Jonas Beckman

What the title says – I ate something bad yesterday, had 24 rather lousy hours but is getting better. See you tomorrow!

Thanks to everyone who visits here! Yesterday I was number 36 on Userland’s Most read sites yesterday – that was a nice surprise. Spreading flow is good, so today I added permanent links to some of my favorites.

But I want links that look good and are easy to update. As you can see, I’m not there yet.
I own Frontier, but don’t host a server at home yet – so I would like to do this using plain Manila.

Weblogging is fun, tweaking look&feel is fun, thinking about site structure is fun, too – but adding multiple link-lists in HTML is boring!

If I must hack HTML from scratch, I use HotMetal Pro – excellent HTML documentation and doesn’t add funny tags. But I’d rather not.

Yesterday I started from the beginning, and used Pike to clean up my site template. Pike is good for this, there is a nice tight little process: tinker, save, switch window, refresh… try again. It reminded me of programming in environments like Delphi, Smalltalk or Hypercard.

There are probably clues I haven’t found yet in the Manila Newbies. But now that Brent is on the case, newbie templates will happen – and it will be fun!

The weather is so beautiful here right now I will be outdoors for a while – I may continue later tonight.

Very late last night I surfed by the minimalistic homepage of the Stockholm festival of Kites. For a “maximalistic” kite-site, try tangoKites.

During the Seventies the kite-festival was something of a “gathering of the clan” for many alternative people. In later years, there was always a touch of sadness to that – in the Eighties I would have strange meetings with the odd survivor and hear tales of the others. I haven’t been there for a few years now.

The one thing I never did back then was build a kite. Now I have a week to go – I’ll call Aila and see what she is up to!

Today I was back on Userland’s Most read sites yesterday. Thanks for visiting, everyone!

Oh, and don’t worry if the page looks strange today – I’m in the middle of a re-design. Mark Canter is right: tweaking templates made by real designers is the way to go. Yesterday he reviewed some nice ETP site templates – I’ll take it from there.

Two very allergic days, slightly depressed and with lots of work to do. And now I’m not on Userland’s new Top 100 list! Wonder if I’m off the list for good?

Today Joel Spolsky posted a great article about building the right kind of company. If you plan to start a company (or already run one) there is one deep and important decision to make – and Joel describes it with beautiful simplicity. I’ll link to this again!

Not so simple: graphs in the Web. Thanks to Curmudgeon for the link.

Yesterday I finally took a long lunch break to visit my friend Kristoffer Leandoer and had some very rich discussions in his beautiful new home. Half an hour after I left we bumped into each other again – in one of the best second-hand bookshops in Stockholm.
So I bought three books and read the first one the same day:

A new Swedish book about German writer Ernst Junger‘s life between 1928-1934. At the time he and his friends, perhaps foolishly, considered themselves “prussian anarchists”. Junger was a fine writer, but his early ideas have always struck some people as suspiciously close to the Nazis. (In 1933 the Weimar Republic fell apart when Hitler won the elections and then made himself dictator – this was also the end of an extremely interesting period of German culture).

The second book was a very nice illustrated edition of Kalevipoeg – the estonian national epos, somewhat similar to the Finnish Kalevala.

A brief history of the Estonian book

And finally I found a book my father mentioned when I was very young – a Russian novel which (in the Swedish edition) has the marvellous title The man who played chess with Life. The author, Sirin, many years later became more known as Vladimir Nabokov.

Stockholm has many fine second-hand bookshops: this was “Antikvariat Hundörat”, at St Paulsgatan 15. No website – but you can find out what “hundöra” means here.

Empty

The day is done. I will take a break and do some running now – then I’ll meet Aila at the Royal Swedish Opera. We have tickets for Romeo&Juliet tonight.

Not everyone is interested in XML – I will write about other things, too. But to me even the boring stuff was fascinating today, in it’s own way.

Ah, XML! When all the beatiful meta-things have been said, you must still do an awful lot of markup before there is something to play with!

Here is one real-world scenario:

Take a large, complex non-XML document and convert it to text. Dream up a simple schema. Markup the document by hand. Generate a new schema. Think. Change the schema, validate, change the markup, validate. Try to use the document in your application. Think some more. Change the schema, validate, change the markup. And on and on and on and on…

Before doing all this I had given myself some advice:

• Talk to someone who actually uses this kind of document
• Don’t markup large documents without a basic schema you believe in
• Use a good editor (like XML Spy). Mess up your structure and NotePad can’t help you – you may never get back to wellformed XML!

And I followed my own advice. But that still left me with several hours of boring markup-work… so why do it at all?

Because trying to mark up a real document is the only sure way to find the kind of problems all the sample programs just ignore.

So far:

• Got bored with useless meta discussions about schemas
• Asked savvy customer to mark up sample document and get back
• Worked out basic use-case diagram and key non use-case requirements with customer
• Surfed around and downloading possible products
• Discussed integration architecture with architect
• Did some proof-of-concept hacks with best alternative
• Formalized requirements
• Discussed requirements with customer and fellow developers
• Set up a decision matrix to weed out obviously bad alternatives
• Got back marked-up sample document from customer
• XML-ized sample document and generated a Schema

Current mini project: evaluating XML editor toolkits for integration with a corporate system. Sometime late last night I could visualize how everything I had done so far was parallell, incremental and about to come together and make perfect sense.

Today I realized that the perfect visualization will have to stay in my head for a while – I have work to do!
Here is a stripped-down list of activities. Note to self: don’t go meta before it’s time!

XML Spy is the editor I use to develop XML documents – version 3.0 just came out and looks very good, so far.

Went out running. Did my usual”out-of-shape-boxer-doing-roadwork”-imitation – after 3 or 4 kilometer of that I usually start running. But now the pollen made it hard to breathe… so I got off the too green dirt-roads and shuffled home along barren backstreets.

It felt good anyway. The first out-of-shape runs in the spring can be a special pleasure: no pressure, I can just keep working on the basics until everything comes back.

One more meeting today, at my office. Gotta go…

Pollen seasons in Stockholm

Me and almost everyone I know are now allergic and more or less successfully eating OTC antihistamines. We look like this:

With the possible exception of Pollen, by Jeff Noon, there is nothing funny about allergy.

Blivet linked to: Cults and not quitting your day job.

Blivet now links back to me. Thank you! I wish you well, too!

Looked at some other recently updated UserLand sites. I’m still on the Top 100 most visited sites – wonder if I’ll still be on the new list tomorrow?