross-domain issues you get when you try to access web services using Ajax. Yahoo's now outputting JSON in a ridiculously easy way, so this is worth checking out.
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March 01, 2005
Yahoo releases web services API
Check it out over on the InformIT blog...
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February 06, 2005
One click, yes. One aggregator, NO.
I've discovered that I'm generally cranky when I post to InformIT. My take on a one-click aggregation solution is no exception.
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05:46 PM
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January 17, 2005
What I want in an aggregator
Almost a year ago, I wrote about what I want in an RSS aggregator, and now, as I actually write one in C++ (see, I told you I was doing it) I've gone back and found that all of those requests are still valid. And I still don't see anybody doing all of it.
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11:53 AM
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May 13, 2004
Mozilla and the potential for interaction
Ever heard of XUL? It's a new way of building web applications in Mozilla (and the newer versions of Netscape). Kind of like a "super" form, with all kinds of interactivity available. I still haven't had time to fool around with it, despite a brief interlude when it looked like I might have to write a tutorial on it, but check out the Mozilla Amazon Browser, a very cool look at what you can do with it. This link is via Jono Bacon's Mozilla and the potential for interaction, which is itself an interesting read, considering the idea of porting applications such as OpenOffice to XUL.
Cool.
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Why I like XInclude
XInclude, designed to make it easier to include part of one XMl document into another, has been a neglected specification for a long time. Now Bob DuCharme gives a good example of how it can be useful with Transclude with XInclude (and XPointer!). It still doesn't address the security issues, but OK, there you are.
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08:20 PM
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February 03, 2004
Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5.1.1
Now updated on developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5.1.1: "This tutorial looks at making your application Web-services ready using WebSphere Studio's tools to wrap an existing application as a Web service, announce it using a UDDI directory, and to discover and use Web services within your applications. It also looks at how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server."
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January 25, 2004
DOM and .NET
Well, I've finally gotten around to writing about .NET, with a section on DOM and .NET at the InformIT XML Reference Guide. It explains how to create an application in .NET that traverses the Document Object Model of an XML Document object. It uses Visual Basic .NET, but the concepts are the same for C#.
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January 18, 2004
199 reasons I'm behind
I understand that there are people who read all of the blogs on their blogroll every day, or at least, every few days. And they even find time to comment on them. I want to know who these people are and how they manage to make a living.
I have, in essence, three blogs that I am supposed to be updating on a regular basis. I'm supposed to do at least three blogs a week for the XML Reference Guide, I've got this one, and I've got The Vanguard Science Fiction Report, which has been fallow so long I'm embarrassed to admit that it's mine. So today, now that the weeks of emergency room visits and surgeries in the family have settled down into the normal level of chaos, I sat down and went through my blogroll for potential posting material.
I thought it might be a little educational to document the "flow" of my surfing, and how it eventually gets turned into actual postings, so here is the list of the "first cut". These are postings that may eventually wind up on one of my three blogs:
- Incremental XML Parsing and Validation in a Text Editor
- XML 2003 session report: Combining multiple vocabularies without tears
- XML 2003 session report: News from the world of DSDL
- ISO/IEC 19757 - DSDL
Document Schema Definition Languages
- Namespace Routing Language (NRL)
- Extreme Markup Languages 2004
- Escaping the Googlearchy
- Blogging Locally
- DocBook NG: The “Absinthe” Release
- DocBook NG: The “Bourbon” Release
- Going to Extremes!
- New Year Resolutions 2004.
- Reuters: Google Planning Email-based AdWords Service
- John Battelle's Searchblog
- eBay = The Fed
- IBM Almaden Research Center
WebFountain
- Rocket Man
- Fontifier
- The XML in Apple's Keynote
- A specious supercomputer argument in the Irish Times
- Draconian XML processing
- Sleep Paralysis
- Spontaneous screen videos
- Dynamic categories
- Turning consumers into producers
- Server-based XPath search
- Databases get a grip on XML
- Thinking the Unthinkable about Microsoft
- Longhorn SDK
- PhotoGallery
- Two Laws of Explanation
- SIMILE : Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments
- Quint on the FREDDY VS JASON dvd
- An Assload Of New Trailers Online!! STEPFORD, CB:TM, HIDALGO, SPARTAN, SCOOBY 2, ALGIERS, TOKYO GODFATHERS!!
