Christian Weyer blogs. RSS subscribed.

Should I start building a bomb shelter?

Kartoo. I'm probably the last one to find out about Kartoo, but it's really cool.[Andres Aguiar's Weblog]

A link to Kartoo has been in my navigation bar (this page, on the left) ever since this blog exists   Also ever since then there has been a link to Corona Production's "Upcoming Attractions" site. Want to know what the current rumors are about Star Wars 3? Go here.

AOP ServicedComponents!

For those attending my talks at the Microsoft Strategic Architect's Forum in South Africa next week (that's an "by invite only" event), I am very happy to announce that I am going to be demonstrating, for the first time, a stable version of my brand-new AOP extensions for Enterprise Services. It's an extensible framework that allows writing custom, managed attributes, which are invoked from within the server-side context and allow interception and inspection at the class, interface, method, property, field and argument level. 

The example below illustrates the functionality using a set of validation attributes, but there's significantly more you could do. I will have to do quite a bit of documentation work before I can make this available, but there will be downloadable bits for everyone to play with within the next couple of weeks.

   [Transaction]
   public class Component : newtelligence.EnterpriseServices.AspectServicedComponent
   {
      private string val = "";

      public Component()
      {
      }

      [Match("[A-Z]*")]
      public string SetMeGetMe
      {
         get { return val; }
         set { val = value; }
      }

       [GreaterEqualTo(0)]
      public int TestField;

       [return: MinLength(1)]
      public string Hello( [MinLength(1),MaxLength(20)] string Name,
                          [Between(1,100)] int Age,
                          [MinLength(1)] out string retString,
                          [LaterThanToday] DateTime when)
      {
           return "Test";
      }
   }

Classpath hell as seen from inside the great ball of fire.

J2EE 1.4 Waits for Web Services.

CNet:

Sun Microsystems, which controls the widely used Java standard, said Tuesday that it will push out the delivery of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 specification until this summer. The J2EE 1.4 specification, which gives Java licensees the blueprint for building Java programming tools and server software, was set to debut in the current quarter.

The forthcoming J2EE specification incorporates Web services protocols, a set of standards and a programming method for connecting disparate computing systems. Adoption of Web services is accelerating as companies look for ways to lower the cost of sharing information.

Sun representatives said the company chose to push back the finalized J2EE 1.4 specification in order to comply with interoperability guidelines set forth by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).

[Matt Croydon::postneo]

And in three months they are expecting the profile to be stable and final? J2EE 1.3 may be the end of the road in terms of an agreed-upon all-vendor standard. With the ongoing delays of these specs, economic pressure on the middleware providers, and the volatility of all the "standards" we're currently dealing with... is anyone really waiting for this? Wouldn't J2EE 1.4 only be a snapshot that's valid only on the exact day the spec hits the street? The way and intensity in which the WS-* arena works is apparently very incompatible with how the JCP works.

newtelliblog. Seems like a lot of people are leaving Radio behind are are using other blogging tools. While I like Radio for what it does, it shouldn't take much longer and I'll be leaving as well.

I've got the core SQL store for a weblog centric "content system" almost feature complete; an extensible aggregation NT service that can read from RSS, RDF and Exchange web stores and which spits out the aggregated content via a pub/sub interface is already running; the rendering engine ("downwards compatible" with Radio design templates) is working and sits on top of ASP.NET and spits out RSS 2.0 feeds; the client tool looks a bit like MSN messenger and allows remote management via Web services as well as offline postings and already has the all-essential tiny HTTP server listening on port 5335 to catch clicks on Radio coffee-mugs.

And of course, it's all built on "dogfood". The Enterprise Services utilities, some of my Web services extensions, attribute-driven state management, JITA pooling and all that. So that noone can ever say we're not using our own stuff ;)

Radar traces of shuttle going down

 

Space Shuttle Columbia  breaks up on descent after atmosphere reentry

Terrible, terrible news. (check Google News)

Transcribing from TV news: All 7 astronauts aboard space shuttle Columbia (OV-102) [mirrored here] on mission STS-107 were killed when the shuttle apparently broke up on descent after earth atmosphere reentry. Contact was lost at 1500CET, 0800CST over Texas, scheduled landing time was 0916EST at Kennedy Space Center. The space shuttle is presumed to have disintegrated at 200000 feet and at 12500mph, some 100 miles south-east of Dallas. People in Texas are advised to report any findings of debris to local authorities and not to go near them due to the toxic propellant used in the shuttle.

