I've started a new job recently, as a Fellow at Commerce Net, continuing my IETF Area Director work with their support. I wrote an introduction to my self and my work, as my first post on the Commerce Net blog. I'll try to remember to post a pointer here when I blog there.

Best part of new job (well, other than getting paid to do absolutely cool stuff): biking to work! I'm not much of a biker so I toodle off on my ten-year-old squeaky fifteen-speed, leisurely pedalling down Channing and Bryant to the office on University Ave. Most often I'll bike in whatever I happen to be wearing to work that day, whether it be a skirt or work pants, blazer or sweater. I do wear a helmet. I don't stop for most stop signs -- cars should stop for me!

Am I a feminist? Are you? I've been reading about Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and it's obvious that if one of us were to time-travel to visit the other, and she were to question me about what I felt women were fit to do, she would consider me a radical feminist. Probably you, too, if you believe that:

• Women ought to be able to own property, instead of having a man (husband, father, brother, son) own and dispose of all property.


• Women can decently write books and be paid for it.


• Girls should go to school, not just to learn to sew but also to think and reason.


• Girls should be allowed some modest exercise to keep their bodies healthy.


• A grown woman is responsible for her own moral behavior.

Ok, maybe 1792 is too easy to compare to. Do you believe women should vote? Then according to the mores of UK, US and Canada in 1906, just a hundred years ago, you're a suffragist and feminist.

How about comparing to a time less than 50 years ago, then. In 1963, the Kennedy administration published the findings of a moderate commission on the status of women, and in 1964 came the Civil Rights Act which covered sex as well as race discrimination. Do you agree that:

• It's unfair discrimination if a qualified woman is turned down for a job, and a less-qualified man hired instead, particularly in government and government-funded jobs.


• Women should be allowed to use contraceptives.

Even though I know nobody, personally, who strongly disagrees with any of these points, I also know nobody who calls themselves a feminist, and thinking back 25 years can't remember knowing any self-declared feminists. Yet of course I know many women who wear pants (heh) and have technically-demanding careers, some of them also raising children. I also know many husbands and boyfriends who support demanding careers, help with housework, and have spoken in favour of equal pay and equal access to promotions and high-status jobs. There's some social differentiation around sexual acts -- it's better for your reputation to be sexually promiscuous if you're male than if you're female -- but I still have trouble of thinking of many people who would seriously discriminate on that basis (e.g. refusing to associate with an adulteress or reproving her while approving the company and behavior of adulterers).

What turned "feminist" into a nasty epithet? Was it the introduction of issues around sexual promiscuity and pornography? Was it the opposition of domesticity to feminist belief, making a woman who enjoyed cooking, sewing or having a clean house feel like she couldn't be a legitimate feminist? Was it fictional portrayals of feminists?

I can't decide if it's a good thing that we don't have as deep a need to be feminists any more, or a bad thing that the word is still so tarred after 30 years. I'd be interested in hearing opinions on that and whether you, male or female, consider yourself a feminist.

We just got the second season of House, MD on DVD, and I'm enjoying it although it may be slightly darker than the first season, so far. The show continues to focus on ethics with a great twist: most episodes seems to demonstrate, one way or another, that nice isn't always ethical, and ethical isn't always nice. Or as the creator David Shore puts it, "What's more important --Kindness or Truth?"

The show is entirely driven by the acerbic, blunt character of Dr. House, played masterfully by Hugh Laurie. He's one of my favourite actors with a huge range of talent (including humour: notably Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster where he plays an utter fop ) and the ability to melt into a role like this. IMDB says:

During Hugh Laurie's audition, David Shore says that Bryan Singer, one of the executive producers, said, "See, this is what I want: an American guy." Singer was completely unaware of the fact that Laurie is English.

Also, Robert Sean Leonard is still cute. Awww, those puppy-dog eyes.

I have another finished, knitted item to show off. It's from a shawl pattern called "Frost Flowers" in A Gathering of Lace. The goal of the project was a baby blanket, not a shawl, so I used superwash wool in fingering weight instead of laceweight. That choice would probably have worked out perfectly if I'd used slightly larger needles, but since I didn't, the square is more than a square -- the stitches were not quite as long as they needed to be for the overall blanket to come out flat, so instead it's got wavy edges. I blocked it by stretching it out very big on the spare bed, which definitely helped.



I love it anyway. I love the colour, which is called "Celadon", custom-dyed by Lisa Souza using her wonderful, soft superfine Merino superwash sock yarn. Celadon isn't shown as a standard colour but if you compare, it's a lighter shade of sage. Mmm.

A few more pics of the objet: center detail, edge detail, and Ophelia modeling it as a shawl at Knitter's Studio.

A new finished knitting project is up on top at my knitting page. It's a pair of crazy, wavy lacy socks for a friend. Yay gift-making and gift-giving! Especially as a total suprise.

I am giving a talk on Cosmo and CalDAV at ApacheCon next week. There'll also be a BoF (which at ApacheCon is a very informal thing) on HTTP Authentication and other standards work. It's my first trip to Dublin so I expect to enjoy the week quite a bit.

I borrowed my neighbour's pressure washer today, and it was fun! First, it's a water toy. Second, it's a power tool. These are two great things that go great together. It's a gas engine, thus loudish, and the spray nozzle is long so both hands have to hold on (one holding down the handle the whole time, which can get fatiguing but that's the worst thing about the job).

My red patio paving tiles were covered in scum prior to this afternoon. Scum came particularly from the eaves of our house, which drain dirty rainwater right on to the patio and then across the tiles to the azaleas. But even away from the path of the scummy rainwater, it was still dirty and black because the drainage is terrible and it rains a fair bit here in winter. I curse the previous owner of the house who designed the eaves and patio this way -- it looks good but isn't as functional as you'd think.

Using the power washer on this blackened, scummy patio is like spray-painting in reverse. With each stroke of the DirtBlaster® rotating nozzle it was as if I painted the tile its original colour. I discovered if I moved the spray nozzle quickly enough over scummy tiles I could see a spiral pattern, proving to myself that this nozzle indeed rotated somehow, although it circled so fast that the water output looked like the surface of a cone. It was like having in my hands a magical staff that fires a cone of cleaning.

After the red tiles, I moved on to the blacktop driveway, the concrete front sidewalk walk, and the back walk. Things got a little messy there, in the tight corner between two sturdy wooden fences, the ground was dirty and the power washer sprayed mud right back out of this corner and onto me. As I finished up I considered turning the power washer on myself, but concluded that a real shower would probably be more satisfying. I looked around for other things to clean, considered whether bushes and trees and wooden sidings needed power washing, and regretfully turned it off and returned it to the neighbour. Until next time.

You won't find me talking about cooking or touting cookbooks much, so pay attention. Cook's Illustrated The New Best Recipe is a different kind of cookbook. You think you know how to make basic french toast? I thought I did. As it turns out, I had only a dim clue, and I needed to use less eggs, much more milk, some flour, vanilla and sugar. I haven't had this book for very long, I don't cook often, and I only cook for myself, as the man around the house prefers not to eat my cooking (probably for justifiable historical reasons). But every few weeks since getting this cookbook I've tried a simple recipe. Here are my results so far:

• The french toast: amazing. Getting the inside custardy, and the outside not to taste like fried eggs, is a total win. Their way is not noticeably harder than doing it my old way. I even cheated by using the wrong bread (nowhere in the recipe did they even admit to the possibility of using wheat-and-7-grain bread) and it was still terrific.


• Pasta tossed with oil (and a little garlic, parsley, etc): Very good and relatively easy, a solid recipe though perhaps not mind-blowing. I don't have much to compare to because I wasn't in the habit of making pasta without a sauce before.


• Chicken cutlets: amazing. Brining chicken naturally takes longer, as does preparing the liquid, flour mix and bread crumbs to dip in. But holy fowl, does this make the most tender piece of chicken I have ever eaten, inside or out of a restaurant. Ever. I was worried because the breast meat seemed too moist when I started to eat, but the liquid was clear and the meat was cooked -- it was just that juicy. Again, I got this result even with a little cheating: I used frozen meat, mostly thawed by the time I turned it into cutlets. I only ate one piece fresh out of the frying pan and that was the one that caused the religious experience, but the cold or reheated leftover cutlets were also highly worth eating.

