Jonas Beckman

Had a bad dream: I saw a familiar face on the evening frontpage, with a doctor’s face mask and crazy eyes. It left a bad taste. I thought about it for a long time, then went swimming as planned.

A friend called back after some busy days – she had just read some new texts in public. We’ll do fun things next week.

Talked to Aila on the phone: she wasn’t feeling well. We can’t always help each other. Maybe it’s because we know this we trust each other so much?

Went dancing later: Dj Ipek from Berlin played at Re-Orient. I wore my artist-made t-shirt with the scared little teddybear and the flaming skull of death and danced on stage with her dyke fans and the others.

I woke up with amazingly deep breaths and felt physically strong. The only dream I recalled puzzled me because it felt bland, almost boring. And yet there was a message – I know I’ll have to think about it.

But first I went to another fantastic session of Lomi-lomi massage. Afterwards, my mood was serious and loving. So I went along on a shopping expedition and helped pick out clothes. Fun but exhausting – trying to make someone feel beautiful is hard work!

In the evening I put on a good suit and went to the company Christmas buffet at Gondolen. I enjoyed the view, ate a lot, talked a lot but didn’t drink. I had never met my dinner partner before, but we soon found ourselves reminiscing about Berlin before the Wall – an unexpected pleasure.

Is it sexy? No. Is it easily understandable by the common man? No. Is it the most important phenomenon going on in IT? Yes.

David Litwack on using web services for integration

Paul Prescod claims strongly typed XML object references are missing from current web services standards.

I played around with the latest release of Mono and upgraded my TortoiseCVS.

Had a very brief and to-the-point email exchange about nonconsensual face slapping, lies and the necessity of trust.

I went to Stockholm Zen Center to pick up a really nice new zafu and some cushions. The evening sitting was just about to start, so I joined them… it’s been a while.

Human or Computer? Take This Test

There are very simple tests that humans pass and all computers fail . But for how long? The Turing Test is often considered the ultimate test of machine intelligence:

The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can “fool” the interrogator, it is intelligent.

Will this happen in our lifetime? Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil disagree and have a bet for 20 000 dollars.

But all this makes me wonder: how does a human prove he/she is human? Humans usually want more than being perfect liars, so there is no easy test.

A friend called unexpectedly. I had just started to obsess over a difficult email when he called – his timing was perfect. We had an amazing conversation about work, addictions, training and love affairs.

About this friend I recently said: he’s not afraid to live. And indeed, so it is.

I am doing research on web services infrastructure for a potential client today. Things are slower than last week, but that’s fine with me. I am going to spend some time with friends and people I care about.

Mark Pilgrim remembers a friend he couldn’t save when his own drug days ended.

There is always something to feel guilty about after friendships like that. But no one is strong enough to help someone who doesn’t want to change – and Mark had to save himself.

Went swimming at Eriksdalsbadet, my home pool. I felt strong but out of wind, like some kind of ancient machine. Then I realized: last week I was doing 25 metre intervals. Now I was trying for the same speed in the 50m pool

Had dinner with an old friend, then she took me to see a fantastic movie: The princess & the warrior. Trust the Germans to make something for hardcore romantics: for two hours you believe not only in love but in fate. We were both crying afterwards.

You should know what kind of data will be returned by Web Service requests and use the structure of that data to design the most efficient message format.

From a recent MSDN Magazine article: Place XML Message Design Ahead of Schema Planning to Improve Web Service Interoperability.

I went out to the suburbs to discuss sad things from the past over a short dinner. I was prepared to learn something. But my dinner companion was not in shape after another night of drugs and another day of lies and hurt people. Someone else might have found the details interesting – to me they were boring and very predictable.

Over dinner, I was asked if I didn’t think hurting other people to avoid falling apart was a ”good enough” lifestyle? After all, it had worked for years already and there seemed to be no alternatives.

No. I didn’t. But who would ask such a question? A drunken child, telling me to stop caring, daring me to prove I could magically make everything alright again – and an adult who really has hurt many people and wants to do it again.

So I cared in the only possible way: I left.

The nearest thing we have to a universal datatype is Unicode – or in programming language terms – the STRING datatype.

Sean McGrath writes eloquently and with great insight about The privilege of XML parsing – Data types, binary XML and XML pipelines. Via Cafe con leche

Working at home with a cold. Fever, headache and grumpy, too. No fun – but it will pass. Wrote several solid pages of documentation. It took forever, but I got it done.

Lots of mail, phone-calls and text messages at the same time, for a little while. I found it hard to concentrate. But almost everything worked as I expected.

Not a cold – either a virus or flu. Very high fever and muscle-ache. I’ve canceled all work tomorrow.