I am subscribed to the Amazon Hip Hop Music RSS feed which provides information about available hip hop CDs on sale at Amazon. I was just thinking that it'd be really cool if once a CD I liked showed up in my RSS feed I could just click a [Buy This] button and initiate the process of purchasing the CD. Combining this with Amazon's one click shopping it's conceivable that this could be done in a single click.

At the minimum to implement something like this you'd need an annotation in the RSS feed that contained the end point for the aggregator to submit the purchase information securely and a specified format for what the submitted purchase information should look like. In the case of Amazon, it might just be a cookie while for others it might be the all the required information like credit card number and shipping address.

Now that would definitely be cool. A subscription to a list of things I might be interested in buying and the ability to buy one of them when something caught my eye.   

 


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

I heard D12's My Band on the radio and was wondering if this is the harbinger of a new album by Em or D12. The song is the typical kind of over-the-top rap you get from D12, the premise is that the rest of D12 is jealous of Em cause he gets more money and fame then them.  

I guess I need to swing by a CD store and see if I can get any news that way.


 

Categories: Ramblings

A little while ago I noticed the SAX dot NET project was announced on the XML-DEV mailing list. From the desxcription on the project page

SAX dot NET is a C# port of the original Java based SAX API specifications. When compiled into a .NET assembly it becomes available to the other .NET languages as well.

The .NET Framework doesn't ship with an implementation of a SAX push model XML parser but instead ships with the pull-model parser in the form of the System.Xml.XmlReader class. The primary reasons for this can be gleaned from my article A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML where I list the pros and cons of various approaches for processing XML. The main advanatages a pull-model XML parser like the XmlReader have over a push model XML parser like SAX are

Pull model parsers typically do not require a specialized class for handling XML processing since there is no requirement to implement specific interfaces or subclass certain classes for the purpose of registering callbacks. Also the need to explicitly track application states using boolean flags and similar variables is significantly reduced when using a pull model parser

I can understand that developers migrating to the .NET Framework from Java platforms or MSXML would like to have the familiar feel of the SAX API so I definitely welcome such projects. However I have seen some criticism of the project from Daniel Cazzulino, a Microsoft XML MVP, in his post Do we need SAX for .NET? (or does Java ports to C# make sense?) he points out of some of the disadvantages of blindly porting an API from one platform to another. He points out some inconsistencies and redundancies between SAX dot NET and the .NET Framework such as

  • There  is an XmlNamespaces class that does the same thing as the System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager class

  • There are IAttributes AND IAttributes2, and the corresponding implementations called AttributesImpl and AttributesImpl2 which seem to imply interface versioning problems and legacy issues in a brand new project.

  • The existence of non-standard delegates such as OnPropertyChange(IProperty property, object newValue)  instead of the  typical pattern in the .NET world where it should be OnPropertyChange(object sender, ProperyChangeEventArgs e).

I think Daniel raises good points and encourage any developer porting an API to the .NET Framework to endeavor to make it consistent with the patterns and naming conventions in the .NET Framework. Doing so makes it easier for developers to understand how to use the API since it will be familiar and contains few surprises.  


 

Categories: XML

After talking about it for the past few weeks the XML Developer Center on MSDN is finally here. As mentioned  in my previous post on the Dev Center the most obvious changes from the previous incarnation of http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml are

  1. The XML Developer Center will provide an entry point to working with XML in Microsoft products such as Office and SQL Server.

  2. The XML Developer Center will have an RSS feed.

  3. The XML Developer Center will pull in content from my work weblog.

  4. The XML Developer Center will provide links to recommended books, mailing lists and weblogs.

  5. The XML Developer Center will have content focused on explaining the fundamentals of the core XML technologies such as XML Schema, XPath, XSLT and XQuery.

  6. The XML Developer Center will provide sneak peaks at advances in XML technologies at Microsoft that will be shipping future releases of the .NET Framework, SQL Server and Windows.

As mentioned in my previous post the first in a series of articles describing the changes to System.Xml in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework is now up. Mark Fussell has published What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release which mentiones the top 10 changes to the core APIs in the System.Xml namespace.

There is one cool new addition that is missing from Mark's article, which I guess would be number 11 of his top 10 list. The XSD Inference API which can be used to create an XML Schema definition language (XSD) schema from an XML instance document will also be part of System.Xml in Whidbey. Given the enthusiasm we saw in various parties about XSD inference we decided to promote it from just being a freely downloadable tool to being part of the .NET Framework. Below are a couple of articles about XSD Inference 

If you have any thoughts about what you'd like to see on the Dev Center or any comments on the new design, please let me know.


