Web Things, by Mark Baker

I forgot to send a pointer to a presentation I gave at last weeks CDF WG face-to-face. It’s titled Media Types and Compound Documents.

Comments welcome.

Congrats Werner!!
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“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-)
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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.
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Watch this space
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Problems using email addresses with a “.name” TLD. An interesting aspect of email architecture that I wasn’t familiar with.
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Jan Algermissen, Topic Map and REST fanatic, relaunches his weblog. Subscribed!
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USB-SD. Gadget design at its finest. Wow.
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“How do web services (particularly WSDL/SOAP/UDDI) fit into this?” They don’t. In order to discover things, you need to get at the data behind an interface, and in order to to do that you need to know the interface. With Web services there are an infin
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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:

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.