Today, Mozilla Messaging was launched. When thinking of it, I’d say that e-mail as a medium has kind of stagnated. Maybe this project can do something about it? (Thanks to Fredda for the link!)
I recently missed the 10th birthday of XML
The birthday on February 10th was celebrated with a blog post about the XML People.
I’d like to add that XML is something like an eccentric coworker who manages to get entangled in everyone else’s work, either by invitation, pushed from above, or sneaked in by someone who knows him or her.
Validating XPath expressions against XML schema
I have come across a situation where I want to make sure that an XPath expression is valid for querying a document that conforms to a specific XML Schema. My first thought was: this must have been done before and I started googling. I found some discouraging discussions. One approach was to create a dummy document from the schema and then try to evaluate the XPath expression. Nice try, but not ideal.
The XPath expressions I want to validate are actually very simple: they are absolute location paths and so far I’ve only seen elements (including namespace prefix) as nodes. I was thinking of using the XPath parsing in REXML but that’s clearly overkill when the XPath expressions are so simple. Keep It Simple, Stupid! I wonder if such a validation could be written in an XSLT that traverses the XML Schema?
Android SDK m5-rc14 now available
Android SDK m5-rc14 now available. I might have planned to give it a try if I didn’t have updates to The Project (MinPackning.se) to do, two energy drinks to add to Taurin.se and a Softhouse Scrum Master Kit to unbox… 🙂
The vmsplice local root exploit
There are some Critical Linux kernel vmsplice security issues that hopefully have been patched properly. See also #27704 on SecurityFocus. Fortunately the kernel on this server is too old to be affected! 🙂
$ ./27704 ----------------------------------- Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit By qaaz ----------------------------------- [+] mmap: 0x0 .. 0x1000 [+] page: 0x0 [+] page: 0x20 [+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000 [+] page: 0x4000 [+] page: 0x4020 [+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000 [+] page: 0x1000 [+] mmap: 0xb7d8b000 .. 0xb7dbd000 [-] vmsplice: Function not implemented $ ./27704-2 ----------------------------------- Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit By qaaz ----------------------------------- [+] addr: 0xc0106340 [-] wtf
RESTafari
Reading Interoperability Wars – Episode 6 – Part 1 – Revenge of Babble just made me want to create a blog post with this title.
First release of The Project
I released the first incarnation of The Project yesterday; please visit MinPackning.se! Unfortunately it’s not so useful if you can’t read Swedish.
Sony Ericsson goes Windows Mobile
Sony Ericsson unveiled their XPERIA X1 device today and it runs Microsoft Windows Mobile! This means that Linux users will be able to use SynCE to connect their XPERIA X1 devices.
I wonder if it’s manufactured by HTC like most other Windows Mobile devices? Engadget has all the other juicy details. A screen with 800 × 480 pixels is not bad!
MidaSync
Today I reinstated a proper web site on the domain for my project MidaSync. Quoting from the single page:
MidaSync is a project, or collection or projects, for seamless connection between Microsoft Windows Mobile devices and Open Source operating systems.
Further development of MidaSync is currently postponed indefinitely.
I hope to revive it some day, in one way or another, but that will probably not happen for quite a while.
The ThoughtWorks Anthology
According to the latest mail I got from The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of their upcoming titles is The ThoughtWorks Anthology, but I couldn’t find anything about it on the web. Out of pure curiosity I’ve sent an inquisitive mail to see if I can find out more about it. Maybe it’s related to the No Fluff Just Stuff books?
Another upcoming book is Facebook Platform Development with Rails, which sounds nice but I’ll probably never get around to do it… 🙂
Update Andy Hunt kindly replied to me:
It’s a collection of essays from leading ThoughtWorkers. We’ll have an announcement up in the next week or so.
Sounds interesting!