Pushing String

My band is playing tomorrow night, Saturday November 26, at the Montlake Ale House starting at 8:30pm. As of our second gig, I’ve been adding some keyboard-playing to the mix, mostly just simple — okay, extremely simplistic — blues piano and organ. I hadn’t played in years, but felt the urge to add a few strains at some point using the synth our drummer had lying around in our practice space, and then got the brilliant idea to add Use Me by Bill Withers to our repertoire. I had to puzzle out how to make the fantastic fat keyboard sound you find in this song; turns out that playing a harpsichord setting way down low sounds great. I actually do have a modern(ish) keyboard myself, a Yamaha Portatone PSR-530 that I bought maybe five years back to help me get reacquainted with playing, but it turns out that I needed a reason to be forced into practicing — and now I’ve got it.

This gig will be interesting, as we added enough songs to make two sets’ worth only a couple of weeks ago, and since then I’ve been on the road solid with no good way to practice! We’ve picked out some great new tunes, though, like the classic Cold Duck Time, so I’m looking forward to it. And the original Eddie Harris/Les McCann recording had them trying it out after pretty much no practice time either, so it seems only fair. (Hmm, I think that rationale would definitely count as a case of flattering ourselves.)

So stop by if you’re in Seattle tomorrow night. Oh, and don’t go looking for the Madrona Social Aid & Pleasure Club — yes, we changed our name again. This time we settled on Mudcat. The real thing is a kind of skanky catfish. It’s not a terribly original name for a band like ours but I think it will serve our purposes nicely.

Since my travel schedule is so heavy and unpredictable, I think I’d better consider investing in one of these marvels. No, seriously. I’m not kidding. (Got any alternative suggestions??)

If you can read the title (that’s “electronic data exchange” if you can’t), then you might be interested in this post by my colleague Gerry Beuchelt. He has found an online petition that German citizens can sign to encourage their government to select and use open document standards (which pretty much nets out to the OpenDocument standard).

Next week I’ll be off to Atlanta for the annual North American XML conference, and I can’t wait. Sometimes I feel like a “write-only device,” without enough time to learn new ideas from others and reflect on them. This conference is an excellent way to fill up on new ideas, discuss and morph them, and make new connections (okay, and drink beer with friends, too). I have yet to plan the sessions I’ll be attending, though I gather others have done so.

I’m speaking this year on Federated Identity Management: An Overview of Concepts and Standards; roughly what I’ll be covering is the SAML V2.0 problem space and some of its solution space, at a middling level of technical complexity. My speaking companion in this session is Yvonne Wilson, who will be sharing a Liberty Federation Deployment Case Study. I think these topics make an excellent pairing. We’re on at 2pm on Tuesday. If you need to get up to speed on privacy-enabled ways to share identity information across distributed-computing chasms, be there!

The paper I’ve written for the conference turns out to be a pretty good companion for the SAML Basics slides that I’ve already made available at the SAML group site. I’m hoping to revise both the slides and the paper once I get through the conference to make a cohesive whole. At the least, I’ll blog a link to the conference paper whenever IDEAlliance makes the proceedings public.

By the way, I hear tell that Len Bullard will be at the conference for the second time in as many years. He and I have some jamming to do; anyone else interested?

I have one of those page-a-day calendars with a new “insult from Shakespeare” on each page. (Actually, I have three of them. The others are a cross-stitch-a-day and an Atkins-tip-a-day. May I just say that I think the newer styles of these calendars that force Saturday and Sunday to share a page are a ripoff? Uh, that is, in the sense that there’s nothing to rip off when Sunday comes along.)

Today’s quote is one of those lines from Shakespeare that sounds weirdly modern:

Draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your shanks. — King Lear: 2.2.34-35

(Kent to Oswald, steward to King Lear’s evil daughter, Goneril)

As in, “he’s so not into you” or “she’s so dissing him”? I thought this was a very recent formulation, and had mildly disdained it, though I’m sure I’ve used it. I found a sub-category of this usage mentioned on a linguistics blog as “the So Not negative”, but without any history. Even the lovely Language Log seems not to have taken up this question, though it’s hard to tell when you’re trying to search on the word “so”.