I guess the deal is that this cookbook explains so much -- not just explaining exactly what to do but why, for example what effect omitting some ingredient or step had in their tests -- makes up for me being the kind of cook who may sometimes take a few shortcuts. I have better guidance about what kind of shortcut really matters.

Colby Cosh points to this article on making more roads in Dhaka off-limits to rickshaws. Opponents of the proposal point out that rickshaws carry 54% of the city traffic using less space than private transport does, and that when more roads are put off-limits to rickshaws, their drivers' incomes dip significantly downwards. Overall, I have to say that it's nice to see reasoned debate on the topic of public transport including not only government-managed public transport but also privately-organized public transport. In most North American cities, it's easy to forget that there are many other kinds of public transport beyond the city buses and subway systems.

For a few years I worked downtown, on the close edge of the shopping and financial districts and right near a subway stop. But for various reasons the subway didn't work for me and I took the train. The problem with the train was that the train terminus was a long walk from the office (25 or 30 minutes) and I didn't like biking downtown. City buses were slower than walking! Sometimes I'd wait for a city bus for twice as long as the supposed period between buses, and then of course the next thing I'd see would be a packed full city bus with one or two empty buses stuck behind it (quite stuck, as these buses used overhead wires for power, and couldn't pass one another). Even after catching a bus on-time it was a toss-up whether it would actually move faster than a pedestrian. One day I noticed the jitney.

The jitney is easy miss despite the fact that it's an unusual vehicle, an ancient royal blue shuttle bus with big white amateur lettering. It goes from the train to various points downtown and back to the train. It only operates during prime commute hours and its schedule is carefully tailored to the train schedule. And it goes fast, taking alternate routes when necessary, changing lanes and sometimers letting passengers off on the left of a one-way street if the right side is too clogged. It took 5-10 minutes to take the jitney from the train to the office, was never late, and it cost the same as the city bus.

The problem? It was illegal. It's illegal to offer a jitney service to multiple passengers in most North American cities. That system allows public buses/subways and taxis to monopolize in-city public transport under limiting rules. It would also be illegal for somebody to run a private commuter bus service up and down the major highway here, and the public systems haven't integrated their services enough to do so (or perhaps have decided not to offer a more attractive option, so as to push people towards public commuter trains). It would be hard to change the status quo although some people are thinking about it.

I hope countries that still have creativity and open competition in public transport are wiser than North Americans. Keep those rickshaws on the road!

Finally I can prove that this is still a knitting blog, too. I lost a hard drive and I lost the data cord to my camera (separate events). These together made me have to do a bit more work than usual to post pictures and edit pages. But finally I've posted a couple pictures of stuff finished in March on my knitting page.

Also in my Flickr set, there's a related picture of my cat. Related to knitting. Well, she always helps me when I take photos of my knitting. This time I helped her take an even closer role, that's all.

Jackrabbit is now a full Apache project, and Jackrabbit 1.0 is released. Jackrabbit is a reference implementation of Java API called the Java Content Repository (JCR). A repository that stores JCR can be used to store arbitrary data, just like a database can, but it's more flexible. Instead of storing data in tables, a JCR repository stores data in a hierarchy of nodes and properties. JCR can replace JDBC in many applications that require a structured repository.

Cosmo uses JCR to store shares, calendars, events and other resources. The reason we use JCR instead of a database is because JCR has a more flexible data model, and because a hiearchical data model is closer to the data models of iCalendar and the Web. There are lots of applications today that use databases when hierarchical storage would be a more appropriate model, but databases are so standard that it's still going to take a while for this alternative to gain ground. It's important to have a standard API for accessing this new kind of repository, so that a server implementation doesn't get locked into one back-end.

As with all new technologies, the reality still falls slightly short of the promise.

• Cosmo has had to compensate for performance issues, particularly if a node has many child nodes. Flexibility has a cost, though I expect this will be improved over time.
  


• JCR implementations are still rather new and I'm not aware of much interoperability testing, so we don't expect we would actually be easy to replace Jackrabbit with another JCR implementation and just have Cosmo work. Still, it wouldn't be terrible either.


• According to BCM, both the XPath and the SQL query syntaxes that JCR provides didn't quite suffice for doing the kind of date queries we do, so BCM had to work around JCR to do time-range queries for calendaring. This kind of trick, bypassing the standard API to use the repository's own non-standard API, obviously makes the replacement issue more difficult.
  

I've been looking for a better understanding of what a trade deficit is, and why it's supposed to be bad, and whether it really is bad. The conventional wisdom as I've always heard it, is that the US has a large ongoing trade deficit causing job loss, debt servicing costs, and possibly currency instabilities if the foreign owners of American dollars suddenly get uneasy. Wikipedia has a discussion of the points of view of those who believe it's harmful, those who believe it's not, and those who believe it's meaningless. Whether the Wikipedia article is balanced, I can't tell. But clearly, just because a "skyrocketing trade deficit" is a great scare news article headline, and fun to accuse Republicans of, or perversely blame China for, doesn't naturally make it a bad thing. .

I can see two possible sources of gut-level unease, the kind of feelings which make people assume a trade deficit must be bad, bad, bad: fear of debt (guilt over not saving), and guilt over consumerism. The debt question comes up if the trade deficit consists of goods for debt: foreign countries exchange their goods for a promise to pay later, including interest. A trade deficit is associated with low rates of saving, again obviously bad. The consumerism guilt comes up because it makes Americans seem greedy that they import so much oil from the Middle East and so many consumer goods from Asia: it's probably felt to be evidence that Americans must be greedier than others if Americans consume so much that they have this nasty trade deficit as a result. Take these bad feelings together, and you have the question of whether it's wise to be going into so much debt just to consume more than anybody else does. When you put it that way most people are going to think it's a bad idea of course.

But it's not that simple. Japan was troubled for years by maintaining a trade surplus, where it sold desirable goods to the US but had little to use those US dollars for. The dollars fueled some purchasing of US investment properties (companies and real estate) at excessive prices. It may also be possible to maintain a trade deficit without going into debt but it's not clear to me whether a debt-free trade deficit would really make people who oppose trade deficits that much happier.

Today Colby Cosh pointed to an article in which, ironically, a Chinese economist may explain why the US trade deficit, in particular, may be calculated as much larger than it actually is. Products that are less than tangible are the problem when tallying up the numbers, of course. It makes me start to fall on the side of those who think it's meaningless. Maybe it's mostly a fictional problem, an arbitrary equation wherein we put one kind of desirable things on the left side of the equation, and another kind of desirable things on the right side, but leave a few terms out because they're too hard to add up, and finish by trying to make the numbers come out even so that it seems tidier.

Getting Things Done

Almost a year ago, I read David Allen's book Getting Things Done (GTD), and decided to apply a couple principles. I already tried to review incoming email once only, but that just wasn't quite working consistently for me, and I regularly had from 40 to 80 emails sitting in my Inbox, unfiled, because I hadn't dealt with them or decided whether or how to deal with them. At 100 emails I would usually feel overwhelmed and go back to some earlier emails and just decide, finally, not to do anything with them, and clear back out down to 40 or so.

I had also tried keeping track of tasks in a separate list from my Inbox but that also hadn't worked for me. One problem was that the list grew too big, easily to 60 items or so within a couple weeks of starting it. I needed to break it down somewhat. Breaking it down by project seemed obvious but then I had several lists and no way to see what was most important. And still there were tasks that I just didn't tackle.

The biggest value trick I got from GTD, above all the other good advice, was to organize my task list by context, rather than by project. My contexts have been:

• At the computer (offline)
• Online
• At home
• At work
• Agendas
  
• Errands
• Phone calls
• Waiting
• Later/maybe
• Done

The 'agendas' list made me look particularly organized because as soon as I had a chance to talk to somebody like my manager or somebody else I work with a lot, I could look really smart and prepared even if I hadn't actually prepared for that specific meeting. I made meetings more productive and didn't forget to cover issues that I'd previously noted I needed to cover. Naturally, the "at home" and "at work" categories kept me from sifting through tasks at an inappropriate moment, so at any moment there seems to be less pressure, less possible things to do, easier to focus. All good stuff.