- Van Helsing Trailer
- Batman Already On_SMALLVILLE??
- The WB's Stillborn FEARLESS!!
- WONDERFALLS
- Craigslist RSS Search Script
- Simplerwork
- Your final 3 hours
- Lost Who episode found
- SCI FI picks up Andromeda, Beastmaster
- Casting for Hitchhiker's Guide announced
- A real "space opera" in development from Turing Opera Workshop
- LeGuin's Earthsea to become Sci-Fi Mini-series
- Perchance to dream - anything you like with the fantasy machine
- A Real-Life Debate on Free Expression in a Cyberspace City
- 2003 in Review: DRM Technology
- Northwest gave U.S. data on passengers
- Luke Cage Making Progress at Sony
- CONFIRMED: Bob Hoskins Part of the Mask Cast
- Comic Book: The Movie Trailer Online!
- ELEKTRA MOVIE UPDATE
- Pre-Order the 2004 Superhero Movie Novelizations!
- JetBlue Redux: Northwest is guilty of violating passenger privacy
- New tech claims to detect lying in real time
- Safety killed the (Hubble) telescope star
- A version of Windows for every geek worthy of that name
- MoveOn.org demonstrates the growing power of the 'net in US politics
- Bush outlines plan for moon rendezvous by 2020
- The Internet gives a voice to Death Row, but not everyone's happy
- The Battle of Serenity Game
- Get your name.name domain
- US using EU airline data to 'test' CAPPS II snoop system
- SCO sort of thinks there are Linux IP violations, but isn't quite sure
- Niue is dead! Long live .nu!
- Nokia to release Perl for smartphones
- CinemaNow debuts download-to-own movies
- Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study
- We finally made it! Confluence 1.0b1!
- Wondering why your WAR is slow? Think of your timezone!
- SiteMesh Overview
- Jira
- The anatomy of a bug
- Sauron’s Eminent Domain
- Find Some Free Fonts
- Format an RSS Feed and Put It On Your Site
- New Google Features -- Travel and Tracking Numbers
- Watching Google Like a Hawk
- YSearch
- Google Labs
- PR Newswire's RSS (RDF Site Summary) Feed
- PR Bop
- Sun Announces Preview of Java Studio Creator Application Development Tool
- Integration: From Big Bang to Controlled Explosions
- Steve Mills On The IBM-Microsoft Web Services Partnership
- BEA, Microsoft, and Tibco Release WS-Eventing Specification
- StrikeIron Announces General Availability of the StrikeIron Web Services Analyzer
- Web Services in Action: Aligning IT with Business Objectives
- WS-I Make Available Drafts of Basic Profile Attachments Work
- BizDex: ebXML And Web Services To Go The Last Mile
- Four Ways to Know Your WSDL
- A Design Center for Web Services
- Mindreef Announces Availability of SOAPscope 3.0 Web Services Diagnostics System
- DreamFactory Launches Browser-Based Tool For Developing Rich Web Services Client
- Web Services Networks
- If You Like Web Services Standards You Would Love XML 2003
- Patterns: Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services - IBM Redbook
- Decentralised social networking
- Looking For a Gig
- On Postel, Again
- Technology Predictor Success Matrix
- History of XML Error Handling
- On Writing XML
- The truth about XML
- Microsoft Web services plan targets Java
- Straight talk on Web services
- Longhorn and the battle for Web services
- Breaking the logjam on Web services
- The real deal on .Net
- Taking XML's measure
- Longhorn and the battle for Web services
- Why Microsoft needs IBM this time around
- Developers gripe about IE standards inaction
- Raising the XML flag
- A Web services wish list
- Novell targets Web services security
- Free Writing and Music - as in Speech (MLP)
- What Good is the Second Amendment?
- CBS May Reject MoveOn.org Superbowl Ad
- Simulating Psychosis
- What Good is the Bill of Rights?
- Mars photo
- Pros and fans
- Which Star Trek Captain are you?
- Which Lord of the Rings character and personality problem are you?
