Symphonious

I’ve been looking into creating an editor for the JDNC XML descriptor file using EditLive! for XML partly as a test case for ELX using a big and complex schema, partly as a way to contribute to that community and partly as a marketing effort (it would make for a good example of what you can do with ELX). Sadly, the JDNC schema is completely invalid so it causes a whole heap of errors to be output by Xerces and finally causes Xerces to throw an ArrayOutOfBoundsException.

Since we use the schema heavily and use Xerces to parse it, that makes the JDNC schema pretty much a no-go for ELX right now (not to mention making it completely useless for anything else). I’ll have to check a few things before I can be completely sure it’s the JDNC schema that’s causing the problems (obviously the exception from Xerces should never happen either) but I’m pretty sure it’s missing some imports for schemas it references.

The schema also seems to override types in a way that isn’t supported (attempting to change mixed content types to element only).

What the hell is a kiss and ride? I’ve heard of park and rides where you can drive a short distance from home then park and catch a train the rest of the way but a kiss and ride? I guess it’s a drop off point where you get your husband/wife (or in San Francisco your boyfriend) to drive you a short distance from home and then you catch the train and they drive home again. Still wouldn’t it be easier to call it a drop off point? Is it really that inconceivable that someone might be dropped off by someone they don’t want to kiss?

Anyway, I’ve got to go find a good looking girl to give me a lift to the train station tomorrow…..

(I wrote this Thursday night but didn’t have net access on the train to post it)

I finally managed to catch up with a number of Apache people tonight at the Thirsty Bear (rest assured the bear is not quite as thirsty after our beer drinking efforts). Afterwards we picked up the two new IBM servers that have been sitting at Collab.Net and deposited them into the cage at the colo facility. Since I’m not a server guy at all this is one of very few times I’ve been in a server room and the first chance I’ve had to see the Apache server setup (there’s now another colo in Europe somewhere I believe).

It’s pretty small and simple but seems to do the job quite well which is what really matters. Apparently the Technorati servers are in the same colo and they look a heck of a lot more impressive with a few racks full of servers and cables going everywhere.

Either way it was great to finally meet a few Apache developers and put some faces to names. My description of myself as “the tall redhead” seemed to be effective as people walked straight in the door and introduced themselves to me. Sometimes it pays to stand out a bit I guess.

Chris DeBona argues that the incompatibilities between Linux distributions don’t matter because the majority of people use RedHat or SUSE so that’s all people bother supporting.

Of particular note is the quote:

In the windows world, people don’t feel the need to support every version of windows, either.

In the Java world we do try to support everything. We want everything to be compatible, we raise the bar so that code should run everywhere. Sure it doesn’t always work out but that’s the aim and it’s simply not good enough to lower the standards for compatibility to what the linux distributions have - it’s not even good enough to lower standards for compatibility to what Windows offers.

So Chris, you obviously need to spend a lot more time in the Java community rather than the Linux community to grasp this argument.