But there's even more to the system than that, and I believe it's hooked into another classic piece of advice, also covered in GTD: that of identifying the next action.

It's actually very hard to identify the next action in many projects. Back when one of my projects was to get my eyes fixed up, I futzed around for maybe a year before actually setting up an eye doctor. Aside from indecision and being busy, part of the reason was because I hadn't correctly identified the first step -- without thinking too hard about it, I had only the fuzzy idea that I needed to setup an appointment with an eye surgeon. But before I could actually do that step I needed the phone number of an eye surgeon. Before that, I needed to know which eye surgeon. Before that, I needed to get some kind of recommendation. And before that, I needed to know who to ask for a recommendation. Finally, I asked a cataract eye surgeon for a recommendation, and the rest followed more easily (for the record, it was Dr. Volpicelli at Peninsula Laser Eye Medical Group).

So how does organizing tasks by context help? Because in order to decide whether the next task is one I can do at work, at home or on the phone, I need to have a concrete idea what the next task is. It makes me break down each project earlier.

Following this discipline, together with weekly reviews to see which tasks are stale and which projects don't have tasks currently in the active list, may have made me up to 20% more productive at times. It's hard to say. I don't always follow the discipline but I'm getting better.

The tool I use for the lists of tasks is called iOrganize. It's not optimized for this task, but it's sufficient. It's good at taking quick notes, giving them titles, and moving them from one category to another. I wish it could assign reminders to tasks, or optional due dates, but that's OK, it's not actually required for the way I work. I put a ** in front of the title of important tasks, trying to have from two to five tasks with "**" at any time. This allows me to search for important tasks very quickly and sort them to the top of each context list. There's a priority field too, but that doesn't allow me to search, and it didn't exist in the previous version of iOrganize so I'm already used to having "**".



I know there's many ways people follow GTD, there are blogs and near-cults out there and I'm certain there are more specialized tools, maybe I'll use one of them someday. This is just what works for me.

RFC 4331 is now up: Quota and Size Properties for Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) Collections. It's my first RFC as author.

Scott Mace interviewed me for IT Conversations, and the podcast is now available, on the topic of calendars and calendar interoperability standards. Is it wierd listening to yourself or what?

You know you're working on standards too much when...

I saw a traffic sign today on University Ave. that said "Bicycles may use sidewalk". My very first reaction was that the text should be "Bicycles MAY use sidewalk"[1]. It was followed by the thought that it should also read "... thus, pedestrians MUST be prepared to encounter bicycles on the sidewalk."

[1] IETF standards have to use capitalized MAY, MUST and SHOULD to be absolutely clear when the specification is prescriptive, i.e. making a requirement, and not just being descriptive.

Ukrainian Christmas may be a Canadian prairie province tradition, according to Colby Cosh. I'm from the prairie provinces myself and love the tradition. My mother grew up in Manitoba and we celebrated Ukrainian Christmas each year in January. Often we opened Christmas presents that day, too. We'd usually travel two days to our grandparents' house for Dec 25 Christmas, with four kids, two parents, winter gear and all the presents we had to give away to aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, stuffed to within a foot of the ceiling of our full-sized van. After that, there just wasn't room for the stack of presents my parents bought for us kids, or that we'd bought for each other. So we'd leave those presents at home and delay gratification until early January with Ukrainian Christmas.

Of course the day also provided an opportunity for my mother to become a Ukrainian babushka, to cook the dishes she'd had as a child and serve them as a special treat for her own children: lovely yummy perogies, delicious sweet kutia, hearty holubtsi and the rest of the traditional twelve meatless dishes. The odd thing? We're not Ukrainian. Not at all. On my mother's side, English and Scottish Canadians. Nor did she take this tradition on for my father's family, who are almost all French-Canadian with a couple Scots and possibly Indian ancestors thrown in. No, she just picked up this Ukrainian tradition from proximity in rural Manitoba.

One year, living in Ontario when I was fifteen or sixteen, we nearly missed Ukrainian Christmas. My mom was travelling home the day before, but her trip was delayed somehow. When she called, my father and sister and I looked at each other in dismay, unable to imagine missing the traditional feast. No pyrogies? No kutia? How would we survive winter without? We talked each other into doing this ourselves even though my father's better with ad-hoc cooking than with established recipes, and my sister (younger) and I hadn't had much experience. But we dove in, hunting down Mom's recipes written on stained index cards, and even making stuff up when we got stuck. The kutia was great (almost impossible to mess up), I seem to recall the holubtsi was tricky to roll up in neat bundles but it was quite edible as messy piles of flavored rice somewhat contained in cabbage wrappings. The pyrogies were the toughest and many fell apart during boiling (later we discovered that they weren't supposed to have butter in the dough). But it all tasted OK, and we tallied up twelve dishes by liberally counting bread and buns and different kinds of pickles (including the necessary beet pickles) each as separate dishes. I felt so grown-up when my mother came home just in time for dinner and we enjoyed our feast.

Today I still do this, even now that I'm in California with no family nearby. For one, it gives me the chance to serve a distinctive meal for some vegetarian/kosher friends. It's also, naturally, a chance to reminisce as I cook and taste the flavours. In those years when I travel back to Canada during Christmas and Hannukah, it's my one chance to do a family holiday evening with my closest California friends. When I'm lucky, some years I manage to have a Christmas, a Hannukah and a Ukrainian Christmas dinner too. Each year I remember that one year I asked my mother why we do Ukrainian Christmas when we aren't Ukrainian. She answered that it was her belief that everybody should be able to adopt the culture of their choice, without limitations due to actual genetic descent. Three mid-winter feasts a year? That's my kind of multi-culturalism.

Another Outlook connector link related to yesterday's post: caldavxp is Mark Slater's project to develop a CalDAV plugin (technically, a message store provider) for Outlook. I learned today some of the many, many ways one can extend Outlook, it gets pretty complicated I take it.

At next week's CalConnect meeting in Utah (brrrr... but thanks Novell for hosting), I suspect one of the topics will be whether it's possible to write some kind of plugin for Outlook so that it can talk to calendar servers other than Exchange. Naturally one obvious approach is to write a generic CalDAV plugin for Outlook, and this kind of thing would make it much easier for many organizations to migrate to a standards-based approach.

The technical barriers are daunting. Outlook doesn't seem to have been designed for this kind of plugin at all. Such a plugin might have to use undocumented APIs even to work at all, and then naturally have lots of code to handle changes in those APIs from release to release. Some embryonic work is in progress at OpenConnector if anybody wants to jump right in, or I can put people in touch with each other so email me. At this point, amongst the group of people I've been talking to, we're not even convinced we have a decent approach outlined (so input from MAPI experts is particularly welcome) let alone how much work it would be. But we're starting to talk.

We're getting very, very close with CalDAV. Draft version 09 is submitted and I'm sure it will be posted soon. There's not a lot of open issues remaining (one is how to use ETags, which is the topic of lively discussions in both the CalDAV and the WebDAV mailing lists). Interoperability is pretty good already -- I got a great reception at ApacheCon when I demo'ed Chandler publishing a new event to a calendar shared on Cosmo, and then used Sunbird to refresh the shared calendar and see the new event (note that Chandler 0.6 was just released so you can do this too). We'll have one more interoperability event in January before likely finishing the draft and submitting it. We plan to do pseudo-last-calls in WebDAV and CALSIFY WGs but if you've been waiting to read the draft, it's great to get comments even before last-calls.

Tom Evslin posts with several reasons why Web sites don't provide APIs -- and yet predicts that many more will provide APIs in the future. I can add one more reason, and that's the risk that with an API, somebody would build an application that presented the data through an alternative UI, and the site would lose eyeballs. For example, if Yahoo Group calendars could be sucked down in iCalendar format, people would probably visit the site less often and receive fewer ad impressions.

Still, I agree with Tom that despite all these forces against opening up APIs,
there are even stronger forces for having APIs -- competitive advantage. Some company hoping to compete at lower cost will provide the API and try to make up the revenue in other ways or simply survive with less ad revenue. If the service is more valuable with the API people will move to that service. I hope that in a year or few, people won't stand for a calendar Web site that doesn't let them use a standard API to have direct access to their own calendar data.

