trip to Poland this year

This year I had a chance to visit Poland. We went to the city of Poznan, which is a nice little town with a medieval history as well.

Well, first we had to pay an exorbitant amount for the visa, i.e. 78 Euros just for a short, five days visit!! We went there by plane, first from Hamburg to Warsaw, and then from Warsaw to Poznan. Poznan has a nice little airport, which seems pretty newly built. From Hamburg to Warsaw, we flew on a type of plane which is usually the private jet of super rich. From Warsaw to Poznan, there was a propellar based plane, noisy, but not uncomfortable.
The first funny thing to happen was the taxi fare we paid for a ride from the airport to the hotel, though we found that out on our last day in Poznan, when we took a taxi from the hotel back to the airport. The taxi driver who took us to our hotel had charged us five times the normal fare!!! I guess that was his good day.

We were among the very few non-locals in Poznan, and we did get curious, but never unfriendly, glances. Poznan also has a big university, (there may be more, but is the one which I know, since this is where the conference I attended took place) which was not far from our hotel, so there were lots of young people visible whenever we went out.

There is a historical city center in Poznan as well, which has some nice architecture, and attracts a number of tourists, mostly european, which once again made us stand out in the crowd :-)
The thing we liked most was, however, the zoo in Poznan. Actually there are two, and the newer one is quite outside the city, but the old one, which we visited, is inside the city, and small, but really, really good. It has lots of animals, is clean, spacious, and not over-crowded. Our son really enjoyed it there.

nice resource on XML related stuff

One site I check out each Thursday is XML.com. New content is added every Wednesday, and almost every week there is an article which makes informative reading.

informative article...

...on the WS-* workshops process is available here.

what I did last Friday

well, last Friday I had my first job interview in Germany. I think I'll disclose the name of the company once I hear their (positive or negative) response. But the experience was very nice. The team I met were young, quite like the one we have here at the department, and easy to go along with. I was nervous, of course, but not uncomfortable. And this is a very important thing for me. Plus the work they do is very much the thing I am into, and so this is another reason I was pleased to get a chance for the interview. If something good comes out of it, I would take the chance without any hesitancy.
I reached the offices of the company much earlier, and the building where I sat in the waiting area also housed the canteen. Since it was lunch time, many poeple were coming or going to or from lunch. I heard german, of course, but also english, and not surprisingly, urdu as well. This is a good sign.
I had the interview discussion in german. Plus I got a compliment that I speak pretty good german:-) Well this has happened to me before, and I really don't know whether people who say this mean it as a compliment, or the opposite of it. I, however, tend to assume the former :-)
As I said, let's see what becomes of it.

5 MP mobile camera phone

According to this ,Samsung have announced a 5 MP camera phone.
Is it a camera or a mobile phone? Ostensibly, its both. Actually its more; it can record movies as well, and has a TV function as well, whatever that might mean.
Would I ever like to have something like this? Yes, only if I am out of my mind.
Of course, at present, I am pretty happy with my simple and lightweight mobile from Nokia, which I mostly use as an alarm to wake me up in the morning, and only occasionally as a mobile, and my Canon 20D.
Well, just occured to me, if the primary use of my mobile phone is to wake me up in the morning, why can't it be taking pictures for others? Makes sense, methinks.

Earthquake in Hamburg

Yesterday morning there was an earthquake in Hamburg. Pretty unusual!! I was sitting in my office, and could feel the building shaking. It seemed very much like an earthquake, since I have experienced a few in Lahore, my home city. But since I thought there are no earthquakes in Hamburg, I assumed some heavy work being done across from my office's building, where two new university buildings are being erected. Only last evening in the news did I found it really was an earthquake. Here is a link in german: 8.59 Uhr: Die Erde bebt bis Hamburg

new laptop

My new Toshiba laptop is now operational. So far pretty good.

well written article on Bloglines Web Services

A well-written article explaining the Bloglines web services APIs is here:O'Reilly Network: The New Bloglines Web Services

Incidently, these APIs are not SOAP-based, and were used as an example by REST advocates to justify their points of view in the many recent REST-SOAP discussions on different blogs.

article about REST and SOAP

An article over at IBM developerWorks differentiates between REST-style and SOAP-style services as them being resource-oriented and activity-oriented, respectively. Simple article, though I don't much like the description of SOAP based services as invocations of operations exposed by a service. I tend to see web services interactions as being, simply, message passing. Its just messages that are passed between services (and their users), and not operations that are invoked on service, though of course exactly this may happen when a service receives a message. But then, of course, this is an internal detail of the service, and not visible to the message sender.

A view of Hamburg's Alster lake.

recently read...

...Blair's Wars by John Kampfner.
Well, it was okay, not very interesting. One thing I thought a number of times reading the book was, what exactly is the writer trying to convey in this book? Unfortunately I couldn't find that out even till the end.
Furthermore, books that rely solely on unnamed sources don't really cut it out with me, even though I realize that its not always possible to name the sources.

W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services

For those interested in different methods of representing policies for web services, this page is a good resource: W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services

continuing REST and SOAP thingy

The furious debate, mainly about the WS-* (mess or protocol suite, depends on what you call it), that ensued recently after the WS-Transfer specification was published seems to have quietened a bit. Here is an interesting blog entry, and the comments made to it are also interesting reading: Eric Newcomer's Weblog: "Complexity in REST and SOAP"

new laptop ordered

After having returned the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M 1420 laptop that I had bought, I have now ordered a Toshiba model. It too has pretty similar specifications, just a 20GB smaller harddisk, but at the same price as the Amilo.
This time I am just going to plug it in, and keep it running for 2 days straight, and then see how warm/hot it gets. If it stays within acceptable limits, then I'll keep it.
Last time I noticed the hotting-up only after I had spent almost 2 full days on configuring the laptop to my needs and taste.
I have ordered it from the same online shop, since I had very good experience with their customer service.

new gmail features

Now its possible to get notified about any new mail by using Gmail Notifier. This is pretty good. Another useful feature addition is being able to save drafts.

This one is from a different location, and at 1/6 seconds. Here the motion blur is more visible, but at a larger resolution, so is the effect of hand-holding at this shutter speed.

a picture taken at a newly opened shopping mall (Phoenix Center) here in Harburg. Camera was handheld at 1/10 seconds, (with my elbows resting on a railing for support). I also tried at 1/15 seconds, but even that was not sufficient to give a pronounced motion blur to the people in the picture, even though the people were walking about rather briskly. I had assumed that 1/15 seconds would be enough.

WS-MetadataExchange specification updated

A newer version of the Web Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange) specification is now available.
I just went quickly through it, and it seems that the individual messages for getting the WSDL description of a service, its schema and policy have been combined into a single Getmetadata message, and the different metadata is differentiated by a Dialect and an Identifier elements, which are URIs which identify, for example, a metadata as being of type WS-policy. The specification also contains an example of a particular type of metadata being sent by reference, and then a method to retrieve the metadata using this reference.

a popular figure

This is perhaps the most used figure in web services-related literature !!