eveningwalk, a weblog by George Girton

Quiet Neighborhood . . . . . mar 20 2003 — pmwalk28.dat

I took the dog for a quiet walk around the neighborhood last night, before dinner but after dark. We didn't take the usual route, going up the alley to avoid a smoker headed our way.

Passing a bar that used to be known as "D.B. Cooper's", named after the hijacker who jumped out the back of a 737 with a bag of money and was never found, we noticed (the dog and I) a basketball game on the huge television inside the bar: no war yet.

Across the street, the Islamic cultural center was quiet, just one car in the parking lot. A modern plastic sign, new I think, towers over the parking lot entrance and shows a map of what looks like Iran.

Just two blocks farther on, television in a convenience store showed downtown Baghdad, in what could have been a still picture.

I headed home past Chabad House and rounding a corner came across a young woman outside in her yard, talking on a cell phone to her mom. Her dog, an aged blond retriever off leash, trotted over to my dog and communed. I gave her a pat, said "good dog," and went home to watch the war begin.

XML extravaganza . . . . . mar 5 2003 — pmwalk27.dat

My parking space -- free -- was blocks from the monthly Java user group meeting, but after a long freeway journey the walk in the evening air was welcome. A rain shower had just passed through, so the air was clean and chilly.

James White gave a two-hour presentation of XML Web Forms at the Los Angeles Java User Group meeting, and it was well worth listening to. His basic approach was to use an entirely open source chain of tools, and write as little code as possible, to generate as much code as possible from an XML schema specifying the data structure of the forms.

At the end, he was dissatisfied with the amount of complexity necessary to put together a plain web form, and thought Apache Xindice would present a better underlying schema mechanism for the forms. It looks like this effort will be taking shape, it will continue to be open source, and you can follow it here.