So I recently got myself a second hand 20D as I was sick of waiting for the 40D.

Both the 40D and D300 were announced this week and the Nikon, from my point of view, craps all over the Canon.

I'm not yet really wedded to a particular lens mount and the D300 with the option to step up later to the Full Frame high spped D3 is looking pretty bloody good. I'm going to do some playing with both bodies over the coming weeks- saving my pennies for a US or Singapore shopping spree later in the year.

Of course Canon shit all over Nikon when it comes to Lenses.....

Germany yes with comments

US yes with comments. Voting here. IBM, Oracle, Farance against. IEEE abstaining.

Brazil no with comments. News item on ZDNet. A friend who was at the meeting tells me that this was a decision passed/pushed down from government circles.

I would have simply posted this as a response on the NZ Open Source Society blog. But the requirement for me to register kinda put me off so here goes. This is a direct response to some of the comments in this post from Don Christie. For the record I was at the ENTIRE Standards New Zealand ECMA 376 meeting.

“The tone of this comment was unexpected, and perhaps even libelous to those that participated the two day Standards NZ workshop on OOXML this week.”

As I said to Ken from IBM on Friday..... ‘Is that a legal opinion Don?’. I found the commentary by the NZOSS the most valuable of all the objectors. They had actually done some of their own research and brought along their own expertise. Contrast this with Ken from IBM who basically just read out the same old IBM crap that has been parroted at pretty much every meeting around the world and, of course, having told all that he was not a lawyer Ken then proceeded to proffer an opinion on the intellectual property issues.

I’m pretty comfortable that the comments by Jim and particularly Doug Casement were targeted not at Kiwi folk like the NZOSS or myself.... but rather were targeted at the obvious corporate interests in the room seeking to further their commercial ends. I speak here of course about Microsoft, IBM and Google NZ (if you can call a contract lobbyist ‘Google NZ’).

“Of course the technical debate was rigorous and sometimes very detailed, but it was also valuable as the Mircosoft expert from Redmond, Gray Knowlton, asserted. That was also the direct feedback I received from all members of the SNZ committee present. Indeed, they seemed pleased that the meeting hadn't descended into name calling and zealotry that people like yourself and Rod Drury had been predicting.”

I would agree with Don that the meeting was remarkably well behaved and really didn’t descend into the sort of Black and White bigotry that one might have expected given the participants. I do however continue to note my concern at the obvious hopes of some participants (Don included) that the process might be used as a means to effect competitive change in the market- such matters are not an interest of the ISO standardisation process and I have placed such concerns on the record. I actually felt that the technical conversations didn’t add all that much value over actually just sitting and reading the documentation. In particular I found the IBM technical comments, the ECMA response document and the NZOSS white paper particularly useful. Have read a LARGE amount of documentation on the issue over the past few months I am confident that there were no new major technical issues raised here in New Zealand that have not already been aired elsewhere- I also note that ECMA has publicly committed to resolving these technical issues at the Ballot Resolution meeting stage and that a number of other standards bodies (German and USA on Friday) have voted Yes with Comments on this basis.

“The fact that all the NZ government agencies took the time to consult, run workshops and, come to a common conclusion and to send four representatives to the SNZ workshops is an indication of the importance of this issue, Microsoft and software in general to our country.”

I MUST add a little more detail here. The ‘New Zealand Government Agencies’ were a very interesting bunch. They were certainly well prepared though lacked technical depth and seemed to have a bee in their bonnet around screen readers. They slipped a couple of times (though corrected) into saying they represented the views of the New Zealand Government- something that they clearly did not. The point I want to pick up on here however is that at the end they felt the need to respond to comments by Microsoft that only a small section of Government was represented- said response was by way of reading out some of the agencies involved in their consultation from a list they had carried with them. When I asked the SIMPLE question that this list be added into the Standards NZ record they refused. Their reason? ‘Participation in the workshop by government agencies was confidential’. As such I hardly think that the statement sets out the fact of the matter-certainly the four people at the table reflected the views of ‘some’ of the Government agencies, BUT, the actual extent of their mandate shall remain unknown. I do wonder if an Official Information Act Request might reveal more details. I was, quite frankly, ASTOUNDED at their response to my request to put the participants on the record.

I shall not restate the issue here- If you need to get some context around what I’m about to rant about take a look at this post from Rod and the comments around it.

I was one of the 20 or so attendees at a standards New Zealand meeting to discuss the vote by New Zealand to JTC1 on the ratification of ECMA 376 as an ISO standard.

