Dave Orchard's Blog

Tech tab sweep: Social graph news

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:45:09 -0800

Myspace opens up, just like facebook. A few differences though, only devs for the first month, no proprietary markup language, open social support, and caja javascript scrubbing support. Close to being too late. Open Social APIs published, with very simple demos. Looks really interesting. Social Networking is slowing down, shown at Creative Capital. What's really fascinating is the Dec 2006 to Dec 2007 numbers. Facebook hasn't doubled users in a year, and they are spending only 15 extra minutes on fb. Amazon offers facebook AMI and tutorial - these guys really have it right. Next thing, they'll offer prioritized EC2 location so it's right next to the fb server and they'll have "distance/time to fb" rates :-) OAuth published the 1.0 spec. Very interesting, and exactly what I want for a lot of integrations.

OAuth and W3C Access Control alignment

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:39:13 -0800

I've done a little bit of digging into OAuth, and I was thinking about how it could compare and work with the W3C's Access Control spec. AC specifies a static mechanism so that one domain can grant another domain access to specific domain and URI identified resources in the browser. In contrast, OAuth specifies a mechanism so that a user can grant one domain to access protected resources. These are very different specs but perhaps they ought to be aligned? I have a few ideas about that, and I'm sure there are a lot of others.

Vancouver flood map under ocean rise of 4 metres

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:35:13 -0800

Here's a cool map showing areas of flooding in vancouver if the oceans rise by 4 metres (12 feet). Very cool map and very interesting to see the effects on Vancouver, particularly the almost total flooding of Richmond.

Bank failure in 2nd life, newer rules for banking

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:41:50 -0800

Fascinating, a bank failed in 2nd life in August 2007. Linden labs just announed that only banks certified by a government can operate in 2nd life. The obvious problem of figuring out which countries are good enough certifiers immediately raises its head.

MT 4 upgrade: failed

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:32:29 -0800

I decided to try to upgrade from MT 3.35 to MT 4. What a colossal waste of time and energy so far. 1. MT 4 has decided that it can't find the mt-static directory if I try to do a clean install. I've tried moving the directory around, all the permissions look good, I can browse into the directory. 2. MT 4 has decided that the username and password that work for the 3.35 version of the blog won't work for MT 4 if I try to upgrade. I even logged out and logged back in on 3.35 to make sure I was using the right one. 3. MT 4 faults when I try to do the password recovery to see what MT thinks the password ought to be "Can't call method "password" on an undefined value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1825." I'm stuck. What a waste.

Connor Butler Restaurant Review: 5 out of 5 fine dining

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:13:48 -0800

To celebrate my company's upcoming nuptuals with Oracle, we went out for fine dining at Connor Butler. We haven't been able to get into Connor Butler in 4 previous nights out. Dine out vancouver is currently running so everybody is going for $35 meals everywere else, and Connor isn't. So he had lots of space. Interestingly, the Maitre' D does day trading and he knew about the BEA/Oracle deal. What a wonderful meal we had. We chose the 6 course Surprise menu. But really, it was a 12 course menu because D and and I each got different items. Where has that happened before? So many of the dishes were just tremendous. I think the Gnocchi was the highlight amongst highlights. I've never had it that good before. The duck breast, lamb, sirloin, prawns, lobster bisque, fois gras terrine, ling cod were all simply amazing. We paired it with a very nice 2003 Chateau la Neurthe (89 parker points). We then did a wine pairing with the desert courses. We had an amazing number of amouse bouches including two courses, and then a wonderful little post desert desert tray. Drink markup is very reasonable, double the BCLDB prices. The wine selection was good, for example our favourite US Chardonnay, Mer Soleil, was on the list. The wine selection could have used a bit more variety, and I'm always agin Canadian wines. Service was excellent. Our benchmark for good service is never having a completely empty wine or water glass. Connor regularly came out to explain the food dishes and to talk. I thought that was tremendous. He totally loves food, has a bubbly personality, and is extremely personable. We chatted with him afterwards about great restaurants that he and we have been to. We've both given up on getting into French Laundry, he'd heard about Tetsuyas, we all agreed that we are agin the current cooking trend of froths, etc. There are a few things that could use some improvement. We felt there were a couple of the food items that left a little bit to be desired. The "closer" desert, the grand item, of chocolate brownie and truffle ice cream just didn't do it. I think you have to nail your chocolate desert. It also felt a little bit like he was doing too many things. It seems strange to say that, but we felt almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of different flavours. Of course, we didn't have to split every course that came so part of our feeling is attributed to our actions. There was a deep fried amouse bouche that was really greasy. I also thought the wine list needed a bit of work. How can there not be a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc in preference to Mission Hill?? There also weren't nearly enough Australian Shirazes available. These "complaints" are pretty small in the overall experience. Serving at least 25 different food items and only missing perfection on 3-4 of them is incredible. Now that we aren't going back to Lumiere, I would say that Connor's is pretty close to my top restaurant in Vancouver for fine dining. I'd rate Connor's higher than our 4/5s of Watermark, Crocodile, C, Cru, Raincity, Parkside, Rare, Bistro Pastis, Vila Del Lupo, and far higher than our 3/5s such as West, Bishops, Fuel, Gastropod, Brix. I can't think of a fine dining restaurant I would rather go to. I'm enthusiastic enough that I think we'll try to have the W3C Technical Architecture Group February f2f dinner out at Connor's.

