December 24, 2002
@ 11:58 PM
Comments [0]
Neil Gaiman's Blog, Comedy Central's Clerks Marathon and XML Oriented Programming
Bob Abooey style since I don't have much to say about anything.
  • Just saw a Dell ad where a Dell intern gets an email from Dell entitled "promotion" and brags to his co-workers about getting a promotion because he is such a fantastic worker only for the email to turn out to be spam from Dell about a sale. That definitely classifies as dripping with irony.

  • Comedy Central had a marathon of the Clerks cartoon on Sunday. I switched channels in the middle of the third episode because I couldn't help feeling overwhelmed by the general suchkage of the cartoon. The cartoon was mediocre at best and downright irritating at worst. This is surprising because Kevin Smith is a for all intents and purposes a modern day literary genius. Clerks was a fantastic movie as were Chasing Amy and Dogma. His run in the DareDevil comic was amazing and has spawned lots of imitation by the authors that took up the reins after him.

  • Neil Gaiman has an online journal. This is definitely the kind of blog I'd bookmark as opposed to the dozens of tech blogs wanking over Sun or Microsoft's technology and other navel gazing crap that passes for blogs. I can't wait for when the fad of keeping a journal (a concept made famous by teenage girls) and posting it online becomes an embarassing memory in the same way pet rocks are now an embarassing cultural memory. Yes, I do realize the hypocrisy of ranting about "blogs" and the media attention they are getting then keeping an online diary at K5.

  • Grey Goose is beginning to compete with Absolut as my favorite vodka. L'Orange hits the spot a lot better than Absolut Mandarin ever did. The next step is to compare Le Citron to Absolut Citron. The verdict should be in sometime next week.

  • Some guy called Jorgen Thelin thinks an XML oriented programming language means a language that processes the PSVI (i.e. a language that is strongly tied to W3C XML Schema). Better minds than mine have already voiced concern about mistaking the PSVI for XML (look for the quote by James Clark from December 20th) and I recently wrote an article about data models for strongly typed XML with addendum which describes why the PSVI is not suitable as a data model for strongly typed XML.

    As for his comments about there being features of W3C XML Schema that don't map cleanly to Object Oriented Programming concepts, I agree but think he picked bad examples. Members of a substitiution group do have to share an inheritance relationship with the head of the substitution group and I can imagine implementations using marker interfaces (i.e. interfaces with no methods) to indicate membership in a substitution group as a last ditch attempt to support them. Derivation by restriction of simple types isn't impossible to represent just inefficient and infeasible to do statically (i.e. probably can only be represented properly via dynamic checks). There are problems with derivation by restriction of complex types but this are more related to the difficulty in expressing things like occurence ranges and optionality than with actual restriction in OOP languages.

    All in all, a type system based on W3C XML Schema would be full of idiosyncracies and logical inconsistencies given that W3C XML Schema was not designed as a type system. The XQuery working group has already had to deal with several issues related to this and for this reason won't support all of W3C XML Schema and has tweaked a number of the parts of it that it does.

    Basically my opinion is that thinking of an XML processing language as a language that processes XSD validated XML is a short sighted viewpoint which I'm glad is not completely endorsed by what is set to become the premiere XML processing language, XQuery.

  • A friend of mine just bought a PowerBook with Mac OS X. The UI was very sweet. I liked the way tabbed panes resized themselves and the way windows twirled when minimized/maximized. Sherlock is also pretty handy. I definitely wouldn't mind having one just to mess around with Sherlock especially since it supports XQuery.

  • The Wired.com Vaporware of 2000 lists "Wireless Webpads" as #9 on the list. I can't help noticing that my Toshiba Portege fits the bill as a wireless webpad except for the fact that it is a year or two behind the hype.


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Disclaimer: The opinions in this diary are my own and do not reflect the opinions, thoughts, intentions or strategies of my employer.
 

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