Scott Hanselman

We have arrived in Madrid.  The Spanish are a very chatty people.
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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Sitting in O'Hare airport, 3pm CDT.  Heading to Madrid, then Casablanca on Iberia Airlines. 

I'm listening (via Audible/iPod) to a FANTASTIC book, “The Time Traveler's Wife,” by Audrey Niffenegger.  It's too complex and amazing to explain, but the two-narrator unabridged Audible edition is great - I highly recommend it. 

P.S. The actor Rip Torn (The Larry Sanders Show) is sitting across from me.
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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What a great idea.  I've heard of this before, but I didn't realize it was so easy and REST-ful.  Loren Halvorson shows that hooking up an Ambient Orb is just a matter of an HTTP GET call added to the build:

<get src="https://myambient.com/java/my_devices/submitdata.jsp?devID=123-456-789&amp;color=12&amp;anim=0&amp;comment=build+succeeded" dest="out.html" failonerror="false"/>

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's a hypothetical.  Say there is an client I'm working with that needs to return Valid XML from their system.  They've given me XML Schemas and said they are representative of the XML returned.  Since Valid follows Well-Formed, sounds good.

Then someone mentions, "oh, well, we can't guarantee that there won't be some < or > or & in the element content.  But, that's no problem, right?"

I said, "Well, then technically you are not sending us XML.  If you can't escape (or CDATA) out the stray content with < >, then you're not even returning less-than/greater-than delimited files. What if I gave you content like this "123123324","2003-04-05","Scott ",Hans,"elman","Portland?"  We have to agree on some fundamentals here.  The XML 1.0 spec (and all tools based on it) is very specific." (They won't even CDATA the stuff)

The response? "Well, that's a purist's viewpoint."

I guess I got too mired in the Judeo-Christian Ethic of "Thou shalt not return malformed XML."

QUESTION: What level of Dante's Inferno would I be relegated to if I pre-process this XML-y (pronounced: 'smelly') to make it well-formed?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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What a fantastic 'doh! I should have thought of that' idea.  Using a Cross-Platform VNC Viewer to record Flash Movies of a user's movements.  This could replace Camtasia for me, cheaply and easily.

Sample Movie

• Gnomine (400KBytes),
• Windows (350KBytes)
• Emacs (300KBytes)
• Mac OS X (1.3MBytes, LARGE)

Update! Double DOH!  Jon Galloway points out that I blogged first and read later.  It only runs on *nix.  So, I have to fire up my Linux VM or keep using Camtasia.  Crap, caught between a rock and US$299.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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