Tim on JSON and XML

From ongoing · JSON and XML:

There used to be an argument about whether platform-neutral, language-neutral data formats were important, or whether distributed objects were the right answer. That’s over: HTML, XML, JSON. ¶

There used to be people who argued that network interchange formats shouldn’t be text-based, but use binary where possible, for efficiency. That’s over: HTML, XML, JSON.

I used to be in the people who argued camp, but at this point I’m almost convinced. It’s a little spooky using an over-the-wire format that looks like the kind of pseudocode we’re used to scribbling all over the whiteboard, but perhaps that’s the whole point. We’ll see……

Happy solstice to all

Seasonal greetings to all who are celebrating the longest-running holiday in the world. People have been marking this occasion ever since they were able to make calendars, and I don’t expect that to change as long as there are (moderately) intelligent species inhabiting the planet. The event has always been tricked out with various cultural and mythological decorations, and most of them are entirely charming. (There are some obvious exceptions, like “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” and store-bought egg nog.) Just don’t let any group claim that their “meaning” of the season is The One True Way. Those silly folks just have no sense of history.

Remembering Carl

carl sagan buttonToday, December 20th 2006, is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s untimely death. Among his many gentle – but uncompromising – admonitions, this was always a personal favourite:

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

If only more people realized this….
Check out the Celebrating Sagan blog – part of the Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon. People have posted video and audio clips, anecdotes, reminiscences, photographs, and personal tributes. Lots of stuff to make you think – which is the whole point, isn’t it?
UPDATE: My colleague Werner has just posted his thoughts about Sagan the educator.

A rude awakening

I’ve got into a nice, relaxed pattern on Sunday mornings: I make a pot of coffee, curl up in front of the TV with the coffee and a pack of oatmeal-and-raisin cookies biscuits, and watch back-to-back English Premier League matches for four hours. It’s a nice, predictable, comfortable habit.

Until this morning.

First West Ham beat Manchester United 1-0, which means that Chelsea are only 2 points behind ManU (sorry!) the Red Devils at the top of the league. And then Spurs, hitherto winless on the road, beat Manchester City, breaking their perfect home record. The second match included one of the prettiest goals I’ve ever seen: a glorious 20-yard half-volley by Tom Huddlestone (pictured).
Tom Huddlestone after scoring his first EPL goal

Great viewing, but hardly the relaxing Sunday morning I had anticipated. In fact I’m going to have to dig out the vacuum cleaner to clean up all the cookie crumbs….

Photos from Oxford & Edinburgh

Belatedly following Alec, I’ve posted some of my photos from my recent trip to the UK. There are rather a lot of “views from a train window” which capture an utterly typical (but not particularly photogenic) view of England. Oh, well. I particularly enjoy the shots I took in the Covered Market in Oxford with Alec, such as:
Alec's choice
and
Feathers too
Oxford itself was as photogenic as ever, e.g.
Timeless style
And finally, here are my mother and Alec in conversation:
Lorna Alec
Enjoy.

A very long day

I’m back in Seattle after a long day’s travel. Door-to-door (i.e. Edinburgh hotel to my apartment) it took 22 hours 30 minutes. Segment by segment:

  • The taxi to Edinburgh airport was wonderful. The driver was a great character: something of a social philosopher, with a wicked sense of humour.
  • EDI-LHR on a British Midland A320, BD53: a classic business-person’s shuttle flight. Most people were clearly going to London for the day: suits were immaculate, briefcases full of the right papers. The striking thing was the depth of the cloud bank over the northern UK: we climbed out of EDI, entered cloud at about 400 ft. AGL, and didn’t break out into sunshine until 30 minutes later at about FL320. Of course due to the new British rules (“only one piece of carry-on baggage, INCLUDING laptops, handbags, purses, etc.”) I had to check my case. Inevitably it was one of the last ones off the carousel at LHR. I retrieved it, and headed over to Terminal 3.
  • United occupies the remotest spot in Heathrow’s Terminal 3, and it’s always a hassle to get there. When I did, the self-checkin machine refused to check me in and told me to see a human. (I could have predicted this, since I’d been blocked at the same point during online checkin.) There was one person handling “Special needs”, and 30 people ahead of me in line. All of a sudden, my 2 hour connection time started to look awfully inadequate. Eventually I got checked in and headed upstairs. It was now 11. I was herded into a line, six people wide, running the length of the terminal building, just to get into the security area. 30 minutes later I reached the head of this line, showed my boarding card, and entered the serpentine queue for the X-ray/metal detector/pat-down screening. When I did reach the X-rays, I was pulled out for a thorough pat-down by a pimply youth who examined me as thoroughly as it’s possible to do without actually removing clothing. I smiled politely, retrieved my shoes, jacket, laptop and case, and headed for the gate. I arrived at 12:05pm; the plane was due to depart at 12:20pm. That is closer than I ever want to be on an international connection.
  • The flight itself (LHR-ORD, UA949, 777, seat 22J in Economy Plus) was completely uneventful. We took a northerly route, just skimming the southern tip of Greenland, and things went very smoothly. There were a few noisy kids around, but I plugged in my noise-cancelling headphones and listened to channel 9. (During the oceanic segment, I dug out my iPod and chose two albums: the new Love mash-up of Beatles’ classics, and No Roots by Faithless. Both highly recommended.)
  • ORD was efficient, in a kind of robotic way. After clearing Immigration and Customs and schlepping over to Terminal 1 [What idiot decided to have both terminals and concourses? I was departing from gate B5, which meant the B Concourse, which corresponded to Terminal 1. Stupid.], I got through security (third time of the day) hit the RCC and grabbed a gin-and-tonic before logging in to check email. Bad plan: I should have eaten.
  • The final flight was UA949, ORD-SEA, B757, seat 12F in Economy Plus. I keep forgetting that row 12 is bad, because it doesn’t have a window. Never mind, it was dark, and I was tired. 12E was empty, so I spread out, kicked back, plugged into channel 9, and went to sleep. This meant that I missed the stupid “snack box” food for sale thing. I went back to sleep, as best I could, but it was a miserably bumpy flight: 170 kt. headwinds, continuous light chop to moderate turbulence, all aircraft hunting vainly for clean air. With that kind of weather we inevitably missed our 8:05pm arrival time, but it was OK: I’d carried on my bags, and so I was able to catch the 8:54pm bus (Route 174) and get home by 9:30pm.

No predictions for how I’m going to get through tomorrow. And speaking of tomorrow, Seattle is due for the same kind of weather as Edinburgh: blustery rain, with sustained gale force winds. Meanwhile the East Coast is basking in unseasonably warm weather……
But overall it was a really delightful trip. It was great to be with my mother for her 91st birthday, good to see my brother and get into Oxford, and a wonderful bonus to spend time with Alec. The Amazon Development Centre team in Scotland blew me away; I hope I don’t offend anyone in Seattle when I say that ADC includes some of the most imaginative engineers that I’ve met at Amazon. They’re a really cool team, and I learned a lot from them. (And special thanks to Joan L. for handling the logistics – it all went flawlessly!)

South Queensferry

I’ve just finished a most enjoyable day of meetings here at the Amazon development centre in South Queensferry, just outside Edinburgh. It’s been very windy and (mostly) wet here, so I wasn’t able to get out at lunch to take any photographs. Also, the window of opportunity is small: at this latitude, this close to the solstice, there isn’t much daylight: sunrise is at 8:34am and sunset at 3:39pm.

Time to head back to the hotel (just the other side of a very busy roundabout, with lots of bridge traffic). I do have an umbrella, but from the howling wind I don’t think I ought to use it.

Blogging on the train

Did you miss me?

At this moment I’m sitting in seat 21A, coach L of the 11:45am train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. It’s 2:57pm, and we’re just pulling out of Durham, so there’s still nearly two hours to go. Fortunately the train has free WiFi and there’s a decent meal service: I have a nice bottle of Lebanese red wine to go with the various snacks that keep appearing.

