Sunday June 06, 2004

The changing images on the top left corner of the page

Snapshots from some of my trips.

Making them change randomly when page loads. Some dummy javascript.

Here you have a set of nine:

To blog or not to blog

It has been a dilemma for me. I wouldn't say I'm much of a blogger. I've tried a few times before but I've given up. It takes time [trying] to do it well. We'll see how it goes this time.

Tucu WHO?

I've been with Sun since early 97 and these days I work in the Sun Portal Server engineering team on some collaboration initiatives.

Why you may have heard my name ...

Does JSR168 JavaTM Portlet Specification ring a bell? I was one of the specification co-leads. As spec-lead I should have to take much of the blame. But I'm not alone there, I have a co-lead (Stefan Hepper) and a whole Expert Group to share it with, community effort I'd say. Doing JSR168 was a great experience. I've got to work with many sharp folks from different companies. I had to learn some political skills. I had fun working on the spec and I'd say I was not alone. We even managed to have an Expert Group face to face meeting in Breckenridge (CO) in January (you connect the dots :). Or Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)? I've participated on the doings of WSRP specification as well. Some more blame to take. I've met more smart people. I've learned other political skills (it's a complete different ball game when you are not the captain). We had fun there too. After a face to face in Grenoble (France) I've wandered through Pais Catar (France southwest) for a few days.

In a previous life I've worked in the iPlanet eCommerce division, in the iMM (iPlanet Market Maker) product designing and implementing a multi-dimensional spot exchange (sounds cool, doesn't it?). Before that I was in Sun IT doing reusable components in Java, many of them are part of today's Sun internal IT applications. Rewinding a little more, I was living in Buenos Aires, where I've worked for Sybar (Sybase Argentinean Distributor back then) doing technical support, presales support, consulting and some management. I'm sure there are still Sybase customers down there that have fliers with my picture offering some mony in exchange of my whereabouts. And I believe the Argentinean customs MARIA system is still using some C/C++ libraries and UI framework I did for them (through SIF America) back in 93.

Syndication feeds Hell

Before you continue reading, the topic covered in this posting has been widely discussed already. Following you'll find a rant on the nonsense of Syndication feeds, RSS0.9 ... RS2.0 and Atom. I just needed to write it to take it out of my system. You've been warned.

I've been following some of the technologies used and/or being developed around weblogging for a while now. I find very interesting how features and functionality keeps being added to the weblog world with (almost) no impact on the bloggers, their weblog systems take care of doing most (if not all) the job (ie: web pinging, trackbacks, etc). My interpretation is that [maybe] the reason for this it is that not always these features are brainchildren of technical oriented folks (you know, programmers). Or if they were thought by technical oriented folks, those folks knew the fact not everybody is techie. It's like the approach has been “It would be nice if when I post a weblog the following happens" instead of being “It would be nice if I can do the following when posting a weblog".

Granted that things get a little hairy when you get N ways of doing the same thing in a short period of time where N closely equates to the number of weblog software packages out there. In the end it's Darwinism in action and after a while things settle. Not a bad thing, even if the prevailing technology doesn't do it for its technical merits.

But there is an exception. One of the first and core features weblogs rely on, syndication feeds. Things went wild there and it is not that we are getting insects, reptiles or mammals. They are all almost the same. And *almost* is the problem. I won't go on the history, all the differences among the different types of feeds or their design problems, pretty good articles and weblogs have been written about it. One of my favorites is Mark Pilgrim's The myth of RSS compatibility. And don't forget to add Atom to hte mix.

It's just plainly insane. Their specifications shouldn't be called that. Think, if you are doing an application that will parse an XML document, what is one of the first things you want to do, ensure the XML document is valid. To do that you'd like to have a DTD or the XML-Schema handy. With the exception of Netscape's RSS 0.91, (that has DTD), none of the RSS or Atom specifications includes a DTD or XML-Schema(*). If you are a programmer that has to deal with syndication feeds, you know this is just the beginning of your nightmare.

A few of months ago I started working on some projects around collaboration and I've became a victim myself of what I call Syndication feeds Hell.

Addendum I

(*) If you find them please let me know, I've spent Google hours with no luck.