4.27 pm

Eurostar leaves from London Waterlo Station

19.47

Eurostar arrives at Lille Flandres

21.03

Steven drops me off. Home.

In memory of how we organized travel in the previous century I can only conclude that there is something really dull about progress and luxury. (Note that calculating the timezone-boundary-crossing makes it even worse)

5:43:10 PM    

Celebs at work.

Carefully choosing the Balmoral track this morning... where I get splendid entertainment from first (mr. SAX1) David Megginson, and (mr half a parser) Simon St Laurent. The main memories from David's presentation:

• The (only useful) possible use for XML Dave is seeing is in publishing DATA online (for all the rest, there is already quite some stuff out there to everyones satisfaction)
• Folowing up on his talk there is http://www.megginson.com/pubxs/ to keep track of the status

And the funny ones:

• XML is a solution in search for a problem.
• Standardisation organizations are (in terms of biological reproduction strategy) Frogs.

[the comparison was between humans having little offspring which they nurture and protect, while frogs just throw around their eggs (specs) and don't really worry that a lot of them do not survive]

During QA: ReSTy Paul Prescod in the room relates to HTTP publishing data and having xpointer-like references to retrieve specific data.

I make the mental note of sending them both a reference to xreporter.

Validation stinks!

Efficient presentation by the people of DecisionSoft on a proposal for possibly expressing arbitrary business rules inside an XML Schema (or did you think it was already complex enough?)

I find myself feeling quite alone in the room with some remarks on

• the fact that validation is already handled in systems out there, and reinventing the wheel will not make anyones lives easier, it will just add another copy of the same business logic to the scene
• programming/scripting languages with an angle bracket syntax are to be abolished (hmm, ant too?)
• if the business analyst is really the person we want to help, then formal modelling techniques like adding OCL to the UML might be making more sense then XML-implementation specific schema-extension

Of course... to a lot of the people at the conference XML is to be seen as conceptual esoteric manna for your brain, and is surely not the handy implmentation stuff I take it for...

Sorry, for thinking it's just XML.

Jacek again.

Next to Gregor this young man has a beautifull full-text-zone-aware search engine lingering around on the laptop's HD.Mmm, maybe he's not all that lazy :-)

And we get to talk in metafors now. He wants to keep Gregor (15 months of personal coding investment) as his own (closed source) product to build a business upon. After the build-up respect in two mindsharing days I cannot make the OSS arguments about doing it different, and can only whish him all the luck. He is after all right: people that are satisfied with the free/open family car can do so and drive wherever they like, he'll be glad to sell the F1 version to those people that need it and can afford it.However: the analogy (as the good ones do) goes quite a long way: his F1 is to be used on the racing track only.

Maybe I can plant some thought in his brain as well: From as little of what I understand from what Gregor is doing, part of the pudding-proof is in how the parser-API is presenting the XML content to the translets... And basically a whole wealth of SAX based applications (why am I thinking Apache Cocoon here) could benefit from the power-driven ideas behind that.

Jacek is pretty concerned with his intelectual property here (understandable with his intelect), but I honestly think his business could only benefit from the fact that all roads out there would be getting upgraded to racing-standards... it would allow his car to seemlessly drive home after the spinning rounds on he current racing track he built for himself...

Mental note to me: I left him with the idea of making public the (non-implementation) API of some, let's call it, sax-ng. I need to follow up on that, and actively help him doing so (if and when he's ready and willing)

While at it, Simon St. Laurent's effort with Ripper might fit in as well.

5:39:57 PM    

Bustje Kapp'n

Missing half of the conference today: I'm starting to notice that the deal between the conference organization and the hotel was to put all the interesting stuff in the last days... So I'm not particularly getting the feeling that I'm missing anything when I just lock myself up in my hotel room and finish up on a due offer for a customer back home.

Yeah, what a way to spend my birthday, I find some resolution in the notion that getting 33 wasn't exactly an easy year for Jesus either...

Conferencing again

Steven does the Cocoon intro show, and Uche's code sample shows the point I tried to make yersterday about serious XSLT abuse. Quite some app they build with Cocoon there.Adding the fact that I had quite some Cocoon coverage in my pre-conference tutorial on java/xml and oss that makes this conference had quite some Cocoon humming in the corridors...

Lazy Jacek

Bumping into the fill-rouge of this conference, Jacek.

As some (too little) payback for all the fresh thoughts planted by him in my brain yesterday I share to him the utter wisdom my father would always say: (in Dutch first, on special request by Janek)

• Hij die niet ijvert om zijn eigen werk makkelijker te maken, is een luiaard.
• He who is not in pursuit of making his own work more easy, is really lazy.

(-- Gaston Portier, Belgian bus- and tram driver)

So let me make a quality statement on Jacek's skills: lazy to the n'th

Cocoon gettogether

Meeting up with 6 cocooners in the center of London is equal fun as meeting 100 of them in Ghent... Aaargh, we really need to get started on the 2003 edition of the bigger version. Just hoping people in more local areas do this kind of stuff, it's so much more connecting the community to people then to code (Stefano's adagium)

5:27:54 PM    

I get to teach.

Boy, do I like this, a room full of people that have payed to pay attention to me. Getting ready for seriously intellectual abuse of the audience...

Ouch, I'm in an XML only zone here...

I have this classical slide in my presentations which basically explains why XSLT is bad for your mental health... and normally it's just a funny part of the show, and I would see all the heads nodd YESYESYES... Not today! These XML-straight-edgers want to lynch me for stating that there is so much one could do with just Java and not wanting my programming language of choice to have a pointy-tagged syntax...