The flight from Seattle to Heathrow was delightfully uneventful; the Economy Plus section of the B777 on the ORD-LHR leg was almost empty. (Good for me, bad for United.) In a first for me I was carrying on all my bags, so I sailed through customs at Heathrow, caught the bus to Oxford, and made it there before sun-up.

I had a most enjoyable Thursday and Friday with my mother and brother in Oxford. (Friday was Lorna’s 91st birthday.) On Saturday, Alec Muffett came up and he and I spent a delightful time in Oxford. Covered Market, lunch at the King’s Arms, self-indulgence at Blackwell’s, dessert at the wonderful patisserie Maison Blanc, some shopping, and then back to Lorna’s.

This morning I set out to Edinburgh. I was booked on the 9:38 train from Oxford to Paddington, and some deep-seated skepticism made me catch an earlier bus and get to the station just after 9. At 9:15 they announced that the 9:38 train was cancelled. Almost immediately, they informed us that the train at Platform 3 was the 9:05(!) to London. There was a moment of chaos as all of the passengers who were booked on the 9:38 (including yours truly) dashed towards the 9:05….. Fortunately I arrived at Paddington in plenty of time to catch a Circle Line train to King’s Cross and I boarded the 11:45 train to Edinburgh at 11:30.
GNER train

We’ve just arrived at Newcastle station. I haven’t been here since 1976. Back in the 1970s I was a post-grad student at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and between 1973 and 1976 I would regularly travel between Newcastle and London. Since then I’ve never returned; even today, I’m only passing through. How strange.

pecunium on torture

Must-read: Terry, on Torture, and what it is. Remember: Terry knows what he’s talking about. He understands interrogation in the way that no politician or pundit can. He’s a professional.

Padilla’s treatment is an outrage. Not just that it happened (secret prisons aren’t really that hard to make, nor even to keep secret) but that when the details come out, no one seems to care.

Freeman Dyson

I just got back from the Freeman Dyson talk at the Town Hall. I’ve always liked his writing – I thought Infinite In All Directions was wonderful – but I’ve been concerned with his wobbly thinking after the Templeton Prize. See Edge #180 for Dawkins’ scathing comments about Dyson’s Templeton piece. Like Dawkins, I don’t know what to make of stuff like:

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.

Since I’m one of those people who think that “minds are what brains do”, this is completely incoherent.
Anyway, the talk began with a very entertaining introduction by George Dyson, Freeman’s son, which included the clip from ST:NG where Picard speculates that an object that the Enterprise has discovered might be “a Dyson sphere”! As Freeman Dyson later commented, everybody completely misunderstood him: he always meant “biosphere”, specifically a loose assemblage of inhabited objects orbiting at the right distance from a star. A rigid sphere would be mechanically impossible.
Freeman Dyson’s talk was actually on biotechnology. It’s taken people less than 50 years to go from the first computers to a total addition to pervasive computer technology. He expects the same thing to happen to biotech over the next 50 years – complete domestication. He got a bit mystical over evolution – in the beginning everything shared genetic information horizontally – “open source biology”; then some organisms got selfish and Darwinian evolution kicked in; now humans are ushering in a new era of genetic sharing, marking the end of the “Darwinian interlude”. A rather blinkered view, IMHO. There was stuff about creating plants with silicon leaves to boost energy capture from 1% to 10%, and an impassioned plea for scientific freedom from political interference. And er… that’s it.
The questions were mostly softballs about energy futures, and the wonder of mathematics, and so forth. And then someone asked him about science and religion, and Dyson got all hot and bothered and ranted about Dawkins for a bit, and then realized that he was getting over the top, and backed off. And then I left. I hope many of the audience (200+) bought his new book; since I’ve already read most of the essays (reviews from the NYT, NYRB, etc.), I didn’t bother.
PS It was odd to be back at the Town Hall for the third night in a row – two Tallis Scholars concerts, now this lecture.