Favorite Songs of Stalkers

6. "I Will Follow You", by Ricky Nelson

"I will follow you
Follow you wherever you may go
There isn't an ocean too deep
A mountain so high it can keep me away"

5. "I will Follow", by U2

If you walkaway, walkaway
I walkaway, walkaway...I will follow

4. "The Power of Love", by Air Supply

Even though there may be times
It seems I'm far away
Never wonder where I am
'Cause I am always by your side

3. "I'll Drive All night" by Celine Dion

So just remember -
I'm gonna make you mine
I'm gonna drive all night
till the morning light
I'm gonna roll till dawn
with the windows down
and the radio on
You know I'd drive all night
just to hold you tight

2. "Nothing Can Keep Me From You" by Kiss

Wherever you are, that's where I'm gonna be
No matter how far, you'll never be that far from me
Some how I would find you, move heaven and earth to be by your side
Oh, I'd walk, this world to walk, beside you

1. "I'll Be Watching You" by Sting

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you

0. Christmas Bonus Stalker Song:

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
O! You better watch out!
You better not cry.
Better not pout, I'm telling you why.
Santa Claus is coming to town.

I posted to a couple IETF lists about yubnub.org, a nice productivity hack -- a command-line for the Web. Since I'm always looking up IETF WG charters, internet-drafts and RFCs, I found the existing 'rfc' command and added two more.

To jump to an RFC: rfc xxxx

e.g. 'rfc 2822' (don't forget space)

Internet-Draft Database Search: (shows list with filename substring match): ids keyword

e.g. 'ids dusseault' to find draft-dusseault-caldav-08, but not draft-ietf-webdav-rfc2518bis because 'dusseault' isn't in the title of that one

To jump to a WG charter: wg wgname

e.g. 'wg imapext'

Now Dan Gurney has extended the 'rfc' command so you can use text as well as numbers. You don't have to remember that iTIP is RFC2447, just type 'rfc itip' in the yubnub.org interface, and see results. Thanks Dan!

BTW I personally setup yubnub to work on the address line or search box in Firefox so I don't even go to yubnub before typing my command. One less step on the way to what I need!

For those who follow my crafty pursuits, I've just posted pictures in the gallery of the mini-quilt I finished this weekend. Well it's more of a wall hanging made with quilting (no piecing).

Also if you saw the Butterfly Quilt for Ally, posted earlier on the gallery, well everybody loves it and wants to be my niece too. I don't have an opinion from my real niece (she's only one year old, after all, and extraordinarily easily bored) but her parents love the quilt. Whoo hoo!

It's been a busy few weeks, which is why I'm only now posting about another IETF meeting although it happened Nov 7. The meeting was the XML-PATCH-OPS BOF, and here are the official minutes.

The SIMPLE WG has been working on some HTTP extensions and using XML in order to allow instant messaging clients to interoperably edit buddy lists (stored on the IM server) and other configuration data. Special functionality to modify/retrieve XML stored on an HTTP server is rampant these days, so it seemed like a good idea to consider general mechanisms, rather than only design mechanisms limited to SIMPLE use cases. So Jari Urpalainen has been working on a general XML diff, or patch algorithm -- like Unix diff files, only specialized for XML (operations that can add or remove branches from the XML tree structure, rather than operations on lines as in text diffs).

Once the SIMPLE WG was potentially working on such general mechanisms, it seemed like a good idea to hold a BOF (Birds Of a Feather) meeting to see if there were general use cases and find or identify other potential IETF participants. Some places where we thought we'd see interest:

• WebDAV allows authors to collaborate on documents stored on HTTP servers. Sometimes these documents are quite large and it would be useful to be able to upload changes without sending the entire file again. In fact, Adobe engineers have talked to me about this -- some of their WebDAV functionality is intentionally designed to limit the number of times large files are exchanged between client and server, so that the user isn't constantly waiting for slow uploads or downloads. Obviously an XML patch format only works if the document is in XML, but some Adobe tools do support XML formats (e.g. InDesign). Another piece to this puzzle is the HTTP PATCH operation I've proposed, an idea I intend to come back to shortly particularly if I get any help (hint, hint).
  
• The NETCONF WG is pursuing ways to interoperably configure network devices and has also settled on using XML and HTTP. They've got very similar problems of wanting to make small changes to large data sets.
  
• Large Web pages in XHTML could be edited using an XML diff format to upload only changes.
• Large Web pages in XHTML could be downloaded faster using RFC3229 and an XML diff format. A text diff is used today but an XML diff format could be even more efficient, particularly for...
• Blog feeds. Today, a blog feed can be a large XML file, in Atom or RSS format. Today, if the ETag or Last-Modified timestamp of the blog feed changes, the newsreader client downloads the entire file. Similarly, to add a single new post to the feed, blog editing tools may have to upload a new feed file (unless the server does this magically somehow). This is really just a special case of the general "large files being shared" case, but since blogging generates so much traffic it seemed worth mentioning.
  

Anyway, even with all these potential use cases, the only people who came to the BOF meeting with definite interest were SIMPLE WG participants. There wasn't even enough interest from outside SIMPLE to merit a separate mailing list, let alone to add non-SIMPLE requirements or
to form a separate effort. So the work proceeds on the SIMPLE mailing list. Still, I plan to keep up with Jari's work and possibly help him generalize it further -- for example, we may add the ability to make changes to text values of XML elements without replacing the entire text value.

Note that there exist other XML diff formats, but none of them are standardized. Microsoft's got one, the W3C has tackled this both for rdf and more generally (though the W3C didn't have any guidance for the IETF when we asked about this BOF), and it's been the subject of several theses: treepatch, diffxml and a survey.

In the past the IETF tried to discuss in a green-field manner how to internationalize email addresses and other email headers. None of the many options seemed really low-risk, however, and those discussions didn't get very far -- rat-holes being very frequent, and people having very different notions about what a solution could look like and what the outcomes and side effects might be.

The BOF I attended last week, however, was much more focused: it was about whether or not the IETF should charter a group to work on a specific experimental solution for internationalizing email addresses as outlined in several draft documents. That solution focuses on SMTP, so that "consenting adults" in an environment that wants to do i18n addresses may do so, and SMTP agents have a reasonable way to deal with these addresses when communicating to the wider world. It's a somewhat transitional approach, acknowledging that existing Mail User Agents (MUAs) and Mail Transport Agents (MTAs) won't immediately be able to handle these.

The discussion was mostly abour risks and unknowns. Some of the risks:

• It's not known how (and when, and by whom) IMAP would be updated to handle i18n addresses, and how clean that could be.

• It's not known how POP would be updated to handle i18n addresses (Chris Newman stepped into the line of fire here)

• It could be difficult to manage VCards, iCalendar objects, and Web pages where mailto URLs and email addresses appear. Some of these support i18n, some don't; even ones that do may have incompatible representations.
  

• Although i18n addresses are supposed to remain within these groups of consenting adults and be transformed before transmission to non-i18n MTAs, it's not known to what extent these would actually leak out.

• When these do leak out, the user experience of email users with non-i18n MUAs could be unsatisfactory.

• There will probably be serious difficulties when non-i18n MUAs are used to try address mail with i18n addresses -- it's possible that sometimes only an i18n address is known and the user can't figure out how to enter it or isn't allowed to by their software.

Normally the IETF is rather risk averse when there are so many unknowns, particularly when 'Net fragmentation might occur. In the past the IETF has gone around and around trying to get more certainty before even chartering a working group. This time, however, since there have been so many discussions and stalled related efforts before, the attendees took a leap into the unknown and approved the working group -- unanimously, I believe. Imagine Admiral Farragut's sailors taking a "hum" and deciding together to damn the torpedoes.

"Eye of Newt" Jello shots

Although it's been pointed out to me that doing jello shots at parties is more of a twenty-something activity than thirty-something, I don't care. I never did jello shots before so dammit, at our party this past weekend, I was determined to do jello shots.

The ostensible excuse was the Hallowe'en theme: orange jello shots with black "eye of newt" in the bottom. I used black tapioca pearls, the kind that are served in "pearl tea" which I love. I found packages of dried black pearls in an Asian grocery store and this worked well.