I’m going to try and quickly remember who was there.

Pat Rossiter from Hyperion Management Services

Tom Robinson from Kowhai Computing

Colin Jackson from Google New Zealand (it.gen.nz is Colin’s personal site, he was there either as a contractor or volunteer for Google. I think he was also one of the Technical Advisors to the Government Agencies working group)

Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia

Richard Donaldson and Liz (last name forgotten) from the New Zealand Computer Society

Three people from IBM (one from Canada, two from NZ)

Three people from Microsoft (one from NZ, one from US, one from Singapore)

Matthew Cruickshank, Don Christie and one other person (who I don’t think said anything the entire time- he was in charge of stopping Matthew’s laptop going into power save mode while he gave a  presentation though which was useful) from the NZ Open Source Society

Four people from The ‘New Zealand Government Agencies’.

Myself J representing Intergen

Peter Lambrechsten from Novell (although Peter told me on Friday that he wasn’t actually representing Novell views but rather his own... not quite sure what all that was about really...)

There were also plenty of people there from Standards NZ.

The meeting was very well behaved and really not the sort of OSS vs Microsoft death match that you’d think it might have turned into.

It started out with some introductions from the COO of Standards and then an introduction to the whole ISO/IEC JTC1 structure by Nelson Proctor of standards. I asked Nelson if he could explain the relationship between ECMA and JTC1 and he ended up going on a bit of a diatribe about how ECMA is not a ‘real’ standards body.... which wasn’t particularly useful. What I was really trying to have explained was the details around the ECMA liaison with JTC1 and thus the Fast Track process. I probably should have pushed back a bit harder but it was the first question of the day.....

We then kicked of proceedings proper with a discussion of 5 questions (3 on Thu and 2 on Fri) + a ‘What is good for NZ Inc’ session on Friday afternoon.

The questions were those from the Free Software Foundation here (my Foxit PDF Reader is failing on cut and paste so I can’t paste the actual Standards NZ ones). Basically of the Free Software Foundation questions we covered verbatim #1, #2, #3, #4, #6. The question of Dual Standards, #5, was covered several times through the other questions.

The process for each question was basically Microsoft and IBM got to have a say and then it was basically a roundtable of questions and comments. This ranged from detailed discussion around technical points to simply reading out a prepared statement.

Ken Matheson presented for IBM and Gray Knowlton for Microsoft.

I’m going to post on each of the questions separately as I get time over the next couple of days- I’m feeling a bit crook with a cold and cut my days skiing at Cadrona very short @ about 1:30pm because I was feeling very broken.

Speaking with some of the NZOSS over the lunch break and I referenced a tinyurl and one of the gjys pointed me at a New Zealand site www.urltea.com.

Here's a useful table that compares desktop with mobile for WCF work.

Feature	Desktop WCF	Compact WCF
Bindings:
·         BasicHttpBinding	Yes	Yes
·         CustomBinding	Yes	Yes
·         WindowsMobileMailBinding	N/A	Yes
·         ExchangeWebServiceMailBinding	Yes, via NetCF install	Yes
Formatters:
·         SoapFormatter	Yes	Yes
·         BinaryFormatter	Yes	No
Encoders:
·         TextMessageEncoder	Yes	Yes
·         BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement	Yes	No
·         MTOMEncoder	Yes	No
·         GzipEncoder	No	Sample available
Transports:
·         HttpTransportBindingElement	Yes	Yes
·         HttpsTransportBindingElement	Yes	Yes
·         MailTransportBindingElement	Yes, via NetCF install	Yes
·         MsmqTransportBindingElement	Yes	No
·         TcpTransportBindingElement	Yes	No
·
XmlDictionaryReader/Writer	Yes	Yes; stub around XmlTextReader/Writer
DataContractSerializer	Yes	No; but can be wire-compatible with DCS via XmlSerializer
Service proxy generation	Yes; via SvcUtil.exe	Yes; via NetCFSvcUtil.exe, not integrated into VS2008
·         Non-HTTP transports	Yes	No
·         Custom headers	Yes	No
WS-Addressing	Yes	Yes
WS-Security message level security
·         X.509	Yes	Yes
·         Username/password	Yes	No
WS-ReliableMessaging	Yes	No
Patterns
·         Service model	Yes	No
·         Message layer programming	Yes	Yes
o   Buffered messages	Yes	Yes
o   Streaming messages	Yes	No
·         Endpoint descriptions in .config files	Yes	No
Extensibility	Yes	Yes

As a continuation of my lean and mean approach I'm using Mozy as my backup solution.