- Lot auctions
- Rental Car Horror Story
- Isle of Man is the new M4 corridor
- Death of the desktop on the way in three years
- 5 years ago... Politicians warned to watch out for the web
- SAP Launches RFID Solution
- EFF Files Amicus in DirecTV 11th Circuit Appeal
- ACLU Defends Rush's Privacy Rights
- Web cam watchers help woman kicked by horse
- Security experts look to agriculture for virus clues
- Farenheit 451 + 1984 = Paranoia
- Hack for the Homeless: Primative Yet Useful
- A 'Xen' State of Being
- Secrecy Suddenly a Campaign Issue
- CBS Shields Pigskin Fans From Ads
- Florida Video Law: Parents Decide
- Diebold Gets Stay in California
- Doc Claims Human Clone Implant
- Off To A Good Start
- Cutting The Cheese
- Movable Style
- YAHTZEE!
- The Perfect 404
- Elastic Design
- Creativity
- Back to CSS Basics 3
- TouchGraph
- Off-Site Popups
- Microsoft: Communicate Or Die
- Innovation is Useless
- Top 20 Groups
- Carnival of the Capitalists by Ensight.org
- Back to Basics Part 3 — What’s in a hack?
- HTTP error pages for weblogs!
- Cute cuddly robots of DOOM
- Church Sign Generator used for fraud!
- Tat, meet tit
- Whidbey Integrated Web Services
- More on WS-Eventing
- WS-Security meets Kerberos
- Dutchtub
- Disaster photos
- Better MIDI sounds
- Scaling the Death Stars
- Honda Civic as H-Wing
- A Taste of Our Own Poison
- New "everyday neuroscience" book from author of Emergence
- nevermind
- and the winners are
- “Go find me a way to do this.”
- more please
- Common(s) Sense of Thomas Paine
- Dems on the Supreme Court
- 11 Top US Papers Ignoring Cheney's Pending Bribery Investigation
- Let's Send W to Mars
- PETA Gives Birth to Baby PETA
- Barlow on Spalding Gray: "Is he finally swimming to Cambodia?"
- Conservatives ALWAYS ADMIT THEYRE WRONG -- a hundred years later!
- more adventures in DEHUMANIZATION
- Sean Penn, DynCorp, and I TOLD YOU SO
- Bush environmental "achievements" for 2003: from Sierra Club's list
- Dr Phil versus Maury Povich - who'd win in a fight? (stuff that just aint right #2)
- Paranoid fears coming true in Ashcroft era
And some XML tools mentioned on Cafe Con Leche:
- Arabica
- Render X Barcodes
- XQuisitor
- <oxygen />
- XMLBuddy™ 2.0
- Relaxer
- Render X XEP XSL Rendering Engine
- Python bindings for XML Security Library
- Mozilla 1.6 (now supporting "XML, CSS, XSLT, XUL, HTML, XHTML, MathML, SVG, and lots of other crunchy XML goodness.")
Even I can't believe how long the list is.
As you can see, it's a rather eclectic group, but it also shows the pattern of how I surf. (Note that I didn't even touch Op-Ed News today, because I know I have enough material for this blog, which is the only place it belongs, or the W3C because I've adopted a "monthly" schedule for them on InformIT.)
Over the next week or so, you can see what makes the cut and what doesn't, and what leads to other things.
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10:25 PM
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The evils of escaped markup
At the end of December, I wrote about The evils of escaped markup as seen by Normal Walsh. It was a well-though-out piece about why he doesn't like that people are using CDATA sections to escape potentially non-well-formed content, particularly in data feeds.
But the interesting thing to me is that I'd actually already written about this particular topic -- and in fact, this particular piece of Norman's -- last summer.
So far, nobody has noticed. Or if they have, they haven't commented.
I'm considering thinking of something completely ridiculous and controversial to say just to see if anybody notices. Suggestions welcome.
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09:03 PM
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December 19, 2003
The relevance of standards bodies
So I was thinking over at InformIT about standards bodies and their relevance, but my really big question is this: what would happen if we all decided NOT to use an accepted standard, and used something else instead?
I mean, seriously. What if a group of scientists decided not to use the "accepted" names for the elements, or renamed the planets or something? I mean, there's no law about it, right?
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11:39 AM
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November 14, 2003
Natural Language Processing
Unfortunately, I still don't have the time to devote to it that I'd like, but all this talk about Chatbots has gotten me thinking about Natural Language Processing. fieldmethods.net is an NLP-oriented portal that seems to have interesting information.
