Bryan Strawser

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Bryan Strawser

This is cool.  I remember

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This is cool.  I remember Eve Maler telling me all about XML about two years ago and I didn’t get it.  How stupid I was..  there is some seriously fascinating XML stuff going on.



US House of Representatives and XML.


The US House of Representatives has made a significant effort in developing DTDs for describing bills.   My authority as Utah CIO doesn’t extend to the Utah Legislature (you can tell from their URL), but I’d still love to see them adopt something like the House standards.  They might be able to just use the House DTDs directly.  A recent article in Government Computer News writes about the House XML efforts.   [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Amazon Web Services and REST.

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Amazon Web Services and REST.

A few days ago, Amazon announced their web services program.  Unfortunately, I had two days without much time to play.   Tonight I finally had a little time. 


Amazon’s progam supports both a SOAP/RPC model and a RESTful model.  Using the RESTful model, I cobbled up the Amazon results box on the right side of this page.  This is the XSL file that I used and this is the URL I called.   A few observations:



  1. My task was made more difficult by the lack of good error messages from Amazon.  Note the the XSL file specifically passes error messages through.  At first, I wasn’t even seeing what little Amazon did send and that was murder.
  2. XSL needs some good tools for debugging and testing.  As it happens, XSL is a programming language with few (maybe no) support and debugging tools.  What’s worse, its a rule based language, an unfamiliar paradigm for most people.  People used to give me a bad time about Scheme and LISP.  I can’t believe they’ll use XSL.  See my earlier rant on XML based programming languages if there’s some doubt as to how I feel. 
  3. Amazon apparently caches the XSL file that they read from me and so I had to keep renaming it.  There’s probably some way to tell it to clear the cache, but hey, what do you expect me to do, actually read the docs? 
  4. The hardest part, by far, was finding the right verb in Frontier to do the HTTP call to Amazon and return the result. 

All in all, a surprisingly easy task.  Someone who knew both Frontier and XSL could have probably done it in under 15 minutes. 

[Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

I would love to have

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I would love to have internet access on the MBTA Commuter Rail.  I don’t ride it into work, but I know many people who do, and I may be joining their numbers in the spring when my office location will probably change.  I’m drooling at the thought.



While we were talking, we got around to WiFi.  UTA has plans to install WiFi access points at the stations along the TRAX (light rail) line.  This is pretty easy to do since they already have network access at each station.  The question remains whether commuters will have access to the network or not.  I’d like to see it taken one step further and have Internet access on the train itself.  That would sure get my attention as a commuter.


The big question is whether this would be a service offered to promote commuting or as a revenue source.  I know plenty of people who would pay $10/month to have Internet access while they ride the train.  It would be pretty easy to do using a captive portal.  Have users establish an account and then give them a token each time they log in that’s good for an hour of access (long enough to go end to end).    We even got in a conversation about warchalking!  [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Made it to Indy..  Been

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Made it to Indy..  Been to Ft. Wayne.. Saw Scott & Erin.  Never met Scott, but knew of him at Indiana U…  Erin and I go all the way back to Ball State.  She’s married and has a kidlet and all now.  Breakfast at Bob Evans. Yummy…


This hotel (Indianapolis Days Inn Northwest) sucks ass.