It was a pretty romantic story. Even though her friends told her to focus on her job and her mother told her to set all of her sights really low – she dreamed to aspire to better things. Through hard work, good manners, and good values.

But nobody is perfect.

The Eclipse JST is the capstone of a lot of penultimate revolutionary efforts at easing enterprise engineering – combined into one powerful programming product.

The fact it is free does not hurt one bit.

• database
  
  • SQL
  • EJB
• web
  
  • servlet
  • JSP
  • HTML/XHTML
  • XML
  • Javascript
• messaging
  
  • JMS
  • ESB
• services
  
  • SOAP

So, as you can see – it is ready. That is why I want it. If I know it, I own it.

Martin’s Potato Bread literally skunks this improperly named upstart.

This 3rd edition version of the XML Pocket Reference from O’Reilly packs pretty comprehensive coverage of XML, DTDs, W3C XML Schema (.xsd), RELAX NG regular (.rng) and compact (.rnc), as well as Schematron rules (.sch) all into one slim 171 page reference book.

Schematron is uniquely suited to checking that XML documents confirm to non-grammar based rules; something other schemas (e.g. DTD, XSD, and RELAX NG) cannot do. It gets covered in here.

RELAX NG is slightly more powerful than XSD and way simpler than XSD. What is the advantage of XSD (W3 XML Schema, you ask? Good question! Not much.

The combination of RELAX NG + Schematron is as superior to W3 XML Schema as it is to the DTD standard, which has been inherited from the aged SGML standard created in the 1960s.

Some reviewers of this book harp on its mysterious decision to include Schematron and RELAX NG. Guess what, they have both been ISO approved standards (crucial to the DSDL, as a matter of fact) for over a year, and they have both existed for around a half decade or so.

Note that it is just a little bit too thick to fit in my shirt pocket. It is amazing how much information on so many useful XML standards they packed in one little book.

It was different than what I expected. That was a good thing, otherwise I probably would have been disappointed.

The documentary completely drove home the point that there was more than one POV. In fact, it gave strong hints that there were quite a lot of perspectives on events.

The documentary did not try to show one clear vision or version of the truth. Rather it just showed what some people thought, said, showed, and saw.

Probably it should have been a little longer if it was to give a clear picture of what was going on. However, then it would have been less successful at giving a quick picture of what it was like to be where things were going on.

The backdrop was the war in Iraq. However, it really did seem to be about what it is like to be in the news media. The title of the movie is particularly ironic.

Al Jazeera did not seem to be in control of events at all.

Being an architect, or even a good engineer – you have to take “things that can go wrong” into account.

Many times in our lives we will hear “that cannot happen” when what the speaker really means is “I hope that does not happen”. The problem is, the things that are not supposed to happen do happen.

We see examples of this in Chernobyl, the Hyatt sky walk collapse, and so on.

To remove the possibility of these occurences from the world, we would have to eliminate both people and chance. Obviously, we do not want to do that.

Therefore we need to take people, their actions, and their work products into account. Then we must figure out the probabilities that things we do not want to happen ...can and will occur.

In this way, we can not only predict our mistakes but other causes of mishaps as well.

1. no index at the back
2. computer programs cited in the back are written in FORTRAN, which has passed out of favor in most of academia and most industries

Given the volume of the book that covers matters of logic and set theory, it would have been nice if the authors had expressed some of the concepts in a logic programming language such as Prolog.

Given that lots of probabilities are used, it would have been interesting too if they had furnished some short programming examples using a fuzzy logic programming language like Fuzzy CLIPS.

Other than that, the book is very helpful and pretty easy to read. The NRC has done an excellent job with this book.

I noticed that it now sells on Amazon for well over $200!

Nescafé instant coffee is so much butter than Maxwell House instant!

I never understood why people called coffee “mud” sometimes until now.

If you think you like this, you owe it to yourself to try Nescafé. I rarely give a product low marks but this one deserves it.

As is pretty evident from the JDK 1.5 documentation, JDK 1.5 adds number of new features to the Java language and classes to the standard Java SE standard library.

• generics (syntactically like C++ templates but incapable of metaprogramming, Sun says)
• java.util.concurrent package of high-level thread-management classes
• Scanner offers an easier way to write tokenizers and such
• new classes for XML validation & XPath expression evaluation
• 5 new types of RowSet including one designed for the Web
• autoboxing (implicit conversion of primitives to their object-equivalents
• collection-iterating for-each loop
• ProcessBuilder – a better way to spawn processes than the treacherous Runtime.exec) technique

JDK 1.6 comes out shortly and I want to completely master 1.5 before 1.6 arrives.

This was very good. It was served with sticky steamed white rice, a salad, and some sushi.

It covers JBoss 4, is easy to read, well-illustrated, and its instructions work on the Mac – not just MS-Windows and Linux.

Oh, and all the screenshots were taken on a Macintosh. Seems to be a noticeable trend these days for development tools books.

The instructions were written using JDK 1.4 but the book says they will work with JDK 1.5.

JBoss 4.0 runs J2EE 1.4.