Pushing String

Lots of exciting chances for people to learn, share, travel, and meet/greet these days. Some new identity-related events are popping up in and among the returning favorites, and the quality’s looking pretty darned high all around.

Here are some that have shown up on my radar lately. (It’s not a complete or even comprehensive-ish list…)

• NET-ID 2008 March 3-4 in Basel: I helped out a bit on the program committee for this one. It’s coming up fast!

• IDTrust Symposium March 4-6 in Gaithersburg: This looks to have a really strong program.

• Managing Identity in New Zealand conference April 29-30: The folks in the NZ State Services Commission I’ve met are smart cookies doing great work. I was honored to be asked to speak at this event — and can’t wait to visit the locale, as well.

• OASIS Symposium on Composability within SOA April 28-30 in Santa Clara, especially the associated eGovernment Workshop on Electronic Identity and Citizen-Centric Administration May 1: Get your workshop proposals in soon!

• Single Sign-On Summit July 23-25 in the wilds of Colorado: Andre Durand, co-founder of DIDW, is throwing a summit. Sun’s a show sponsor. It’s going to be cool.

Lauren gives her take on our fiberrific outing (or would that be “fibriffic” spelled her way?). I guess I needn’t have been so coy about the identities of “my very experienced and talented knitting friends”, and as it happens, she and Yvonne are also my very knowledgeable and talented colleagues. Lauren has a great crafting blog; I hope Yvonne considers blogging her crafting adventures as well.

Lauren notes that the tech quotient of the actual event was low, but we suspected there were plenty of techie-types in attendance. As we went around the room doing introductions in my Charting class, I mentioned that I had designed some XML-related cross-stitch charts; one young woman piped up: “You mean like web services?” Yowza.

One more language note: I learned a great acronym from the Creative Crochet Lace book. It’s common to yield to temptation repeatedly and buy lots of yarn for what is called one’s “stash”. Eventually you run the risk of a terrible condition called SABLE: Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. This is an addiction, folks — clearly we should be taking it much more seriously. Time to start a .org!

Test scrumbles

So I survived the Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat, and had a wonderful time learning and hanging out with friends. Both brain and fingers have gotten a real workout. This event is somewhat like a convention or technical conference of the sort I’m used to, but with an overtly social purpose, and attendees sign up for specific classes, rather than floating from track to track at will.

The language of knitting and crocheting has really gotten under my skin. I took Creative Crochet Lace with Myra Wood, and found that the class — along with the companion book — was filled with delicious words and phrases. For starters, there’s scrumble, a piece of lace created in a freeform fashion (when you stitch these pieces you’re scrumbling). Makes me want to crochet up a fruit-themed work just so I can call it an “apple scrumble”. (Hmm, plenty of Google hits for this one referring to recipes, though it does ask the fateful question “Did you mean apple crumble?”) The book casually invokes the phrase fiber jazz to describe a particular style of freeform lace. Lovely.

The past tense of knit became something of an irritant to me every time I heard it in the “Market” (what I would have called the huckster room had I been at an SF con…). If knitting isn’t a pastime of yours, I bet you’d say it should be knitted. I guess I’m revealing my newbie status in agreeing with you. But it turns out the past tense all the cool knitters use is knit, as in “I knit four sweaters and three hats last year.” I found a source that defends the irregularity of this verb and in the process earned myself a whack across the knuckles: I do use the American English past tense of fit, which is of course fit. Then again, I also say “day-tah” for data but “statt-us” for status, so sue me.

In another class on charting written patterns (and conversely writing out charted patterns) with Karen Alfke, I learned sweater-knitting tricks that I probably won’t be ready to try out for a year or so — haven’t made my bones on sweaters yet. She has an honest-to-goodness methodology (with paper-form tools!) for the multitasking involved in knitting a main pattern with (say) cables running up it, an armhole decrease, and a neckline decrease so that it all lines up properly at the top. One way she put it was that you’re fileting the pattern. Nice. (The term filet also shows up in the context of a totally different crochet technique, lest you get confused.)

With the help of my very experienced and talented knitting friends, I’m planning to tackle a lace shawl soon. Next lessons up: new stitches, circular needles, and teeny weeny yarn…

The original XML Recommendation is 10 years old today. Happy XML Day!

These anniversaries feel a little artificial to me; my first clear memory of the XML work was a teleconference Jon Bosak had arranged among the “SGML on the Web Editorial Review Board” members in June (?) 1996, so for me XML is eleven [FIX: erroneously had twelve before] and a half years old. Of course, that just makes me feel ancient, but having just received my very first solicitation from AARP a few days ago (may I just say: eek) I’m getting used to the feeling.

On that early call, I remember insisting that we write down design principles before we do anything else; this was a core part of the methodology I used for SGML DTD development and I felt the effort would end in tears without it. (I’m pretty sure I was right.)

Right now I find myself sitting on a mountaintop in rural Ontario with my old friend Murray Maloney, who was also there at the beginning — in fact, with Yuri Rubinsky he had already been advocating for SGML on the Web by the time Jon began putting together his nefarious plan. I’ve been lucky to make so many lifelong friends through my work on SGML and XML; for some of us, as Tim demonstrates today, the people are a big part of the story.

As something of a birthday present, today I’m publishing something SGML-flavored that I hope may still be of use, or at least morbid interest, to modern XML practitioners. You see, I cowrote a book in the just-prior-to-XML era with another of my lifelong friends, Jeanne El Andaloussi, about SGML, in SGML. In DocBook, as a matter of fact. That methodology I mentioned above, with design principles and stuff? That came from this book. Now that the book is out of print, she and I discussed the matter, and we agreed to publish it here. For the occasion Jeanne penned this note:

Now that XML has become a commodity and most National XML User Groups have stopped their activities, it is time for our ELM methodology to be freely accessible on the Internet. I just hope our readers will have as much pleasure in reading it as we had writing it over a decade ago.

You’ll have to be the judge of how well the content has stood the test of time, but I can tell you the markup did beautifully. With a huge dollop of help from Norm Walsh (both his DocBook stylesheets and his mad skillz), the SGML-to-XML-to-HTML processing pipeline was downright trivial.

Voilà! We present to you Developing SGML DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup.

p.s. It turns out the old joke is true. XML is good for reuse. It lets you reuse all your old SGML presentations. (rimshot)