Somehow we get to calm down a bit and make some consesus on the facts:

• writing XSLT _is_ programming. In fact it's due time that the current free hacking mode of writing those gets on a level where there is a full programming cycle of design, modelling, best practices, patters, debugging, (junit) testing, and all of that hopefully supported by a decent IDE environment. I know it's declarative, but writing Java is also _authoring_ in my book.
• XSLT is the best tool for the carefully selected job: purely transforming XML to XML. So don't even bother to explain how to put in my own extensions...

nu.XOM

My main course of new API coverage is about nu.XOM. Hm, nobody in the room even heard about it? This while I'm quite sure Eliotte didn't mean it to be such a secret... maybe I should just post back my slides to him, see what happens, they are in debt with him to a large extend anyway. (which is not that unlogic given his ownership on the thingy)

If nothing else, teaching people about nu.XOM is a great way for showing DOM's deficiencies and gotcha's.

Celebs

In the afternoon Jeni Tennison is in the room next door. I have vivid memories of discussing regexp declared parsing with her more then a year ago. So I dive next door in the lunch break to shake hands and put a face to the emailaddress. Fun.

And confronting: Conceptual me never got round to actually finishing up on the regexsl parser idea of then. Still halfish finisdhed on my HD... I guess Chaperon offers everyone what they need now anyway... If not, just yell, would be happy to revive the thinking.

Speaker's Drink

Known faces all over. And mingling... All the way up to the real contact with Jacek Ambroziak. Utterly refreshing. Basically I am not such a great innovative thinker myself, but I do have a 6th sense to feel new ideas in other peoples minds... Talking to Jacek is a great way to sharpen my antenna again. In the neuron-transmission radius of (knife-)sharp people like Jacek there is a fair danger for utter idea-bandwidth congestion... It's not untill a lot later that night that I get to parse and process everything he thinks...

On a more lightweight level, we get to find the similiraties between Large Corporations and XML Validation as well as between budweiser beer and having sex in a canoe... Hoping this is the start of a deeper intelectual friendship we can sustain over the email-channel :-)

5:20:00 PM    

9.43

We leave home by car. Ostend no longer operates a passenger boat service accross the channel. The option being called 'via Calais' inspires us to attach a long due visit to some friends in Ghent. Hence the early leave.

9.58

Tuur declares he wants to go home.

10.02

Tuur throws up and manages to puke over the complete rear space of the car. Fien takes it rather well and finds it actually quite 'gross' Cleaning up I make the mental note that my audience tomorow will enjoy my sweater being cleaned by the hotel laundry services.

11.05

Arriving with Annemie and Matthew a bit later then promised. Nice catch-up talks, exquisit lunch, enjoying the company and the pleasant atmosphere they created throughout living quarters and garden. Today's serving it with a shining spring sun makes it double.

14.26

Family drops me off at the station. Sudden push up of expectations at the ticket desk are not met: There really is NO Eurostar today. The clerk didn't realize the 4th of May was today.

15.42

We pass the depressing railway station of Tourcoing and get a visit of 5 customs officers. (Casual clothing and all) Has been a long time since I saw any of those really operate inside Europe (I should take these uncommon transportation modes more often.)It's probably only about knowing how to do your job efficiently but all other passengers must have noticed also that the white guy (me) is the only one that doesn't need to open his bags. My explanation "Je vais á Londres" together with "L' Eurostar ne roule pas aujourd'hui" is all that it takes.

16.13

Swiss clockwork driven sharpness. My train for Boulogne leaves. Everyone on this train seems to be dressed up for a steamy night on the beach over there. I manage to find the carriage with "les pensionés" that are either listening to headphones-classical-music (eyes shut) ot talking to each other in a funny french-influenced old flemish. I even understand some words from my dialect. Frans Vlaanderen. They get off in Hasebrouck.

17.15

It is hot in this train. A midly sour smell from my sweater is making sure I will not forget what needs to be done about it.

18.17

I get to learn:

• that the ferry booking was noted down for 6.45 am (!= 18.45)
• that the "every 45' minutes scheme" actually means: the next one is operated by our competitor on the other side of the room
• that switching companies is not an option since the fair is already charged from my VISA (we like you to book early)
• that there are nicer areas to waste 90 minutes

18.45

Boooring

19.13

I see the 4th fire-arm of the day while being on french territory. I make the personal observation that I never see those in Belgium. Over there one of the ever returning election topics comes from the undefined 'feeling of unsafety' that seems to have grabbed each and everyone. My personal opinion on the subject os that not arms but outspoken voices will make the difference.

It's probably just easier for a 33y-old, 1m86-high packaged 91 kilos of white male meat but I always make an outspoken remark when I witness any of the smaller deilcts that are said to cause this: boys fighting, youngsters littering, useless brutality... stupid things but something in me says that the grown-up, big-crime villains were just never told that what they did was wrong? I vote for some civil duty to perform this kind of vocal public education to actually balance the right everyone has to a proper education into good citizenship.

19.45

In the boat, waiting another 15' before we leave. Must of been something like 15 years ago that I was on one of these. Can't even remember the setting, occasion, company. I do remember puking all over the North Sea, but then again it could just be the sweater at my feet colouring that part of memory.

19.57

There'sa boat dat's leaving soon for...

21.01

Switching to UK time, almost on British soil.

8.20 pm

I must be the only male passing customs without a bag full of tabaco.

9.17 pm

Welcome to the railroad-museum. If the brits were indeed the pioneers of the railroads, then the current state of their rail-system is an obvious case of the 'law of the hampering headstart'

0.21 pm

finally checked in - laundry handed over - head down

5:07:47 PM