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11:59 AM
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November 09, 2003
Grab headlines from a remote RSS file
Now on developerWorks: Grab headlines from a remote RSS file: This article shows you how to retrieve syndicated content and convert it into headlines for your site. Since no official format for such feeds exists, aggregators are often faced with the difficulty of supporting multiple formats, so Nick also explains how to use XSL transformations to more easily deal with multiple syndication file formats. (This was actually published in September.)
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10:52 AM
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November 06, 2003
The XML book business
I am pretty darn proud of XML Primer Plus. I knew the subject well, and I worked hard on it. I also feel good about the fact that it covers not only Java, but also C++, VB.NET, Perl, and PHP, thanks to the help of some additional writers. The reviews have all been good, and even the four star review on Amazon says that the only reason he didn't give me five stars is because he feels that that levels should be reserved for "recognized experts in the field," which I clearly am not.
But sales have been, frankly, disappointing. I was feeling really bad about it -- until I found out that The XML Book Business is in the toilet. With very few exceptions (and frankly I can't think of any), nobody's XML books are selling.
So tell me, are you buying XML books? Why or why not?
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11:17 PM
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March 04, 2003
SAX-like apps in PHP
Now on IBM developerWorks: SAX-like apps in PHP -- While there is no official implementation of the Simple API for XML (SAX) in PHP, PHP does provide a SAX-like method for working with both local and remote XML files. In this article, author Nicholas Chase shows you how to work with XML files in PHP by building and setting handler functions and creating a parser. He demonstrates SAX in PHP with a page-building exercise in which he crafts a page based on the result of an Amazon Web Services query.
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09:30 AM
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February 06, 2003
Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5
Now on IBM developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5 (Tutorial) -- This tutorial shows you how to make your application Web-services ready using the tools in WebSphere Studio Application Developer Version 5. You will learn how to wrap an existing application as a Web service and announce it using a UDDI directory and to discover and use Web services within your applications. The tutorial also explains how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server.
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09:01 AM
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November 01, 2002
Building an Amazon storefront using SOAP and the WSDK
Now on IBM developerWorks: Building an Amazon storefront using SOAP and the WSDK (Tutorial) -- This tutorial is for developers who want to use SOAP to access the Amazon product database through Amazon Web Services (AWS). It shows you how to use the IBM WebSphere SDK for Web Services (WSDK) to create Java classes from the Amazon Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file, demonstrates the use of those classes, and then examines the process of using the WSDK to turn the classes into a Web application and Amazon storefront.
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August 02, 2002
Understanding Java Factories
Now on InformIT.com: Understanding Java Factories -- How do factories work, and how can you use them in your own applications? Create two different "ferrets," and see how using a factory allows you to choose which one is actually loaded at any given time.
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June 11, 2002
Introduction to ebXML
Now on IBM developerWorks: Introduction to ebXML (Tutorial) -- Whereas EDI for years has provided a usable but expensive way for companies to exchange information in an automated manner, ebXML now provides a means for companies to integrate their processes much more easily. Based on XML, it provides a methodology for business to determine what information they should exchange and how, as well as a set of specifications to allow automation of the process. This tutorial gives an overview of ebXML, explaining how all of the pieces fit together.
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June 09, 2002
Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere
Now on IBM developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere (Tutorial) -- The Site Developer configuration of WebSphere Studio and WebSphere Application Server ease the pain of integrating Web services with your application. This tutorial looks at making your application Web services-ready using Site Developer's tools. It takes you through the process of wrapping an existing application as a Web service, announcing it using a UDDI directory, and discovering and using Web services within your applications. It also looks at how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server.
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May 21, 2002
Building Web service applications with the Google API
Now on IBM developerWorks: Building Web service applications with the Google API (Tutorial) -- The Google search engine can now be accessed via a SOAP-based Web service. This means that developers can now embed Google search results and other information into their own applications. Google also took this project one step further, creating an API and Java toolkit for accessing the data. This tutorial is for developers who want to use Google information from within their Java applications.
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April 12, 2002
Tip: Send and receive SOAP messages with JAXM
Now on IBM developerWorks: Tip: Send and receive SOAP messages with JAXM -- In this tip, author and developer Nicholas Chase shows you how to use the Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) to simplify the process of creating and sending SOAP messages.
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