excellent reading material...

...here:Adam Bosworth's Weblog: ISCOC04 Talk
Apart from the technical material written, I like the prose; flowing simply and effortlessly.

Flawed WSDL

An interesting article on the flaws of WSDL 2.0 is here. Interesting reading, specially the first and second headlined sections.

few days off the net...

...mean a big load of reading to be done. I feel bogged down after having been sparingly on the net for the last few days only :-(
Struggling to catch up. OTOH, holidays perhaps should be net-free.

rocketman

yesterday evening there was a documentary on TV about Nazi Germany's "rocketman", Wernher von Braun, who was the key figure in the development of rocket technology in the first half of the forties. The famous V2 rocket, which was used in the last stages of the war, was also built by his team. The documentary focused on his activities while Hitler was in power, and claimed that he personally authorised using slave labour in the production of the rockets. But since he was "strategically important" to the Americans due to his technical skills, he was allowed into USA, where he continued to work on NASA's rocket plans, and was also part of the team that built the rocket that went till the moon. Incidentally, von Bruan was said to have claimed while in Germany that his mission was to make a rocket reach the moon, and not London, for which he was briefly imprisoned, but released again so that he could continue his work.
It was an interesting documentary, and even though I was vaguely aware of Germany's development efforts in rocket technology, this is the first time I learnt the actual names and places in detail.

posting using WLAN

Well, for the first time in my life, I am connected to the internet using WLAN here at the university. I am off from the office, and just came to the library to return some books. And I also brought my Toshiba laptop with me, which has built in support for WLAN. Well, I do remember doing some configurations for connecting to the univ. WLAN some time back, such as having installed a VPN client, but connecting today was easy, and the speed (it says 11 Mbps) is pretty much okay. Much much better than the dial up connection at home:-) I do hope, though, that the connection is encrypted, and that my passwords are not being read off. For the time being my using the WLAN is just an example of making use of technology without understanding it.

managed to capture this last Sunday, when it was pretty sunny, at a lake here in Harburg, with my 20D.

'am on holiday

this means will be posting sparsely these days.

updating bookmarks file

For quite some time, I have maintained my bookmarks in an XML file. Its been, however, pretty tedious to maintain this file, since I save my bookmarks in the browser, and from time to time I had been manually adding the saved bookmarks to the XML file.
I recently thought of creating a program in C# to automate the process, and also to use dotNet's XML libraries, which I previously used quite some time ago, and found to be pretty user-friendly.
Today, however, I spent quite some time figuring out why, when adding a node to an element would overwrite the previously written node. Turned out that I was adding the same node again and again, and the behaviour of the C#'s System.Xml.XmlNode class's appendChild() method is to remove the node to be added first if it is already present.
Now I can update my bookmarks collection pretty much automatically. I say pretty much, since I start from Firefox's bookmarks.html file, which is where the browser stores bookmarks. I convert that to an XML file first, which means getting rid of some tags, which is, however, simple using an editor's replace function. I also looked briefly for some tools which could take an arbitrary HTML file and clean it up and convert it to XML, but did not find any easy to use one, and gave up, since its not difficult to make an XML out of it manually. The rest, and the difficult part, can at least be done automatically.

an autumn view.