 

Categories: XML

As a lead developer with an Open Source project on SourceForge and a program manager at company that produces software commercially I have used private and public bug databases. Sometimes I've wondered what it would be like if the users of Microsoft products had access to our bug databases and could vote for bugs like in Bugzilla. There are two main things that decide if and when a bug will be fixed when bugs are being triaged at work. The first is the priority of the bug but how this is determined varies from component team to component team and is more a holistic process than anything. The second is how much work it would take to fix the bug and whether it takes up too much of the schedule ( a bug that takes a week to fix will less likely be fixed than 4 bugs that will take a day a piece). I've always thought it would be interesting if one of the factors we used to determine the priority of the bug included direct customer feedback such as the number of folks who'd voted for getting the bug fixed.

There are down sides to every proposal and I discovered this post from Matthew Thomas (who seems to have abandoned his Phraswewise.com blog) entitled discussions in unwanted places where he lists some of the problems with public bug databases that the Mozilla project has faced. It should be noted that the Mozilla project is probably the largest and most significant instance of a software project with a public bug database. Matthew writes

While none of these channels may be intended as an avenue for discussion, humans have frequently demonstrated that they will try to converse even in areas where discussions are not wanted.
...

The saddest example I know of is Bugzilla, a Web-based system originally developed to track bugs and requests for enhancement for the Mozilla software, and now used for a variety of other projects as well.

By default in Bugzilla, when someone adds a comment or makes any other change to a bug report, everyone associated with the bug report will receive an e-mail message: the reporter, the assigned programmer, the QA contact, and anyone else who has registered their interest. This can result in a lot of e-mail being sent.

It’s not so much of a problem when Bugzilla is used by a small or professional team, because participants have social or disciplinary incentives (or both) to ensure everything they do in the system is productive. But when Bugzilla is used by a large mostly-volunteer team, as it is with the Mozilla Project, you get problems. People argue about whether something is a bug or not. They argue about its severity. They argue about its schedule. They plead for the bug to be fixed soon. They throw tantrums. They make long tedious comments no-one can understand. In short, they treat Bugzilla as a discussion forum.

As a result, over the past few years several of Mozilla’s best programmers have begun to ignore most or all of the e-mail they receive from Bugzilla, for the good reason that they’d rather be fixing bugs than wading through Bugzilla discussions. The correct response from Bugzilla’s maintainers would have been to make Bugzilla harder to use as a discussion forum, but instead they made it easier. They added linkable numbers for comments, making it easier to reply to them in new comments. They made the comment field larger, aiding long and rambling comments. They added a mechanism for quoting a previous comment when replying, aiding long and rambling conversations. And they could have turned off the quoting feature in the mozilla.org installation, but they left it turned on.

Each of these decisions appeared to be good and proper, as it improved the usability of Bugzilla for those writing comments. But the purpose of Bugzilla is not to collect comments, it is to track bugs. And the resulting blizzard of comments has made Bugzilla less useful for tracking bugs.

It seems obvious that having a public bug database leads to information overload but what is surprising is that the problems don't come from too many spurious or duplicate bugs being entered [as I expected] but from people actually using the bug database how it is intended.

Well, looks like another idea I had turned out not to have been as good as I first thought.


 

Categories: Ramblings

I was reading a post by Rory Blyth where he points to Steve Maine's explanation of the benefits of Prothon (an object oriented programming language without classes). He writes

One quote from Steve's post that has me thinking a bit, though, is the following:

The inherent extensibility and open content model of XML makes coming up with a statically typed representation that fully expresses all possible instance documents impossible. Thus, it would be cool if the object representation could expand itself to add new properties as it parsed the incoming stream.

I can see how this would be cool in a "Hey, that's cool" sense, but I don't see how it would help me at work. I fully admit that I might just be stupid, but I'm honestly having a hard time seeing the benefit. Right now, I'm grabbing XML in the traditional fashion of providing the name of the node that I want as a string key, and it seems to be working just fine.

The problem solved by being able to dynamically add properties to a class in the case of XML<->object mapping technologies is that it allows developers to program against aspects of the XML document in a strongly typed manner even if they are not explicitly described in the schema for the XML document.