There are plenty of normal uses where the degree of the “so” is designed to be proven or balanced with a “that” or “because”, as in this poem or the classic comedy bit — “My dog Buster is so lazy…” — “How lazy is he?” And if you translate the “I’ll so [verb]” formulation into “How I’ll [verb]” — like “How I’ll miss you” — the first one doesn’t seem so much like teen-speak (but maybe that’s because I’m using a verb like “miss” instead of “diss”!).

I guess I can now use it confidently, knowing that even Shakespeare sounded like a mall rat from time to time.

(By the way, there seems to be some disagreement over what “carbonado” means. My calendar defined it as cutting into strips or cubes, but some other sources I found suggested it was more like slashing or scoring the outside of the meat to make it cook faster. It makes an excellent threat either way, and “I’ll so carbonado your shanks” sounds positively piratical.)

(Now I’ve got that tune in my head — you know the one — yun dun dun dun, dah dah dah dah dah…)

From a Sun press release issued on Friday:

Sun Facilitates Interoperability Between Java Technology and .NET Via Open Source Web Services Implementations

Java Technology and .NET Integration Breaks Down Barriers to SOA Adoption

For our customers who have intensely heterogeneous environments (and that includes pretty much 100% of the really big ones), we’re always trying to make things easier and to give them the choices they want and need. For many of them, it answers an important question if they know they will have flexibility in hooking up application components using our Java technology and Microsoft’s WCF. Connecting this to Glassfish is a measure of our real commitment. (I always wonder if Microsoft is secretly pleased about these open-source plans… We’ve also got an open-source project called Wiseman for WS-Management, in case you didn’t know.)

I’m late with this news, having been a bit busy + under the weather this weekend, but others have already commented. Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart offers remarks here as one who’s got an extremely close view of the project, and Tim Bray gives his (thought-provoking as always) perspective here.

Norm has a post describing his explorations with the features that make DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture) unique. I haven’t really been following DITA, other than to note the fairly high-powered participants, including both users and implementors, in the OASIS TC and to assume that it was driven by some of the same goals as the old IBMIDDoc documentation system, which I’d guess is still in use. (Hey, Sun’s on the group!) (Uh, guys, could you include direct links to the specs for convenience rather than requiring me to download a zip file? [UPDATE: Thanks to Mary for providing direct HTML links in the comments.]) (I’m getting a strong whiff of that IBMIDDoc “look” off the specs.)

Going into writing this post, I guess I had a bit of the same impulse towards DocBook protectiveness that Norm had. But I very much respect the goal of designing a system that is meant to have reusable parts, rather than trying, as many have done over the years, to reuse what I think are inherently non-reusable documentation structures.

Let me explain. In my years in DEC’s documentation groups, we had endless committees trying to define what “modular documentation” is, how to achieve it, etc. I spent quite a lot of time in the early days of the OSF DTD design project (a bit of information on it can be found in this DocBook history; I should dig up and re-digitize some of my old design docs from those days) arguing that it’s pointless to have nestable Section elements if what you want is modularity. Unless you have unbelievably strong editorial guidelines and whip-crackers, you can’t assume that any one Section instance will have been written in such a way as to support plucking it out of its original context and reusing it. Imagine, for example, that you’ve used a top-level Section element to create a “chapter” of what will be your printed documentation. You may have included introductory text in it that says something like “This chapter discusses…”, and the scope of the section is likely to be extremely broad — not suitable for immediate demotion to a sub-sub-sub-section.

At the time, mostly what you got from nestable Sections was the easy ability to promote and demote information in the Table of Contents as you write and revise — which was perhaps important in an era where authoring tools didn’t help you do this very effectively. But this wasn’t the same as achieving modularity! I used to joke that the best way to achieve modularity was to pay technical writers per-use royalties on modules that actually got used by other writers.

Part of my intransigence in the OSF DTD group discussions came from the fact that, around the middle of my technical documentation career, I had moved from the Digital VMS Layered Products documentation group to the ULTRIX documentation group — and discovered man pages. Why, here was the perfect example of modular documentation, and it had been there all along! This, I believed, was the way to define reusable structures. To me, the requirements were:

• A c

It seems my true purpose in life is to be an aggregator for weird crafting links. Here we have the knitted digestive system — complete with a beautifully colored liver that sits atop the stomach like a jaunty beret. (H/t Pat.)

UPDATE: Lauren made me do it! — Link to this knitted “cute, cuddly uterus doll” in bubblegum pink, that is…