1 large package orange jello
2 c. boiling water
1 c. mandarin vodka (or other clear liquor)
1 c. cold water
1 pkg tapioca pearls (five servings)

Boil tapioca pearls -- I found it took longer than the advertised 5 minutes. Drain and rinse and distribute into little paper Dixie cups (I used about 20 but these were smallish shots). Mix boiling water and jello powder to dissolve then add liquor and cold water. Pour mixture into cups and put into the fridge for about an hour.

The paper cups are important because you have to squish the jello shot out into your mouth. Leaving the jello solid too long before serving means that the pearls get harder so don't prepare too far in advance.

Calendaring News: I haven't blogged about this in a while, so here's what's up.

• The CALSIFY WG met at the last IETF for the first time. We found authors to revise the iCalendar suite of standards (RFC2445, 2446 and 2447). We're meeting in November in Vancouver to discuss progress and open issues on these.
• The CalDAV proposal for standardizing calendar access (personal, group or public calendars) is going very well. We're very close to a draft we can last-call at the IETF. I'm proud to say that OSAF's Chandler and Cosmo both do some CalDAV and can test basic interoperability with other clients and servers like Sunbird and Oracle's server. I'm demoing some of this at Educause next week.
  
• We're starting to think about what extra metadata is needed to do public event calendars well -- for example, good location information. There's a technical committee within CalConnect talking about this, including EVDB/Eventful people.
• Another new CalConnect committee is discussing the application (and perhaps in some cases, adaptation) of these standards for use on mobile devices.
  

I can't write as humourously as Stitchy McYarnPants of the Museum of Kitschy Stitches (Vols. I, II, III, IV and V). I'm not as up-to-date as knittykitty of the the You Knit What blog. And even (or especially) my husband thinks I'm the last person to be an authority on this subject. However, I scanned some choice pattern pics from my small collection of "antique" (meaning, completely out of style) knitting and crafting books to give you: What Not to Knit.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

George Bernard Shaw

Ekr explained the corrective eye surgery I just went through. Since I've been wearing glasses since I was five (and had limited use of contacts because of allergies) this perfect vision feels quite different to me -- perhaps my own self-image was more tied into the wearing of glasses than I had realized. Anyway I'm very happy and periodically almost giddy at this improvement.

Philippe said that the CalDAV panel at OSCon was full of very interested people. I'm quite gratified and quite sorry that I couldn't be there (at 6pm PST I was fast asleep recovering from meetings lasting from 9:00 am to 8:00 pm in Paris time yesterday).

Philippe also pointed to this blog commenting on OSCon, CalDAV and various calendar product and server providers.

My ideal cultural week (or so) in Paris
- 1 day in 7e, up Eiffel Tower to see whole city, then walk around Invalides and École Militaire (would have been even nicer to go into Army Museum)
- 1 day bike tour of Giverny and Monet's garden, being restored and regrown the way Monet grew it in order to paint it. Interior of Monet's house also fantastic due to the dozens of Japanese prints that influenced his aesthetic.
- 1 day Louvre to focus on the grand gallery, 19th centure and famous works of art I hadn't seen yet. Favourites include Ingrès and David's portraits of women.
- 1 day Centre George Pompidou, include main collection and special expositions (this time: Africa Remix)
- 1 day Versailles, include Grand and Petit Trianon as well as main buildings by going for the day pass
- 1 day Musée D'Orsay -- no, make that two, there's so much to see here and I really wanted to go slowly due to my interest in the impressionists and symbolists
- 1 day seeing the Galliera de Mode (not very big) and, inspired, go clothes shopping
- See the end of the Tour de France -- bonus!
- Pop into Musée Cluny for medieval textiles, tapestries, roman baths, stained glass and other cool stuff
- Every day: tiny cups of espresso at street-side cafés, baguettes, cheese, olives, pastries, and sometimes crêpes, ice cream, mussels, frites, duck, foie gras, prosciutto and rocket (roquette) salad

What I still wish I could do:
- Musée Marmottan has still more Monet works (than can be seen at Giverny or Musée d'Orsay) and it's on Bois de Boulogne which features in so many history fact and fiction books
- Rivoli Museums
- Musical Instrument museum
- Chartres
- Orangerie museum in Tuileries, Tuileries gardens themselves
- Grand Palais and Petit Palais
- More time browsing books and shops on left bank

Project Management for Sailors

Have you ever heard project managers talk like this?

We decided to take a different tack with the rollout project, after we ran afoul of the ordering processes. Julie was swamped with acquisitions paperwork and helping Sam learn the ropes, so we deep-sixed the new hardware. Office scuttlebutt is that the boss wants to cut expenditures so it's easier to go with the flow on that one. The OS upgrade project had a minor hitch, but that project is on deck now -- all we have to do is tie up the loose ends and it'll be all sewn up. That will put us on an even keel for the rollout and if nobody rocks the boat the support team will stick with us until the bitter end.

Although this is fictional I've heard all these colloquialisms in the office, and probably only recognize them as nautical because of an interest in etymology and a couple years of sailing. A non-sailor or person for whom English wasn't their native language might have a hard time seeing where these come from (and thus, how to use them properly). Herewith, a guide.

To take a different tack is a change in direction while sailing. Tacking itself means to progress by changing directions frequently, like zigzagging. This is necessary to make progress into the wind: a boat can sail quite fast when it's pointed nearly into the wind, but it can't make progress directly into the wind. Thus the boat zigzags so that the wind comes over the port side first, then starboard, then port. Don't replace with the word "tact" as Michael Rubin did.

To run afoul is to hit a snag, a complication, particularly in laws, regulations, contracts or processes. On a sailing boat a fouled rope is one which is caught up in another rope or another piece of equipment. Fouled ropes can cause quite a tangle if sailors keep doing what they're doing.

Swamped is quite suggestive, as a swamped boat is literally filled with too much water. A swamped boat is not only heavier but also sits lower in the water and presents much more drag on the water, so no wonder a swamped boat moves so slowly.

Learning the ropes is exactly what a sailor does on a new ship. Sailing ships have very individualistic rigging, often the result of years of modifications and jury rigs.

Deep sixing is burying something in six fathoms of water (a fathom is six feet), deep enough for it to be gone.

Scuttlebutt was the term for ship-board gossip. A butt is a cask of a certain size. A scuttle is a small hatch on deck. Thus, the scuttlebutt is a butt lashed onto the deck near the scuttle. Often this butt contained fresh drinking water. How a propos that today this might also be called "water cooler talk".

Go with the flow is simple -- it can apply to the flow of a river but also to the tides. Leaving harbour when the flow (the tide) leaves is much easier than going against the tide.

Hitch is a specific kind of knot tied in the middle of a rope. When winching a rope, winding it or running it through a cleat, a hitch would temporarily stop progress. However, it's not as bad as a fouled line.

On deck meant something physically on the deck of the boat, the exterior top surface where people stand. This probably migrated first to baseball where the batter going next is said to be on deck.

Tying up the loose ends meant to literally clean up the long ends of lines (ropes) hanging off a rigging once it was rigged. Loose ends were dangerous on ship, causing fouled lines and getting in the way of sailors moving around. Naturally this was always the last step in rigging, part of doing the job well.

All sewn up probably refers to the shroud around a corpse prepared for burial at sea. A corpse ought to be weighted down by something like a cannonball. The cleanest way of doing this was to put the cannonball and the corpse together in a piece of sturdy sailcloth and sew up the edges. After being sewn up there was nothing left to do before burial.

Even keel is a ship's position. The keel is the center bottom line of the boat from front to back. A ship with an uneven keel, dipping into the water more at either bow or stern, was probably badly loaded. An uneven keel meant that the ship wouldn't sail as efficiently because it would not present an optimal profile for water resistance. More generally it simply means going smoothly, steadily, without waves rocking the boat.

Rock the boat is too simple to need much explanation...

Bitter end is a very specific end of a line (rope) -- the end that goes around the bitt, a kind of deck post. I guess sailors would be told to pull on or coil the rope until they reached the bitter end.

(Sources: take another tack, deep six, scuttlebutt, all sewn up; also other pages on same sites)

IMG_3437.JPG

IMG_3437.JPG
Originally uploaded by hamstermacaroni.

Mimi is the master of taking friends shots including herself. Or at least so I conclude based on a sample of one photo. This is me and Mimi at a Giants game a couple weeks ago.