This may seem unobvious so I'll provide an example that illustrates the point. David Orchard of BEA wrote a schema for the ATOM 0.3 syndication format. Below is the fragment of the schema that describes ATOM entries

 <xs:complexType name="entryType">
  <xs:sequence>
   <xs:element name="title" type="xs:string"/>
   <xs:element name="link" type="atom:linkType"/>
   <xs:element name="author" type="atom:personType" minOccurs="0"/>
   <xs:element name="contributor" type="atom:personType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
   <xs:element name="id" type="xs:string"/>
   <xs:element name="issued" type="atom:iso8601dateTime"/>
   <xs:element name="modified" type="atom:iso8601dateTime"/>
   <xs:element name="created" type="atom:iso8601dateTime" minOccurs="0"/>
   <xs:element name="summary" type="atom:contentType" minOccurs="0"/>
   <xs:element name="content" type="atom:contentType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
   <xs:any namespace="##other" processContents="lax" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
  </xs:sequence>
  <xs:attribute ref="xml:lang" use="optional"/>
  <xs:anyAttribute/>
 </xs:complexType> 

The above schema fragment produces the following C# class when the .NET Framework's XSD.exe tool is run with the ATOM 0.3 schema as input.

/// <remarks/>
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlTypeAttribute(Namespace="http://purl.org/atom/ns#")]
public class entryType {
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string title;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public linkType link;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public personType author;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("contributor")]
    public personType[] contributor;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string id;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string issued;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string modified;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string created;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public contentType summary;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("content")]
    public contentType[] content;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAnyElementAttribute()]
    public System.Xml.XmlElement[] Any;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAttributeAttribute(Namespace="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace")]
    public string lang;
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAnyAttributeAttribute()]
    public System.Xml.XmlAttribute[] AnyAttr;

}

As a side note I should point out that David Orchard's ATOM 0.3 schema is invalid since it refers to an undefined authorType so I had to remove the reference from the schema to get it to validate.

The generated fields highlighted in bold show the problem that the ability to dynamically add fields to a class would solve. If programming against an ATOM feed using the above entryType class then once one saw an extension element, you'd have to fallback to XML processing instead of programming using strongly typed constructs.  For example, consider Mark Pilgrim's RSS feed which has dc:subject elements which are not described in the ATOM 0.3 schema but are allowed due to the existence of xs:any wildcards. Watch how this complicates the following code which prints the title, issued date and subject of each entry.

foreach(entryType entry in feed.Entries){

  Console.WriteLine("Title: " + entry.title);
  Console.WriteLine("Issued: " + entry.issued);

  string subject = null;

 //find the dc:subject
  foreach(XmlElement elem in entry.Any){
   if(elem.LocalName.Equals("subject") &&
      elem.NamespaceUri.Equals("http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"){
     subject = elem.InnerText;
     break;
   }
  }

  Console.WriteLine("Subject: " + subject); 
 
 }

As you can see, one minute you are programming against statically and strongly typed C# constructs and the next you are back to checking the names of XML elements and programming against the DOM. If there was infrastructure that enabled one to dynamically add properties to classes then it is conceivable that even though the ATOM 0.3 schema doesn't define the dc:subject element one would still be able program against them in a strongly typed manner in generated classes. So one could write code like

foreach(entryType entry in feed.Entries){

  Console.WriteLine("Title: " + entry.title);
  Console.WriteLine("Issued: " + entry.issued); );
  Console.WriteLine("Subject: " + entry.subject);  
 }

Of course, there are still impedance mismatches to resolve like how to reflect namespace names of elements or make the distinction between attributes vs. elements in the model but having the capabilities Steve Maine describes in his original post would improve the capabilities of the XML<->Object mapping technologies that exist today.


 

Categories: XML

I just found the following post in Andrew Watt's blog

Beta of RSS Bandit Available - but doesn't work, at least for me

Dare Obasanjo has announced, RSS Bandit 1.2.0.106 (beta) available, the availability for download of a beta of RSS Bandit. The download is available from Sourceforge.net.

Installation was smooth but the beta unfortunately seems not to be able to access any feeds, whether RDF or RSS. Sometimes it fails with an exception, sometimes silently. I don't know whether it is because the uninstall of the previous version didn't clean up fully after itself or not (it didn't) or for some other reason.

The end result, however, is that RSS Bandit is broken meantime failing to access any RSS or RDF feed I have pointed it at.

Posted by Andrew Watt at 04:09 PM | TrackBack (0)
The point of betas is to gather feedback about possible issues with the software before a release. If you are a beta user and would like to provide feedback you can file bugs in the bug database on SourceForge, send a message to the mailing list or discussion board
 
It may seem that like this is too much trouble in which case you can blog about your woes and Torsten or I will eventually find your post. However it would be much appreciated if you provided a way to follow up and get more details about your problem. The above post by Andrew Watt is an example of a post we can't do much with since he has no contact information on his blog and it doesn't support comments.  
 