Web Applications Format and WS-ResourceTransfer both overload alleged operation

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:44:18 -0800

I've been reviewing the Access Control for Cross-site Requests document. One interesting aspect of the document is that it specifies how a web site can authorize other web sites to do non-GET operations such as PUT or DELETE. The client makes an authorization request by creating an HTTP GET with the http header Method-Check. The server then responds with an HTTP Response containing Access-Control HTTP Headers or even an XML document with Processing Instructions. Now the part that I found very interesting is that it seems that the client's authorization request isn't really for the resource identified by the URI, because the goal is to actually get the authorization information. Thus, an HTTP GET has been over-ridden to be a GET of metadata about a resource. Also interestingly, if the URI for some reason doesn't know about the Method-Check header, then it will return the "wrong" representation, that is the actual representation. There is no way of requiring that the server knows about the Method-Check request. Over in WS-* land, WS-ResourceTransfer is a specification that uses a SOAP header wsrt:ResourceTransfer to indicate that there may be RT specific extensions to the WS-Transfer operation, such as GET. Because it uses a SOAP header, it can use the soap:mustUnderstand attribute to require that the server understand it. Seems to me like this is an interesting case of where SOAP solves a problem that the Access Control for Cross-site requests has, that is the ability to mark a header as mustUnderstand. This isn't surprising, given that SOAP was exactly created to solve problems with HTTP headers.

Rest In Peace: Martin Sikes

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:54:18 -0800

Yesterday, we went to the Celebration of Life service for Martin Sikes. I've been very emotional about his passing away and I'm struggling to understand the reasons for the depth of my emotions. I was part of a group of people who called ourselves the Excursionists during university, from roughly 1985 to 1991. I had drifted far from Martin since then. My lifestyle of virtual office work in enterprise software, family, exercise, safe vacations to Europe, etc. didn't seem to fit with Martin's almost exact opposite lifestyle of bachelor, wildly successful gaming entrepreneur, DJ, Rave organizer, hobo train traveler to New Orleans and other places, inventor of many electronics devices, and wild traveler to South America and other places. At his celebration of life service, I wanted to speak a few words about Martin. I wanted to talk about his amazing ability to form connections, like the people I drove to the service with were my wife whom shared a locker with Martin at UBC before I knew her and we met via Martin, and the best man at our wedding whom I met at the infamous Martin Geek party of 1985. I wanted to point out that the glow-in-the-dark stars on his dodge colt were there because Steve, Wendy, I think Richard, and myself put them there as a prank and this was an example of how he inspired others to be creative. I wanted to say that I admired his amazing creativity, like the time we were playing elevator tag as a team and we decided to move the floor lobby furniture into the elevators and see how long they would stay. I wanted to say how much I admired his positive energy, like the time we all got together last summer at his penthouse apartment, and it felt like I hadn't missed a beat. (As I write this, I'm starting to cry yet again so I have to pause for while). I wanted to say that Martin will always be remembered, in even small things like my son's fascination with trains reminds me of Martin's amazing fascination with trains. All these and more I wanted to say but I couldn't. I couldn't even make it through other people's speeches without crying. This is my attempt to say the things, and yet I couldn't even write these words without having to pause a few times. Why the amount of emotion for somebody whom I had become very distant from? Is it because Martin was the first of our group of friends to die? Is it because he died far too soon? Is it because of the qualities of him as a man, like the amazingly creative and positive person he was? Is it because of all of the opportunities I had to do amazing things with him and did? or the ones that I didn't and will never be able to? Maybe it is all of those and more. I don't know yet the reasons. Maybe I never will. I will miss him very much, far more than I realized.

