Day: 8 June 2003

My iCalendar

Its been one of those things, I've been meaning to do in my spare time. Set up a iCal using Mozilla Calendar. Because Outlook 2003 beta still doesnt support iCal as its storage format. which is a real pain in the arse, as I now have two calendars. But at least I can transfer single events between them.

I have my calendar in a webdav directory on my website now. My Calendar page
Direct link to my calendar which you can subscribe to, if you like.
I've made this calendar mostly have design and technical events in it, and kept outlook for personal events. Which is a good idea i think for now.

How I share my Calendar
A great place to sync calendars, could be come the next rss?
Please note mac owners! Moz did it first Apple wasn't the first company to offer public calendars. The phenomenon was introduced by the Mozilla Organization, which released a calendaring application in November of last year.
Interesting debate about ical sharing

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Xml in the public sector

So finally did my talk in west london yesterday at Osney media.
I had to skip certain sections of presentations because we were running behind time before I got started anyway. Which was a shame because there were some very useful parts which people asked questions about afterwards, which I had to explain.

I was also part of the panel dissucssion afterwards which was great. The topic was open source vs closed source. And i was very privilaged to be with 3 great guests. Orginally I was worried that I would be the only person with the open source hat on, turned out to be the opposite. Everyone had there open source hat on.
Anyway the pannel was a guy from the national archives, one of the heads of the e-envoy, me and a guy from open forum europe. It was a great dissussion and we did spend a long time promoting the open source movement to the managers of the public sector. I feel on the biggest things that came out of the talk was the guy from the openforum's remarks about having a open govenment with open source software – its the only way to do it. Also using open source software but selling it in a closed way, with the things you dont usually get much of with open source software – support and the like.

Anyway on the final count, most of the managers were sure they were using open source software anyway somewhere in there business.

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24hrs in the matrix

Ok its been less than 24hrs and I have watched the matrix reloaded twice in the cinema and once on my computer. In total 7 hrs of my day has been spent watching this state of the art movie.
But its not good and i've pledged not to watch it for a few days now. Maybe Sunday with a friend or sometime over the weekend with my wife whos not all that bothered about watching it. Yes she needs help…

I'm still loving matrix reloaded but I cant wait a moment longer for revolutions. Its killing me… /images/emoticons/happy.gif

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xml authoring from microsoft?

I hope for a better future, and one of the hopes was for a xml authoring tool which would hide the xml from users but constrain them to a xml schema.
Even a year ago I looked at different solutions and they were honestly crap to say the least. Then I heard about Office 2003 by Microsoft of all corps, and thought maybe there doing something right for once?
Yeah right… I think this pretty much sums up the current situation.

At Microsoft's Mercy

Its does talk about Open office a bit and how that fits into the picture with Microsoft, Corel and Adobe. With the other links off that page its a quite good read and sums things up.

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Soap and Xml-rpc

I am very confused,
I heard of soap and thought that was the standard for webservices. And it seems like it but then I came across xml-rpc? What the hell is that when its at home? Well I finally worked out the other day.
Daves history of soap. Very informal and easy to read even for non programmers like me.

Anyhow thats not what I was writing about really.
I've been playing with soap in cocoon as a client, realised quicky that a soap service is a whole bigger thing than i imagined. Just been gathering information from amazon using the tutorial in my cocoon book. It seems quite straight forward specially when you understand the concept of a soap env and the like.
but how does xml-rpc fit into all this? Humm its a difficult one because soap does all the lovely things like validate via a xml schema, etc. Xml-rpc on the other hand doesnt seem to do all that but is simplier to use and less verbose. It seems like it the difference between xml schema and relax ng. Both do the same thing and each have there advantages. I think I'm going to stick with soap because if i can understand that, then xml-rpc wont be that much more difficult to learn.

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SVG presentations

Found this while looking for a gui for exist, Jack svg. Basicly its a presentation tool which converts xml into svg.
JackSVG is a program that takes your presentation contents, written in a simple XML-based language, and produces a SVG file formatted for presentation

Now I could do this easily myself but to write the xsl would take man hours which I dont have but I could also write a xsl turn the same xml into pdf using apache's xsl-fo.
Humm, will try this out on the weekend of once I solve this problem with storing xml in exist.

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Open source xml database

The best opensource xml database I can find at the moment Exist. Written by a mastermind and good enough to use in almost every project regarding xml. Supports xinclude and limited xquery. Works so well with cocoon its untrue and has built in support for webdav. Amazing stuff, cant wait to find more time to experiement with it.

Querying exist is easy as pie.
supports cocoon views – very useful. as in http://127.0.0.1:81/exist/xmldb/courselets/?xpath=document(*)//q&cocoon-view=content (thank you miles)

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OpML? what?

It started off with me looking for a RSS desktop reader, because it just makes sense rather than visiting the website all the time.
First came across this first of all. RSS Info. Then I downloaded Feed reader and started to think this is good stuff but when I'm on my tablet I can always connect to the net anyway. So it got me thinking there has to be a RSS reader for the pocketpc platform?

And I wasnt wrong, Pocket Feed. Anyway moving on, I started thinking wouldnt it make sense if I could sync my rss subscripions across my tabletpc, workstation and pocketpc?

Well it seems like others have come to this point already. Using OPML for it's blogroll, you can now take your news, blog entries, or any other type of syndicated data with you, sync it wirelessly or read it offline. So yes, you can sit in Starbucks with your PDA and read the latest news over 802.11b.

So what is this opml? looking at the site theres a xslt which could be useful if I decide (or more like find the time ) to make my rss favourates available through cubicgarden.com. Kinda of like avant-go but all the subscriptions I want.

Need to find out more about Opml and get a RSS reader which exports and imports OpML.

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