Thanks to all the folks out there using RSS Bandit and helping us make it better. You all rock.

 

Categories: RSS Bandit

March 26, 2004
@ 06:08 PM

This month's issue of The Source magazine asks the following question on it's cover, “Are Rappers the New Target of America's Criminal Justice System?”. In article entitled “Operation Lockdown” there is a spread on various rappers who've had trouble with the law. They include

  1. Jamal Barrow aka Shyne: Assault, Gun Possesion and Reckless Endangerment, sentenced to 10 years at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York.

  2. Corey Miler aka C-Murder: Second Degree Murder, awaiting sentencing but facing a mandatory life sentence.

  3. Michael Tyler aka Mystikal: Extortion and Sexual Battery, sentenced to 6 years in prison.

  4. Ricky Walters aka Slick Rick: Attempted Second Degree Murder, Self-Deportation and Illegal Reentry, served 5 years for the former and 17 months in an INS detention center for the latter.

  5. John Austin aka Ras Kass: Driving Under the Influence sentenced to 16 months at the California State Prison in Corcoran.

  6. Dwight Grant aka Beanie Sigel: Attempted Murder and Gun Possession, awaiting trial.

  7. Chi-Ali Griffith: Murder and Gun Possesion, awaiting trial after being on the run for two years and being profiled on America's Most Wanted

  8. John Fortè: Drug Possession with Intent to Distribute, sentenced to 14 years.

  9. Patrick Houston aka Project Pat: Aggravated Robbery and Parole Violation, sentenced to 51 months.

  10. Warren McGlone aka Steady B and Chris Rony aka Cool C: Murder and Armed Robbery, Cool C was sentenced to death by lethal injection while Steady B was sentenced to life without parole

  11. Chad Butler aka Pimp C from the group UGK: Aggravated Assault with a Weapon, sentenced to 8 years.

  12. Marion Knight aka Suge Knight (CEO of Death Row Records): Firearm Trafficking, Assault, Parole Violation and Other Charges, currently serving 10 months for parole violation

  13. Shyheim: Armed Robbery and Gun Possesion, sentenced to two years.

  14. J-Dee of Da Lench Mob: Murder, sentenced to 25 years-to-life.

  15. Ronald Blackwell aka Spigg Nice from the group Lost Boyz: Conspiracy to Commit Bank Robbery, sentenced to 37 years

  16. Marvin Bernard aka Tony Yayo from the group G-Unit: Gun Possession and Probation Violation, served a year.

  17. Peedi Crakk of the group State Property: Gun Possession, sentenced to 11 to 23 months.

  18. Big Lurch: Murder, sentenced to life.

  19. Styles P of the Lox: Assualt, served 9 months.

  20. Ol Dirty Bastard:Probation Violation and Drug Possession, served 20 months

  21. Lil' Troy: Drug Possession, served 18 months.

  22. Flesh-N-Bone: Threats with a Deadly Weapon, sentenced to 12 years.

  23. Keith Murray: Assault, sentenced to 5 years.

  24. Capone from the group Capone-N-Noreaga: Gun Possession, served 27 months.

  25. Tupac Shakur aka 2Pac: Sexual Assault, sentenced to 18 months to 4.5 years.

The above list doesn't include various rappers that got probation or were put under house arrest for their crimes such as Jay-Z, Trick Daddy and Coolio. Going back to the original question asked on the  cover of the Source as to whether the criminal justice system is targetting rappers, it seems to me that if anything it seems rappers are just going out of their way to tangle with the criminal justice system by committing crimes. Of course, there is the fact that young, black males are more likely to be harshly sentenced for a crime than their caucasian counterparts but this is different from the criminal justice system going out of its way to target rappers.

I find it sad that a lot of these folks whose music I've bought in the past made it out of the hood just to screw their lives up by doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.  


 

Categories: Ramblings

March 26, 2004
@ 04:47 PM

The following are excerpts from the interview with 50 Cent (multi-platinum hiphop artist, highest album and single sales for the year 2003) in the April 2004 issue of Playboy.  

Playboy: When you started dealing, at 12, where did you get the drugs?

50 Cent: I was uncomfortable asking my grandparents for certain things. They raised their kids at a time when ProKeds cost $10. When I was a kid the new Jordans were more than $100. The people I met while I was with my mother, they had jewelry and nice cars. They gave me three and a half grams -- an eight ball. That's the truth. The same money I would've paid for those Jordans. Sometimes when you ask for fish people give you a pole.

