Vitor Rodrigues

The executive committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) fell one vote shy of the nine required to approve Microsoft’s Open XML standard. It voted 8 to 7 in favor of approval with one abstention, the group announced last week.

The ballot description here: Open XML ballot

The voting details here:  Open XML US voting

It’s unfortunate that some companies didn’t add comments to their votes. I would be interested to know the reasons for Apple and Intel voting yes, being that they are not strongly affiliated with Microsoft.

Another topic that can lead to some discussion is the fact that the two government agencies present in the group had different votes. the DHS thinks that the existence of 2 standards is a good thing, while the Department of Defense did their homework and based their negative vote on the following technical issues with Open XML:

From the several government agencies present in the voting body, it is interesting to see the different voting positions. The Department of Defense clearly identified the technical reasons for their negative vote: 

1. Binary information in the standard that would lead to security concerns.
2. The referencing of unexplained backward compatibility modes that might pose a problem for third party implementers.
3. The use of proprietary file formats within the open standard appear to cause potential intellectual property ownership concerns.

The Department of Homeland Security voted yes, even though they also found technical issues with the proposed standard:

Although this is a though result to Microsoft, I do think that eventually Open XML will be considered a standard format. Microsoft may have to do some work on addressing some technical issues like the ones pointed by DD, but eventually they will get the majority of votes. They just need one vote, and most of the NO votes were “conditional approvals”, voted as NO per the voting guidelines. I’m sure they will try to do some lobbying as a mean to get the missing vote.

Source: pcworld.com

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 Latest articles checked out from my “toread” folder in delicious:

• FastSOA: Accelerate SOA with XML, XQuery, and native XML database technology
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• xforms vs. ruby – a rebuttal (sort of)

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Originally uploaded by FireinCairo.

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Increase your speaker’s volume, go to www.yahoo.com and click on the exclamation sign in the logo

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Dear lazy web…

I’ve been playing with Ruby and XML lately, and one of the key features I need to use is XML mapping from XML to Ruby objects and vice versa. However, both ROXML and XML::Mapping do not seem to be very active at the moment. Both forums contain un-replied questions  several months old, and I can’t find any examples that are not a couple of years old.

Is there any XML Mapping library for Ruby that is currently active(*)? XML::Mapping was serving me good enough, until the moment that I needed some of the documented features and found that they are not supported in the current release

 (*) by active I don’t mean it needs to be in exclusively in code development, but at least with some recent activity in forums, documentation, examples, etc..

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If you are interested in the stock market and/or investing, you will find this article interesting: http://www.247wallst.com/2007/06/the_247_wall_st.html

It’s a list of the best 25 financial blogs on the internet, according to the website 24/7 Wall St. I’m a regular reader of a couple of the listed blogs(1,2), and have discovered some  new interesting reads on this list related with long term investing. 

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Originally uploaded by Telzey.

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>> doc.find('/*').first.name
doc.find('/*').first.name
=> "Customer"
>> doc.find('/Customer').first.name
doc.find('/Customer').first.name
NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occurred while evaluating nil.name
	from (irb):52

Something is wrong with Ruby’s libxml xpath evaluator. I’m only able to use the wildcard * to select elements and not the element’s name. After doing some research on the project’s page, there are 2 comments about the problem, complaining that libxml’s support of XPath is just too limited and it has lots of problems when dealing with namespaces. Default namespaces are not parsed, namespace wildcards are not supported and namespace prefixes won’t work all the time. What’s the advantage of announcing a 300x faster xpath speed than rexml when it doesn’t work and valid xpath expressions return syntax error?

>> doc.find('/*:Customer').first.name
doc.find('/*:Customer').first.name
XML::XPath::InvalidPath: Invalid XPath expression
	from (irb):73:in `find'
	from (irb):73

It’s time to go back to the slower but working rexml.

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When even the banks have no money to buy Windows licenses, something must be wrong with its price…

via digg

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When I moved to the US about 2 years ago, one thing changed in my life habits: I stopped downloading “illegal” stuff from the net. No more divx movies or MP3 musics. I started listening to online radio (www.sky.fm hs been on my top list since then) and using Netflix to all my movie needs. And the truth shall be told: I never really felt the urge to download this kind of stuff from the internet. Online radio has a good variety, and Netflix delivers the movies next day. Downloading movies would sometimes take one or two days for me because I never had much credits on eMule, so Netflix was faster than downloading and with better quality.

After I moved to Canada in the Fall of 2006, my music habits continued, but not my movie ones. I still go to the cinema, but there is nothing like Netlifx over here. I mean, there are alternatives, but not with the same quality/price/stock/speed. Netflix-alike companies charge more over here because people do not return movies some times, and some mail-mans also like to evolve their movie collection using those DVDs. I always wondered if Netflix would work in a less responsible society than US and Toronto example (which is everything but Canadian) just proved it won’t.  I even tried some online alternatives like amazon and iTunes but the ratio price/service didn’t satisfy me. Also, iTunes movie stock in Canada is miles away of Us or UK. So I replaced my movie renting with watching some online TV.

This week, when reading  about DRM in some posts on P*, I decided to investigate something I’ve heard about a few times over here: the Private Copying Act (pdf). Yep, it looks like in Canada downloading copyrighted stuff for personal use is not illegal. It is, however, illegal to upload copyrighted content. If you use p2p programs and you allow uploading while downloading, then you are breaking the law. Knowing about this Act was a good thing, as I started to use isFree a few months ago and I was never sure if it was legal or not. Another reason why I never felt I was “breaking the law” while using isFree is that the tv shows I watch (LOST, Heroes and CSI) are always broadcasted in my cable tv before they are available on isFree. That way, I was just using isFree almost as a Tivo system to watch the shows when I have free time and not when I’m cooking or biking.

The Private Copying Act also explains other thing that I never really understood: the high price of writable media when compared with other countries. It has been a few years since I paid more than 1 Euro per CD, and I always questioned myself how could they be so expensive in here. Well, I guess the $0.77 levy fee paid on each CD helps explaining that. One more mystery solved

This won’t change my daily habits too much, as I will for sure continue listening to online radio, and I’m thinking about buying a TV so I can make use of the cable tv subscription at home, but it makes me think more about buying an MP3 player to use when biking, hiking and filling it with the music I want, as long as I find a website to download it for free without having to do any upload

 

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