This posting has also been a test of the flickr photo-blogging tools. They're impressively easy to use, at least with a blogger blog.

Kim Cameron is working on the "Laws of Identity" and discussing them on his blog. Kim defends the choice of the word "Laws" quite strongly:

I tried to explain that the laws are not what Bob Blakley calls "desiderata" - things that we would like to see. They are the objective characteristics of an enduring identity system at Internet scale.

Oh, but how often we turn out to be wrong about these seemingly objective characteristics. Kim's Law 5 on Pluralism of Operators and Technologies understands that there will be more than just one identity authority, but wishfully states that there must be one "encapsulating protocol (a way of agreeing on and transporting things)". This reminds me of a heated BOF three years ago at the IETF for a WG I ended up being heavily involved in, chartered to take the Jabber protocol and standardize it as XMPP. At the time there was already another IETF WG doing instant messaging, and a friend of mine got up at the microphone, objecting to the formation of the WG, clearly quite upset, saying:

But you can't have two instant messaging protocols! That's like -- that's -- that's like having two IPs!

Of course the irony is that the IPv6 WG was probably right down the hall working out how to co-exist with IPv4 during an extended, possibly interminable transition period. And today we have both XMPP and SIMPLE and gateways between instant messaging protocols -- not just two, but probably more like eight (including MSN, AOL and other pre-existing systems). Much as we'd like computer systems to be simple, considerations of backward compatibility and competition between aesthetic models, among other things, keep things exciting.

I finished a knitting project in March, a purple shawl in Old Shale lace pattern. I just got around to posting the pics this weekend.

America is full of fat people, right? Well, I've been subject to the same delusion. I think it took hold firmly in 1993, when I drove from Waterloo, Ontario, to Milwaukee, for a few days at GenCon, and for some reason was struck by seeing all the fat people in the streets of Milwaukee. Was that simply observer bias? Who knows. Now I live in California and it's very clear to me that Californians don't tend to be obese, but I still had the meme in my head that "Americans are fat" even if California big cities might be some fitness-oriented exception.

Well, I'm encouraged to hear I might be wrong. It seems this is a common myth, and that other well-off countries have similar weight profiles, as explained by Paul Campos in a TCS interview (I keep reading TCS for exactly this kind of myth-busting material though many articles are more boring). I wish the article provided links supporting the claims, because there were a few quite interesting tidbits from the article:

• The CDC had previously estimated 400,000 deaths from obesity in 2004 but has recently had to revise that figure significantly downward (following CDC links, I see the surgeon general now says an "estimated 300,000 deaths[/year] may be attributable to obesity").
  
• The classification of "overweight" in children is defined as the heaviest 15% of children for a particular age cohort. That would mean nearly a million children are labelled overweight because they're defined that way. According to that methodology, 15% of children in a third-world, famine-wracked country would also be overweight. I can't find evidence at CDC of this methodology but there was a study showing that 16% of teens had been found to be overweight [*].
  
• There's no strong evidence that Type 2 diabetes -- one of the diseases justifying the labeling of obesity as an epidemic -- has increased, let alone having increased due to weight factors.
• The governor of Arkansas has written legislation proposing that body weight index be part of kids' report cards. If I were in Arkansas I would write him personally to indicate my disgust at such misguided and potentially harmful interference in the family.
  

One nasty statistic I picked up myself from the surgeon general's note is that "Overweight adolescents have a 70% chance of becoming overweight or obese adults". Yikes, oh no! But combine that with the claim that 60% of adults are overweight or obese, and a sensible person will see that so-called overweight adolescents would have only a slightly higher (if measurable) tendency than non-overweight adolescents to become overweight adults. Sigh.

I completed another long-term project this weekend -- though it was supposed to take only a couple months, I dawdled for over a year. It's a silk-mohair cardign, pattern and yarn chosen to show off some really marvelous Toulouse-Lautrec buttons I found in Vienna. More details and pictures can be found on my knitting gallery.

One of the projects I've been very involved in at OSAF has been the Cosmo project, an effort to take existing open-source WebDAV server technology and turn it into an easy-to-install, easy-to-administer "sharing server" for use by Chandler -- but also supporting standards that make it easy for any client to share too. Last week, Mitch did a demo with Cosmo in the background for the first time and it went smoothly. Thanks BCM!

I have completed a big long-term hobby project, and given it away (I think it was quite a surprise) so now I can reveal what I was working on: a king-size Amish-inspired wedding quilt. It's at the top of my crafts gallery right now if you want to take a look.

I needed to cancel a credit card I wasn't using, so I called up their toll-free line and tried to navigate their voice-activated automated menu. The automated system repeated all the choices ad nauseum, misheard me, and of course didn't have an option for "Cancel this goddamn card". I tried to say "Cancel card" and "Cancel" hoping that would either trigger some bonus feature or get me out of the system and talking to a human. I tried to say "Talk to representative". At some point the system offered the option of "Help me with something else" but when I said that it misunderstood me. Finally the system gave up on me -- literally said it couldn't seem to help me -- and that it would transfer me to a live person (thank-you).

I got some satisfaction, however, when they asked me why I was cancelling their card. "Because of the automated voice assistance system", I said -- and this was typed in without comment by the operator. I only felt the teensiest bit bad for lying.

I'm concerned about conferences with serious gender imbalances, much like Kathy Sierra and Shelley Powers with their recent posts on ETech. However, it's not ETech I'm thinking of.

To put it bluntly, a knitting conference can be hostile to men. The interaction style is touchy-feely -- women walk right up to strangers and fondle their knitted garments, invading personal space. Although some have said that men aren't discouraged from attending and in fact receive positive attention for being there, this can be of the form of "How nice it is to have men attending", "Is this knitting book for your mother?" (ref) and "I'm sure your wife will love this yarn.

All the instructors at knitting conferences are female, and one wonders if the mostly-female program committee could have something to do with that. In the expos or markets, one finds patterns for shawls, purses and female garments. Although some of the market vendors are male, they are clearly there as "booth bunnies", to attract women to look at the yarn. Some of the male vendors are even pressured to wear demeaning and ridiculous knitted vests.

What can we do about it? Well, we can be more equal in our language, for a start. Articles like this, although mentioning a few knitting men, are given titles like "The yarn is flying as more women discover the joys of knitting." Vendors like Habu textiles are taking a step in the right direction, offering stainless steel yarn, which is sure to appeal to men. Joe, a male knitter, has some other great ideas, such as making the act of knitting into more of a competition.

Researching Bali, found this:

The once beautiful Bale’s and other buildings have long since fell into a state of disrepair. It was as if the villagers had ‘locked-on’ to the ring of the till from the tourist dollar. This was more than evident when I had a short but sharp conversation with one of the souvenir sellers:

Tourist: I was here 18 years ago and I am surprised at the change in the village.

Seller: (Abrupt tone) What’s wrong with the village?. Now I have a motorbike. We have TV and electricity and... a phone!

It was my point precisely! Too many cultures in this world are decimated by the tourist dollar. Not only that, the intrusion of the modern world has an overall affect upon the social, religious and political aspects of that society. So much so that it literally forces the entire socio-cultural structure to undergo a metamorphosis in order for adaptation. Having said that, tourism is good for the state of the economy in any country. However, when it has a serious affect on the core culture of that country, then it becomes disadvantageous.

Much as I'd love to visit other countries and have them be all picturesque and unique, I can't begrudge a Balinese his motorbike, TV, electricity and phone. I wouldn't give up my conveniences to live in the style of my grandmother, nor would I appreciate pressure to maintain the religion of my ancestors. A tourist like this one would have to stop being a tourist (being one of those intrusions), go back to the country of his own ancestors, give up his own conveniences etc. for me to take those sentiments seriously.

Philippe pointed me to David Berlind's list of Technology's top ten failures. Two of them are directly about calendar standards, asking for the ability to schedule meetings and share calendars. Another two are email related. Good news, David, we're working on the calendaring standards, and calendar and email implementation issues for you, already. Sorry I can't -- personally -- help you with phones and printing problems just yet.

Who is your favorite Philosopher?