Playboy: You did buy-one-get-one-free promotions.

50 Cent: And I only called it “buy one get one free” because they were calling it “two for $5” on the next block. I was trying to make it different. I was marketing! Fiends want something free , so use the word free. It's better than “two for $5”

Platboy: Did it work?

50 Cent: Hell, yes, it worked. And I made the pieces bigger. Some guys made small pieces and figured they'd make a huge profit. But it takes longer to sell the pieces. I made the pieces huge, and they started coming from down the block. All the pieces would sell the same dat and I'd accumulate more money.

Playboy: This seems pretty heavy for a teenager.

50 Cent: Older dudes in our neighborhood were way worse. They were robbing banks; they would kidnap each other. They tried to rob me one night in front of my grandmother's house. I was 19 and had bought a 400 SE Mercedes-Benz. I got to the front door, and the sliding door of a cargo van opened. They had a shotgun. I jumped over the porch and ran for a gun in the backyard. Pow! I got away from them, though. There's a strong possibility they would've killed me.

Playboy: Did you ever use the gun you hid in your grandmother's yard?

50 Cent: The first time I ever shot somebody, I was in junior high school. I was coming out of a project building -- I ain't gonna tell you where. I was going to see this girl. I had my uncle's jewlery on, and two kids decided to rob me. This kid was like “Yo c'mere, let me holler at you”. As I turned they all started pouring out of the lobby. It had to be 15 people stepping to me to rob me. I had a little .380 six-shot pistol, and I didn't even look. I just spun around bangin'. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! Shot and just kept running.

Playboy: Did you hit anybody?

50 Cent: Yeah, I hit one of 'em. And that encouraged the next situation. After that, you just get comfortable shooting. The first time, you're scared to death, as scared as the guy you're shooting at. Then it grows easier for you. Everybody has a conscience. You say to yourself, Man, he was gonna do something to me. Then it's like, I don't give a fuck, whatever. After a while the idea of shooting somebody doesn't bother you.

Playboy: When you were signed with Columbia, you decided to quit dealing. Then what happened?

50 Cent: I got a $65,000 advance; $50,000 went to Jam Master Jay, and $10,000 went to the lawyer to negotiate my contractual release from Jay and do my contract with Columbia. I had only $5,000 left. I had to be able to provide for myself so I took the $5,000 and turned it into 250 grams.

Playboy: You went back to dealing.

50 Cent: I had no choice.

Playboy: Do you think Jam Master Jay ripped you off?

50 Cent: He didn't he took what he felt was his. I was never bitter at Jay, because what I learned from him is what allows me now to sell 10 million records. He groomed me. That's worth $50,000

There were a bunch of other questions but most of them focused either on his violent past or his publicized beef with Ja Rule and Murder Inc. Two things struck me as I read the interview. The first was how people could live in the same country and in some times the same city yet exist in totally different worlds. The second is that America is truly the land of opportunity.


 

Categories: Ramblings

I recently read Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right which was a very interesting read. It was definitely partisan but in this age of blatant lying by practically every highly visible member of the Bush cabinet and the Republican media boosters on Fox News, it's hard to be objective when describing some of the things they've done.

Al did a lot of research for the book, thanks a team of 14 graduate and undergraduate student researchers he got from Harvard.  There are extensive end notes and some thorough disection of the lies of the usual suspects in the conservative media like Sean Hannity, Bill O'reilly and Ann Coulter. There was also a personal account of behind the scenes of the political circus that was the memorial service of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. An interesting data point is comparing the coverage of the memorial service on CNN the shortly after it happened where they wrote, thousands pay tribute to Wellstone, to the coverage the day after once Republican talk show hosts had put their negative spin on it. The story became tone of Wellstone memorial generates anger. Al gives a blow by blow of how this happened from behind the scenes and exposes a lot of the half truths and exagerations that led to the media reports.

Another thing I found interesting was chapter 16 of the book which was entitled Operation Ignore which described the Bush administration's attitude to terrorism which was to consider a lower priority than the previous administration. A lot of the stuff I've read online about Richard Clarke's testimony to the independent 9-11 commision was stuff I'd already seen in Al Franken's book. I'm just glad it is getting wider coverage in the mainstream media instead of just being available to the few people who bought Al Franken's book.

I pray we don't get four more years of this shit...


 

Categories: Ramblings