Globe's Pied-a-Terre review: Pied-a-Grillade on service

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:08:43 -0800

Finally, a restaurant review of a vancouver restaurant that doesn't gush with unwavering praise. It took the Toronto based Globe and Mail to do a real review of the new Pied-a-Terre restaurant. It's a fairly predictable review, which is poor and arrogant service and a mixture of good and not-so-good food. It's right in our neigbourhood, 5 blocks away, so we're hoping they improve and we can be regulars. We had some slightly similar service problems once at Bistrot Bistro (asked to move tables????) but the last time the service for our big birthday party was great. My server at Barney said that they had good food and good service when they went to Pied-a-Terre, but they were the first table so no time pressure. She also said that the other new french bistro, Jules, had horrible service, seating them at 10:40 for a 9pm reservation with no apologies. The problems of getting good service seem rampant in the hot job market of Vancouver. I'm just glad there are some publications that will actually hold the restaurants feed to the fire, Pied-a-Grillade style.

Validation by Projection Implementations

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:40:11 -0800

Validation by Projection implementations I gave a short introduction to Validation by Projection WSDL 2.0 The WSDL 2.0 and Schema 1.1 Working Groups first discussed the idea of “pruning” extra elements from an xml document if they didn’t match an element declaration in the schema in March 2004 (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-desc/2004Mar/0038.html) Paul Biron first proposed the idea of stripping away the nodes that after validation is attempted are valid but unknown. The WSDL 2.0 Working Group ultimately decided to not included validation by projection in WSDL 2.0. Validate Twice with Surgery (V2S) Henry Thompson provided an implementation of validation by projection called Validate Twice with Surgery between (V2S) at XML Europe 2004 (http://www.markuptechnology.com/XMLEu2004/). V2S is available online at ( http://www.markup.co.uk/showcase/V2S-pipe.html). V2S validates the document, then eliminates any elements with the PSVI property of ‘notKnown’ and then validates the document again XML Beans XML Beans supports validation by projection, though this is not documented. XML Beans generates Java classes for the schema types. Any unknown elements in an xml document are ignored from the Java perspective and the document is considered valid. It is possible to access the unknown elements using the XML Beans cursor methods. Custom XSLT XSLT can be used to transform a document into a projection. A very simple example is an XSLT that matches any personNames, family and given children and copies them to the output. The XSLT could use the definitions from XML Schema or the elements to match could be embedded in the XSLT. The first is more complicated to write but once built can handle arbitrary Schemas without recoding. The second is simple to write but requires coding for every schema change. UBL UBL uses XSLT for Validation by Projection. There are XSLT stylesheets defined for each version of UBL. When a UBL document is received, validity checking is performed against the version of the schema that the UBL receiver has. If the document fails validity checking, the XSLT stylesheet for the version of UBL that the UBL receiver has is applied. This creates a projection that has removed any unknown elements. Then validity checking is performed again. Other Programming Languages Concievably any programming language could be used instead of XSLT to either prune extra elements or to create a content model from only defined elements. Probably the great the xml support, the easier the implementation would be. I don't know of any other Java or any Python, Ruby, .Net, or other implementations. Others? Are there any implementations of validation by projectiono that I haven't listed? Does anybody know of an XSLT that will project based upon a schema document?