Ekr points out that the question "Who's your favorite philosopher" does not have an analogue in all fields. In highly technical fields, you wouldn't ask "Who's your favorite cryptographer" or "Who's your favorite biologist". OTOH it's common for musicians to talk about their favorite pianist or favorite composer, for painters to have a favorite painter, and for writers to be asked about their favorite writer (it's a formula interview question particularly for writers). So I guess that means that in not only asking the question but insisting on it as a valid or important question, David Brooks is implying that philosophers are like artists, their work subject to aesthetic judgements, preferences and stylistic likes and dislikes. I'm not sure that's what he intended in bringing attention to the question.

There's lots of action in the online calendar world. A fair amount of it gets brought to my attention, which is lots of fun.

• Ted pointed me to Mosuki, and I hope to meet some of the creators shortly. It's more oriented towards personal calendars than the other sites but it does allow you to share.
  
• I met Brian Dear a few months ago and heard about EVDB. Now that it's announced, I can talk to others about it too. Scraping sites for event and venue information sounds like a really valuable service.
• Kragen Sitaker showed me a del.icio.us-like calendar site that seemed pretty cool. Rather than try to scrape every page, his demo let the user pick certain text, send it to the demo site and it would turn that text into an event (pulling out date, time and location if it could) on your calendar.
• Brian posts about Upcoming, a public events site with feeds to let you know about event categories you're interested in, and a way to add events you want to your personal calendar. It has a HTTP/iCalendar interface that allows users to synch into iCal. According to del.icio.us, upcoming is the biggest new thing with hundreds of bookmarks.
• So far, Trumba's newly announced OneCalendar gets a rather less enthusiastic response. Trumba consists of several ex-Visio guys according to their press release, and like EVDB they have high-powered investors so expect some noise. Already you can synch with Outlook which has got to be a highly desired feature.
  
• Of course, we are working on some of the same stuff too, only with a federated server approach. When you share your calendar with Chandler you can share it on any WebDAV or CalDAV server (see also recent article). We're working on a WebUI for such shared calendars so that the calendar owner or their friends can view the shared calendar or individual events just by going to the URL in the browser. We may do tagging just like everybody else, too.

So far I don't use any of these, there isn't quite enough "there" there, whether it's users I want to share with or features I need. My calendar is in iCal, stored locally, and I don't even share it with anybody, though I do share one other person's iCal calendar. But I don't think that isolation will last long given the exploding options.

I wonder what Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are going to do in this space? Yahoo has more of the world's calendar info than any other site at this moment, because of its excellent support for group calendars. What will Yahoo do with that data? If it does not expand its features soon, possibly allowing users to synch up calendar data on the site with their client software, Yahoo will soon see its calendar data decay and vanish. As for the two gorillas, I really don't have any idea whether they will buy, innovate, or crush.

In response to my last post, Mark pointed out that .NET's HTTPClient supports pipelining. Heikki said that Mozilla put in support for this but it isn't turned on normally because so few servers support it. Furthermore, Heikki reports that tests showed only a 7% performance increase when Mozilla uses pipelining. The Mozilla FAQ is a good start for information on this though it doesn't have the data.

The application I had in mind (Chandler) does more synchronization than browsing over HTTP/WebDAV. For example, if the user decides to work offline, and while offline moves a bunch of resources from one collection to another, then goes online again, Chandler would have to issue one MOVE request for each moved resource. With pipelining, Chandler could theoretically fire each request off and wait to start seeing the responses come back in order over the same connection. The only thing limiting throughput is the bandwidth and MOVE requests and responses don't take up that much. Without pipelining, Chandler has to wait for each response before sending the next request. Now this work is limited by latency, multiplied by the number of resources being moved.

Still, I don't consider this proof that pipelining would be useful. It would be great to see more data one of these days -- assuming, of course, that there really is a performance problem in the first place.

Are there any open source HTTP client libraries that support pipelining? Are there any open source libraries that solve an isomorphic problem with a different protocol? So far I'm not turning up anything but this is the kind of thing that is a little hard to Google for.

At the gym last night I was lifting weights and a man started this converstaion.

Man: "What are you going to do with all those muscles? Beat up the boys?"
Me: "Yup."
Man: "Well then, stay away from me.

What am I supposed to make of that? Seriously, I'm asking here.

... So this hat doesn't fit me. The question is, would it fit a guy with a size 7 3/4 head? Joe, you might or might not want to click through :)

There are a whole bunch of "Working Group last calls" going on for email-related technology. Roughly, these are calls for reviews of Internet-Drafts before they are submitted to become standards. I called for reviews for an IMAP Extensions working group document which adds annotations (like properties, or metadata) to emails in an IMAP server. The Lemonade WG has issued last calls on these documents (all last calls on the mailing list and the documents themselves are linked from the Lemonade charter page):

• the Catenate proposal, used to allow clients to more efficiently work on draft messages stored on an IMAP server
• URLAUTH, which lets one user show an attachment to another user without sending them the whole attachment (basically I give you authorization to view my copy on my server)
• Server-to-server requirements for email event notification systems -- intended to allow voice mail and email servers from different vendors work together more smoothly
• The BURL draft, allowing clients to forward an email without downloading and uploading it again as email systems currently require.
  

There are also upcoming improvements to the performance and extensibility of the LIST command which is the heart of IMAP, and ongoing improvements to access control, both coming to a head in IMAPEXT. If you're interested in email protocol and developing standards for those, this is an exciting time for that. I guess that means about 7 of us globally are excited right now :)

I attended a knitting convention this weekend, and learned how to do japanese short rows, double crochet (which is like a cross between knitting and crochet), and twined knitting which is a three centuries old Swedish technique a.k.a. "Tvåändsstickning". The marketplace was also amazing and very tempting and dangerous to my wallet.

The "gallery" at the Stitches conference is very ad-hoc -- it's on the backs of the attendees. Here's a few pics of people I saw.

It's starting to become well-known that well-published suicides inspire more suicides. There's an explanation on everything2.com, but I'm dissatisfied with the references to heroic portrayal as the explanation for the phenomenon. The Wikipedia entry is much more complete, but it still explains copycat suicides by refering to the media "glorifying the deceased." This "reward" theory is simple--that the media encourages copycat suicides by providing attention and glory as a reward for suicide. The standard sources also explain that media coverage may provoke admiration of the deceased in eulogizing him, and by explaining the causes of the suicide and thus implying that suicide is an understandable or normal response to those causal events.

The reward theory has been debunked somewhat in Cialdini's book Influence,
the Power of Persuasion. Some brief reasons to doubt the reward theory:

• Even consistently negative publicity encourages copycat suicides
• Copycat suicide demographics are surprisingly similar to the original suicide (e.g. 35-year old women don't tend to see Kurt Cobain's suicide as one to copy no matter how much glory is supplied)
• Deaths which are not publicized as suicides but which might have been (car and plane accidents) provoke a rash of similar deaths even though there's no glorifying of suicide.
  

Cialdini's model to explain copycat suicide is more sophisticated than the simple "reward" model -- Cialdini calls the effect "social proof" and it goes beyond just suicide to explain how people copy the actions of those they consider similar enough to be role models. So even if the suicide is criticized unanimously, someone who feels similar (same preference in music, perhaps) will find actions to emulate. In fact, the criticism from the dis-similar people may strengthen the bond felt towards the role model. The bond may be strengthened by the copycat feeling that society is against both himself and the original suicide and provoke feelings of solidarity. Thus, a society that reacts to some unusual person's suicide by criticizing their unusual taste (goth clothes, punk music, or playing dungeons and dragons) may in fact create a self-fulfilling prophecy in calling that taste dangerous and then see a spate of suicides in a population sharing that taste. There's also some evidence (again you can reference Cialdini who discusses Goethe and his hero suicide Werther) that even fictional suicides inspire copycats.

Dorothy Parker seems to have intuitively understood this. I recently read Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, a look at literary culture in the Twenties by examining the lives of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edna Ferber and Zelda Fitzgerald. Dorothy attempted suicide several times in her life, each time via a different approach, and damaged her own health and reputation. In her short story "Big Blonde", Dorothy wrote:

There was no settled, shocked moment when she first thought of killing herself; it seemed to her as if the idea had always been with her. She pounced upon all the accounts of suicides in the newspapers. There was an epidemic of self-killings -- or maybe it was just that she searched for the stories of them so eagerly that she found many. To read of them roused reassurance in her; she felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead.

