USB-SD. Gadget design at its finest. Wow.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
Jan Algermissen, Topic Map and REST fanatic, relaunches his weblog. Subscribed!
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
Problems using email addresses with a “.name” TLD. An interesting aspect of email architecture that I wasn’t familiar with.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
Watch this space
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“Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML to any webpage to change it’s behavior” – Wow.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
“As a language of contracts, SOA involves complex shapes. But as a Lego system, it’s about simple shapes. Where’s the sweet spot?” Erm, simple shapes? 8-)
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
Congrats Werner!!
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

As Stefan mentioned, we got together for dinner while I was in Dusseldorf at a Compound Document Formats WG WG meeting last week.

I only had my crappy cell phone camera with me, so please excuse the quality of these shots of our meals;

Stefan’s Pork Knuckle:

Stefan's Pork Knuckle

Mark’s Deer Ragout:

Mark's Deer Ragout

Can you make out the brussel sprouts and spaetzle? Mmm..

On the “Convert Stefan to a REST believer” front, I think I made good progress. I used to believe that email was a better medium for these exchanges since I could take the time to fully understand the other party, and formulate a detailed response. But just a few minutes of back-and-forth on the (more or less) transport vs. transfer issue, and I had him going “Hmmm…”. Perhaps at some point he’ll elaborate on that, and how much of a nuisance a single bit can be. 8-)

Anyhow, Dusseldorf was quite the amazing city. I didn’t have much in the way of expectations visiting there, believing it was largely industrial like Frankfurt. But I was quite wrong. It’s very affluent and cosmopolitan, and its beautiful old town area has the largest pedestrian mall I’ve seen in Europe.

I also wasn’t going to get down to Dusseldorf without visiting the famous German wine region of Mosel, home of, IMO, the world’s best white wine. So, arriving early, I did the 3 hour trip, both ways, via taxi, train and bus, to Bernkastel. I was glad I did too, as the day was gorgeous, and the wine fantastic. In particular, the 2003 vintage from Dr. Loosen (pic) was out of this world! We did a 2003 flight from each of their first growth vineyards, and all were of exceptional quality and full of “Mosel-nature”; sweet, lucious fruit, with citrous and mineral. Curiously, the offering from Dr. Pauly wasn’t nearly so whistle-whetting, which probably had something to do with the abundance of Kabinetts that they turned out, while my preference – and Dr. Loosen’s speciality – is their Spatleses and Ausleses. I’d also never seen this before, but Loosen also offers a “Goldkapsel” (gold cap) Auslese which is Auslese without any botrytis affected fruit; pure sweet mosel with none of the sometimes-off-putting and always-tastebud-killing botrytis flavour (epitomized by Sauternes). It had all the fruity sweetness of an Auslese with a Beerenauslese price, weee! 8-) The gold cap is their own means for labelling it, though the practice of making the wine has been recently picked up by other VDP member producers.

Some more phone-quality pictures in a yet-to-be-properly-setup gallery are available.

If it’s in a protocol stack, it’s a protocol.

I forgot to mention that I proposed an issue to the TAG, as the WS-Addressing WG refused to accept it.

This is an interesting one, since it’s not so much a test of URIs vs. EPRs (though that one will be entertaining!) as much as it is a test whether the TAG agrees that protocol independence – where a SOAP message’s semantics are independent of the underlying protocol – is counter to Web architecture.