We already use MozyPro over @ http://www.medrecruit.com but seeing as I don't need the SQL/Exchange backup I'm gonna run with the free version.

2GB free should be enough to get me kickstarted. There is a paid for edition at a few bucks a month that gives unlimited storage that I'll probably go to for digital photos at some point (will depend on if SmugMug works out well for me).

Mozy signup is here

So I'm building a new machine at the moment. I've moved from my Asus Lambourghini to a Dell Inspiron 1520. It's not really an upgrade... more of a crossgrade. While I've gone from a top of the line Consumer Notebook (the Asus) to a standard consumer grade notebook (the Dell) I have gained a slightly nicer Graphics Card and I now have 4GB of RAM.

I'm taking a VERY different approach to building this machine. I am going to try a while of Virtualizing almost everything.

So I'm going to run a VERY lean and mean install on the metal then I'll run VMs for all my dev work. This is a major move away for me as for a long time I've very much been one to basically Frankenbuild a machine with Beta and Alpha everything. Then I'd rebuild it every six months or so.

On this machine I'm looking to document exactly what I install and to keep it to a bare minimum. Currently on the metal I'll be running

Vista Home Premium (I couldn't get Ultimate to install as it kept bluescreening on startup so I went back to the recovery disks)
Office 2007 Ultimate
Visio 2007 Pro
MSN Messenger
Lightroom
Photoshop
WinRAR
Polar Performance Pro (Sport Watch Software)
IE7
VMWare Workstation (If all goes well I'll look to move my entire approach across to Windows 2008 Server Core and WSV once the Beta is out but for the moment I need the USB and Multimonitor support of VMWare- and of course VPC doesn't run on Vista Home!!!!!)

Then I'm going to virtualize ALL my development and test work. I'll post back here as I go along.

There's a bit of a bruhaha around the fast tracking of Office Open XML at the moment ECMA 376 as an ISO standard. New Zealand have, thus far, shown themselves to be among the less supportive crowd.

To be honest it seems to be distilling down to a debate between the:

“There should be one standard” crowd vs the “There can be many standards crowd”.

Rick Jeliffe from Australia (Writing on the O'Reilly site about the Australian standards meeting yesterday) makes a great point:

“Then a quick mention of some of the issues that I prototype in this blog: that ISO standards for documents are voluntary, that standards form a library of choices, that the mere existence of alternative standards does not prevent any group from choosing one over the other, that standards such as PDF and Torx are not open in the sense of allowing arbitrary change but nevertheless valuable, and so on. I emphasized again that the ISO process is a win/win system in which attempts by one group to stymie another’s needs does not fit. “

It makes fascinating reading actually- international techno-politics writ large.

Further to my thoughts earlier this week Rick also points to some thoughts from Marcus Carr:

“Marcus Carr objected to this. He spoke from the perspective of document processing from the early 90s, and the difficulties in practice of dealing with Word documents (with the various hijinks: converting .DOC to the Rainbow DTD, converting .DOC to RTF then processing that, etc) and brought up the key processing issue that I think almost all the commentators on Open XML miss. He brought up the issue of the need for a full-fidelity baseline schema to allow the most flexibility in downstream processing. “

Got myself a sweet new (2nd hand) Digital DLR yesterday as my birthday gift for myself

It's a Canon EOS 20D Bod. Barely used. I thought that there wasn't a bundle of point in buying the newer model... it really only offered a Bigger screen on the back to which I say BLAH... it's an SLR!

I'm currently using my nasty old Sigma 28-200 Superzoom and my “Every Canon Shooter Must Have One” 50mm F1.8 on it.

Now I have to decide on another Lens.

Current Candidates are:

Canon EF 24-70 F2.8 L
This is a nice fast lens. L spec is nice. Is an EF lens so if I get bitten by the bug I can carry it across to a big sensor camera like the 1D MarkIII or 3D/7D/5D (yes... you know they coming!!!!0

Canon EF 24-105 F4 L IS
Not as fast as the above. But, longer Zoom range and Image Stabilized. Currently my top choice. Is still an L spec lens and F4 is not terrible... only 1 stop above the 2.8.

Canon EF-S 18-55 F2.8 IS
So in many ways this combines the best features of the above. Fast lens WITH Image stabilization. Arguably the lower bottom end is well suited to my 1.6 crop camera. But... it's as much as the above and a non L series lens (read plastic!!!) and being EF-S I can't take it across to a bigger sensor later....

I am torn..

Share your thoughts!