The subtlety of the copycat suicide effect probably means there's no easy solution. It doesn't work to have the media to portray suicides negatively -- that doesn't prevent the social proof phenomenon and may even strengthen it. We probably don't want to instruct the media to entirely suppress news of suicides. Even if we did that, there's still fiction and possibly other art (music lyrics?) -- and even if we censor art there's still deaths-which-might-have-been-suicides.

Despite these subtleties, most journalism codes around discussing suicide in the media focus on the glorification aspect. E.g.

a licensee must not broadcast a program which depicts suicide favourably or as a means of achieving a desired result (ref)

The WHO report from 2000 also talks of glorification and acceptance of suicide as an understandable response, but it goes even further, stating that "certain types of coverage may help to prevent imitation of the suicidal behaviour" (p 6). However, I've not yet seen evidence of that, and I worry that is merely wishful thinking. If Cialdini's model is closer to being correct then the very type of coverage that the WHO report suggests may do more to encourage copycat suicides by mourning the deceased, providing details of their life and families, and providing "risk indicators and warning signs" which can trigger the role model effect.

Update: I've never updated a Wikipedia page before, but this seemed a good time to try. I added the paragraph on Cialdini's social proof model.

I got annoyed on the drive to work today, listening to NPR's Morning Edition program. The show was covering California's new display hardware tax and recycling program. I guess "coverage" always means looking for flaws, but this was silly.

Here's the facts: California is adding an electronics recycling fee, which retailers apply based on size of display, from $6 to $10 per display. This includes laptops, monitors and TVs.

Morning Edition added the factoid that California pays recyclers $0.48 per pound to process the displays, to chew them up and sorting the resulting bits into plastic, glass, etc. From this factoid and the fee rates, Morning Edition concluded that the tax would certainly not pay for disposal. They gave an example of a 53 lb monitor, which would be taxed at $10 at time of purchase but would cost $25.44 to recycle.

With the information provided so far in the program, I could see immediately several flaws in their argument. First, not all monitors are that heavy. People buy 5-10 pound laptops, pay $6 or $8 fee at purchase time, and those only cost $2.40 to $4.80 to dispose of. Second, there's time-value of money: the $10 paid for the 53 lb monitor is paid years before that monitor has to be recycled, and if the state saved that money it could accrue interest.

Even if you say that this year's recycle fee income should cover this year's disposal costs (rather than allocate the fee to one item over its life) it's entirely possible that the program does pay for display recycling. It works if people buy more lightweight displays (for which they overpay on the recycle fee) than heavy displays (for which they underpay). At the same time, it also works if people buy more displays per year than they dispose of -- also a reasonable possibility.

This kind of thing in the media bothers me more and more. It makes me think "How stupid do they think I am?"

Today was the first Interop event for CalDAV. Sadly, I am not there, having cancelled a trip due to a cold. But I'm excited to hear about preliminary successes. It's only been a couple months since people started developing code to this spec, so this is great progress!

I went off on a tangent today and wondered how many translations of Marot's poem "A une Damoyselle Malade" could be found on the Web. I thought there would be more because there are nearly a hundred in Hofstadter's book "Le Ton Beau de Marot" alone, and he encourages readers to write their own. Anyway, here's the list I found, using the first line rather than a title to refer to them because that's what I found most memorable:

• Petter Hesselberg wrote Min Konfekt in Norwegian and provided an English gloss of that
• Mark Irons wrote Little Mole
• Craig Clark wrote Precious Girl
• David Short wrote Sweet Jeannou
• Melanie Mitchell wrote To my sweet (or in her more wordy version, "To be a joy forever to my sweet")
• Enno de Witt wrote Teder Wicht in Dutch (gloss, anyone?)
• Kat Walsh wrote Sweetest Rose.

Rather than provide my own translation, I wondered what Babelfish would provide. To get a decent approximation I had to remove line breaks (format as a paragraph), replace abbreviations with fully-spelled-out words, and modernize a couple words. My input:

Ma mignonne, je vous donne le bon jour; Le séjour, ce est prison. Guérison recouvrez, puis ouvrez votre porte et que on sorte vite, car Clément le vous commande. Va, friande de ta bouche, qui se couche en danger pour manger confitures; si tu dures trop malade couleur fade tu prendras et perdras le embonpoint. Dieu te donne santé bonne, ma mignonne.

Babelfish spit out (with me re-adding the line breaks as with the original):

My nice,
I give you
the good day;
The stay,
it is prison.
Cure
cover,
then open
your door
and that one left
quickly,
because Clément
orders you.
Goes, fond of delicacies
of your mouth,
which lies down
in danger
to eat
jams;
if you hard
too sick
insipid color
you will take
and lose
the plumpness.
God gives you
good health,
my nice.

Not too bad, really, though I had to trick Babelfish to get it to be even that good.

It seems that to keep an eye on terrorists and other dangerous people, the government could be more creative in outsourcing the hard work of keeping an eye on citizens. Leave it to an expert -- Santa Claus. He'd just have to expand his "watch list" from kids to include adults as well. Then we could update the famous song and and still keep the exact same Christmas spirit:

Don't drive like a jerk,
Or be late paying fees,
Steal Post-Its from work
Or share mp3s,
Santa Claus is coming to town.

He's making a list,
Of those who can't fly,
With guys who made jokes,
In the security line,
Santa Claus is coming to town.

He knows if you've been cheating,
On your taxes or your wife,
He knows if you've been smoking pot,
Three strikes and you're in for life.

Anyway, happy holiday season.

Jon Udell just posted his wishlist for a calendar protocol (comparing it to WebDAV-only and to traditional calendar-only protocols), a list that's rather close to explaining why I'm working on CalDAV and what I want it to do. (Jeffrey Harris pointed this out to me and even pinged Jon about it, thanks Jeffrey)

A couple new items in my "stuff I made" pages, both the knitting page and the general page: a crocheted purse (almost clutch size) and knitted lace pillowcase edgings.

I'm hiring again at OSAF -- this position is for our very first server developer. I'm looking for somebody who can lead the charge, crank out code, and make the server do us proud.

Data modeling is hard. Some loosely correlated thoughts and links:

• Model-driven architecture is rigid, at least with the tools as we know them today.
• RDF has a simple basic model but leads to very complex structures, as Adam Bosworth explains.
• Pictures express complex relationships relatively readably, like the picture in this paper. Unfortunately we need to translate the pictures into text in order to use these in software and network protocols.
• The more complex your picture is, the more unreadable your text is.
  
• Text has to be relatively flat to be readable.
  
• References in data formats are like "goto" jumps in programming -- you lose context.
  
• Maybe if data modelers put a little more thought into flattening their models we'd find them easier to use? This may make the models seem less "rich" but "KISS" is good too.
  

I don't know how true all of this is, but I'm learning.

The "relatively flat" observation seems to hold at least some validity in data formats, programs and even books. Experienced programmers, with the help of good indenting, can see quickly that they're within an 'else' statement inside a loop inside another loop inside an 'if' statement, but even experienced programmers screw this up sometimes (and even more experienced programmers flatten out the code by delegating some reasonable piece off to another method). Books are better if there's no more than three (maybe four) layers -- chapter, section, sub-section, and even this much organization requires human-readable text to link from one section to another and summarize what a bunch of sections are going to say.

There's a higher quality of homeless people in Palo Alto. I just saw a hand-lettered sign outside of Whole Foods, explaining that the homeless of Palo Alto need food donated in the holiday season (and a very shifty looking guy collecting food on their behalf). Among the list of requested foods was "organic turkey". No cheap turkey for the Palo Alto homeless, please!

Timboy has a good medium-sized post on why meetings suck yet they're indispensible.

A while back I posted on honesty in journalistic bias. This week TechCentralStation has a longer essay about why we might see more openness around bias and why that's a fine thing.

Being aware of bias is something I agree with, but I do worry about blinkered views of the world. Too many people reading some highly biased source will simply not read any opposing source, or do so with only mockery in mind. We've got plenty of polarization, thank-you. So my preferred model is journalists who say "Here is my natural bias, and here is me being as unbiased as I can be in covering this topic, through rigorous reasoning and discourse with others who disagree with me."