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InfoPath Service Pack 1
It's beta, but it's here. Will check out soon.

Media coverage with a too-cute headline. The article is pretty blunt in places: "Analysts see InfoPath as part of Microsoft's strategy for locking businesses in to Microsoft enterprise products." Huh. -m
Reviewers needed
I'm writing a chapter for an upcoming book, _XML Hacks_. If you're interested in reviewing a whirlwind tour of XForms, mail me.

The objectives here are:
(1) introduce the concepts clearly
(2) demonstrate it in a way the the reader can easily duplicate
(3) reference all resources
(4) do it in roughly 2 to 5 printed pages.

-m
X-CP
Here's an interesting new Internet specification. Actually, I haven't looked at it in the slightest, but it has an 'X' in the name, so it must be good. -m
Then Again..
On the other hand, if your day job deadlines leave you completely exhausted at the end of the day, electronic notes or not, you'll tend to blog less (or at least blog in the morning, when you're still semi-conscious). -m
Microsoft Innovation
OK, knock off the jokes about oxymorons. Today, on my daughter's 1998-vintage computer, I installed Windows 98. I had completely forgotten the pain involved with that particular task. IBM hardware, as ordinary off-the-shelf as it could be, and the install doesn't recognize the onboard video card. No Internet, and hardly any other machines in the house have a floppy. Ungh. Several hours later, I'm finished.

Today, we basically take it for granted that you just pop in an OS CD and install away. Not terribly long ago, care and feeding of a computer was an intensely geeky proposition. Only recently has it become mainstream. For Desktop Linux, the bar has been raised much, much higher. This is a good thing. -m
Is writing like electronics?
TV sets, inside, used to include a full schematic diagram. You'd unfold it, then again, and again, and again. There were huge, tablecloth-sized sheets. Back 'in the day', I used to go through these. You could point to any random symbol representing a component somewhere in the thing, and determine exactly what the purpose of that component was. What would happen if you suddenly yanked it out of a running TV?

That's how writing works. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph has to be active doing something for the piece.

To design a big circuit, you wouldn't start with a blank sheet and just start drawing components hooked together. You'd start with a general block diagram, then reduce that into smaller blocks, then figure out how everything interconnects, THEN start arranging individual components to make each block.

That's how writing works. You don't start with a blank page and write a story A to Z. You start with the big picture, flesh it out more, then finally down the the level of words. -m
Everything Must Go!
Here's an interesting project that ties in nicely with my recent reading of Text Processing in Python: markdown, a plain-text-ish format for writing.

I just used David Mertz's format in writing a Hack for _XML Hacks_, and I have to admit it was far easier than skipping over the tags, or even the rather good attempt at tagless-WYSIWYG-XML-editing I got from Morphon.

My initial comments:

Paragraphs should be allowed to be uniformly indented a few spaces. Like code, most text is read far more often than written, and every little bit of extra readablility helps.

The inline link syntax -- This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link. -- doesn't seem natural. It's not the kind of thing you'd see in use anywhere. (The out-of-line links, however, are very slick) The image syntax is even less so -- 

For the image case, I'd take a hint from TPIP and use keywords (which are only recognized at the start of a line) in these cases
IMAGE: [alt text] "Optional title"

-m
Unipain
Interestingly, Jon Udell's latest column at InfoWorld has the following title: "InfoWorld: E-mail’s many hats: April 23, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATIONS". (because this will likely get mangled further in the publishing stream, that's a-circumflex, then two of what looks like an A-in-a-box instead of the apostrophe in "E-mail's".

Unicode is hard. Even if your content is fine, chances are good that your content management or publishing system will come in and muck things up. Actually, Unicode isn't what's hard--if the whole world used it exclusively we'd be sailing smooth--what's hard is transitions between encodings. Throw in a few unhelpful substitutions by Microsoft Office's aggravating, so-called "smart quotes" features, and you've got a mess on your hands.

A straight-quotes-are-your-friends production. -m

Update: More related discussion. But not directly related. The web page is still titled oddly, as above. Also, interestingly, RSS readers and Atom readers see the above differently. Which just goes to show...
Lost Songs
Apparently, the Apple store does not let you redownload songs you've paid for. Despite the "FairPlay" DRM, that the tracks are only authorized to play on up to 3 computers. It would be trivial for them to allow this, but they prefer to have their customers pay again. Since you're not buying any physical media, you'd think they'd attempt to make it a little more robust.

The system seems to conspire against you. Tracks on your iPod aren't visible as files. Then when you connect your iPod to a newly-formatted Mac, it cheerfully offers to wipe all the tracks off your iPod. So there's a point there where you still have the track--could even listen to it--but have no choice but to erase it. Grr. -m
Life in a Hexagon
Somebody running the Gilbane conference had fun with Photoshop. :-) Yes, that's the same as my Orkut photo. -m
Why Pick XForms?
This is essentially a snapshot of today's talk at the Gilbane conference.

So why should you pick XForms vs. some non-XForms system?

1) The uninstaller argument
If you had two functionally similar pieces of software, one with a great uninstaller, and one with a tedious/manual uninstall, which would you install first on your own system? I thought so. Ironically, having a great uninstaller gives users peace of mind, making them *less* likely to actually uninstall the program. Open standards, with the associated non-lock-in, have the same effect.

2) Cost of change
Another way to look at the lock-in situation: even a mid-sized organization can have 1000 forms around. If each has a design/production/review cycle of 8hrs, that's an investment of 4 Man-years. Does it make more sense to invest that much in a single-source solution, or something that could be reused/shopped around? If you have a dozen forms, go ahead and try anything. For serious amounts of, use standards.

3) Metadata needs standards too
Forms are metadata. It doesn't seem obvious at first, but it's true. Forms provide a context and interpretation for a core piece of data. Metadata needs to be standardized as much as regular data, maybe more.

4) Choosing your point on the continuum
It's not like you can draw a black and white diagram of "standards-based" and "non-standards-based" software. It's all shades of gray. The flipside of this is that useful standards support isn't a checklist feature. Lots of forms systems have long lists of individual standards supported, but still use a proprietary layer that effectively negates many of the usual benefits of open standards. You have to pick the point on the continuum at which you are comfortable. -m
SCO Humor
Courtesy of "pinko-rat-bastard" on slashdot...

Somewhere on the path to Mordor....

"We hates them, the nasty Linuxies!", hissed Darllum. "They STOLE the precious from us. Evil Linuxies! We hates them!"
"But Linuxies helps us!", he wimpered. "They gives us nice IPO...they gives us Kernel Personality. SAMBA is our friend!"
"We don't have any friends!", he spat, eyes glowing with hatred and fury. "Evil, tricksie Linuxies! They STOLE it! We HATES them!"

"OK, Sam", sighed Frodo, "I've changed my mind. You can kill him now."

-m

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