Validation by Projection introduction

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:18:34 -0800

Validation by Projection Many of the architectures and strategies for validation apply validity checking to a particular document with a pass or fail result on the document. This assumes that the schemas used in validation are expressive enough for all the potential versions of documents including any extensions. We’ve regularly seen that the Schema 1.0 wildcard limits the ability for fully describing documents. For example, it is impossible to have a content model that has optional elements in multiple namespaces with a wildcard at the end. The choice is to either have the wildcard or the elements. There is another approach to validation, called validation by projection, which effectively removes any unknown content prior to validation. It is validation of a projection of the XML document, where the projection is a subset of the xml document with no other modifications to the contents including order. Using our regular Name example that defines a family and a given as children of personName, an example document with Orchard Bryce David We see that there is a middle element that is not known. As our personName example does not allow the middle, validation of the document would fail. A projection of this document is: Orchard David We immediately see the benefits of validation by projection, which is that extra content is ignored for validation. Many more documents that are intended to be valid will be se under projection by validation. Validation by Projection is an implementation of the Must Ignore Unknown or Must Accept Unknown rules. There are some complexities to the projection. The projection could ensure that unknown attributes are removed but it might need to ensure any xml: namespaced attributes such as xml:base and xml:lang are preserved. There are constraints that the projection perhaps should preserve, such as only projecting family elements that are children of personName and ignoring family elements that are children of any other element. Projection Algorithm Part of validation by projection is determining what to project. Our name example was fairly straightforward because there is a complexType definition with only two child elements. The simplest rule for determining what to project is: Starting at the root element, project any attributes and any elements that match elements in the content model of the current complexType and recurse into each element. This very simple rule ignores complexities, such as excluding attributes, elements that match wildcards, and global element definitions. The crucial aspect of validation by projection is that the Accept Set under validation by projection is a superset of the Accept Set without validation by projection. In general, the larger we can make the Accept Set, the greater the chance for versioning. Because the validation by projection Accept Set is potentially a superset of the Accept Set that can be specified by XML Schema, validation by projection will generally allow more languages changes to be compatible changes compared to XML Schema.

Flickr supports editing

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:53:36 -0800

Flickr just announced that they now offer Edit Your Photos on Flickr. A much needed feature and they did it right by partnering with Picnic. I edited a number of pictures and found the tool really useful. The user interface was very fast and easy to use. The red-eye correct worked very well and I liked the cool little "exploding" graphic when it removed the red-eye. The sharpening adjustment worked easily and nicely. Cropping was easier than Canon or Nikon software. The performance was better than I expected. If the online editing works this well, I wonder if I will switch from using local software to online editing...

Amazon S3 to support file and data browser uploads

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:17:14 -0800

Amazon has announced that they will support browser uploads, which I previously said is a big missing feature. They've asked for feedback on S3 POST. My feedback is: - this is a great start - need size limits - need multi-file selection, especially for images - prevent overrides needed - returning just xml on error isn't nearly good enough

Tivo finally really in canada!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:00:28 -0800

Tivo just released the Tivo Series 2 in Canada. It's $200 for the box + $13/month or $130 pre-paid. London Drugs, Future Shop, Best Buy, and the Brick carry it. I was able to start an order at London Drugs, so it looks like it is in stock here. Why now? A fairly negative review from the Montreal Gazette theorizes that Tivo is dumping the Series 2 units in canada that they can't sell in the states. At any rate, it totally works for me for a couple of years. We don't have digital or even HD signals into the house and our tv is an old 36" beast from 1999 that is well pre-HD.

Watermark restaurant review - 4/5

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:06:07 -0800

We visited Watermark restaurant for our much delayed Anniversary dinner. What a wonderful night and meal. It gets a solid 4/5. Food was excellent but needs some slight improvements, service wasn't that great, wine list was excellent and the pricing has to be some of the best in vancouver. I think it is now my favourite waterfront restaurant in vancouver because it's the only one that doesn't rely on it's location by deliverying excellent food and wine at good value. I had the chilli tossed calamari with curry almond dip and D had the lobster dumplings in ginger soya sauce for appetizers. They were both excellent and there was even too much of the calamari for me! The dip was fabulous. The one slight negative is that the calamari were slightly too greasy. For mains we had the excellent new york steak and seared scallops. Again all were great. One slight negative on the scallops was that they weren't quite what was described in the menu and they were slightly doughy. We finished with the fabulous chocolate desert. The service wasn't that great in that the server didn't really describe or know the dishes well, basics like whether the scallops were pan-seared or grilled. I know it's very difficult in vancouver to hire and retain staff, which is I expect what they are struggling with. The wine we had was amazing and amazingly well priced. It think this is the best restaurant I've ever been to for markup on a wine. We had the Mer Soleil Chardonnay for $85 and loved it. Afterwards, I found it at the liquor store for $50. They are only charging a $35/70% markup. That's simply amazing and worth at least a star on it's own. Compare that with stupid Fuel/Gastropod that are charging $85 for $27 bottles of wine. Why on earth Fuel etc. get regularly hyped for poor food, service, selection and price and Watermark and Rare get overlooked is beyond me. I highly recommend Watermark as a place to go. It's definitely on my top list. You'll need reservations well in advance because it's very popular.