The videos seem to indicate the the descent was mostly nominal until the shuttle suddenly breaks up into two and shortly afterwards into multiple pieces after a large flash as shown on the second picture above.

---

NASA statement:

STS-107
Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain declared a contingency for the shuttle Columbia at around 8:14 central time this morning (1414 GMT) as the shuttle and its seven astronauts headed for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center.

Columbia fired its braking rockets at 7:16 this morning (1316 GMT) and entered the Earth’s atmosphere with all of its systems functioning normally for a landing at the Florida spaceport at 8:16 a.m.(1416 GMT).

But communications were lost with Columbia around 8 o‘clock (1400 GMT) as the orbiter streaked over Texas.

NASA began to use all of its tracking facilities to look for Columbia, but communications were not restored by the time the shuttle had been scheduled to land.

Contingency procedures remain in effect and landing support officials are currently being dispatched near the Dallas-Forth Worth area to search for possible debris.

---

Witnesses in Palestine, TX report loud explosion sounds that shook their buildings. [16:30CET] Police in Nacogdoches reports finding debris.

---

CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews

STS-107 mission information at NASA: Crew, Timeline, Cargo, Press Kit (11MB PDF)
Better reachable: European Space Agency STS-107 information.

Commander	Rick Husband
Pilot	William McCool
Mission Specialist	Kalpana Chawla
Mission Specialist	David Brown
Mission Specialist	Michael Anderson
Mission Specialist	Laurel Clark
Payload Specialist	Ilan Ramon

[16:17 CET] Meanwhile, http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle is swamped and virtually unreachable

Huh! Someone really likes my utility set for Enterprise Services and correctly points out that they are in "preview" state, but very useful. The good news is: there's no timebomb. And, yes, there's going to be an update once Windows Server 2003 is "official". And, yes, there's going to be an option to get at the source code for all of it. These classes and a lot more code that only few folks have seen yet will be at the center of my developer-topics talks this year.

Fighting Windmills. Yesterday, Brussels was another stop of the ongoing Microsoft EMEA Architect's tour. Going through the customer feedback on my "Service Oriented Architectures" talk I once again realized that there's a lot more work to do in terms of educating people about the significance of XML. One of the core messages of my talk is that the XML InfoSet is the focus of integration.

The comment that caught my attention was stating that I were completely missing the point about interoperability because "XML is just a data format". 

Excuse me, Sir, but it's not. XML is a very broad and deep infrastructure for data that has moved very much beyond being a "data format". The "data format" perception of XML may have been accurate in 1998, but by now, the focus has entirely shifted towards the XML Information Set (Infoset).

Focusing on the Infoset and not on angle brackets allows you to serialize to and import from virtually any binary or text format (including XML 1.0 with angle brackets) and always have a central anchor point that is indeed independent of your choice of serialization format. If you look (just to name one example) at Microsoft's BizTalk Server, you will see that it's common practice to have a parser that reads EDIFACT and produces an Infoset, performs various operations on the Infoset and serializes the result back out as EDIFACT (or X.12 or some custom text format) again. The fact that BizTalk will indeed serialize that Infoset as XML 1.0 as it is passes through its internal pipeline stages is an internal implementation detail of BizTalk.

I am sorry to say that, but if today you still believe and insist that XML is just another data format, the train may already have left the station for you.

Patch Your SQL Servers!. As John has already reminded people, don't forget to patch your SQL Servers, paricuraly on laptops! As long as programmers still create buffer overruns, its important to apply all patches (well, its important to keep current with all OS patches). The security fix is rolled up in the SQL Server 2000 SP3, which you should install if you have SQL Server 2000. Otherwise, read about and install these patches. [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

Very funny ;) Is This a Joke?. [Matt Croydon::postneo]

A morning for reliable messaging. I got online this morning and close to nothing worked. I don't know whether today is "international router config day" It's "unpatched SQL Server exploit fest" or something, but and there's suspiciously many IP destinations I can't reach from where I am and tracert shows loops or broken routes at random places outside the Deutsche Telekom network (that's where my DSL is hooked up to). So, at first sight, it doesn't seem to be an immediate problem of my carrier. Sometimes a route comes back and then it breaks again. Very bad. So, whatever the problem is, time and hordes of technicians will eventually, hopefully solve it.

I am very happy that I don't have to make any business critical Web service calls via plain HTTP and without a reliable messaging protocol layer today. I'd be screwed. On mornings like these, "HTTP is the one and only protocol" purism makes handsome gunwounds in both of your feet. 

(snapshot as of 2001-01-25T10:00:00+1, click for current status)