Crossroad rocks for an event like this. It has a food court, a big open space and public access 802.11. The only thing I could think of that was missing was a bunch of power strips.

I love how you can find an unexpected blessing at an event like this. A bunch of us were sitting around talking XML geek talk. Don Box and Miguel de Icaza were talking about RelaxNG / XML Schema. Miguel was doing the standard "RelaxNG is so much simpler" bit. Don pointed out that James Clark has a tool, trang, that will convert RelaxNG schemas into W3C XML Schema. He went on to point out that if all you wanted RelaxNG for was a simple syntax, then why not just write RelaxNG and then use those tools to convert them to Schema. At that point, the lights went on for me. At the last ApacheCon, Andy Clark and I talked about how much work it would be to adapt Jing to use the Xerces XNI instead of SAX, with the goal of being able to plug the adapted Jing into Xerces so that Xerces would have support for RelaxNG. We thought that this would be a way to help more people use RelaxNG. I actually had started to do this a few weeks ago, before working for food took priority. After Don's comments, I decide that using James Clark's trang solves the problem that I wanted to solve, without importing another large code base into Xerces. RelaxNG advocates will go on to tell about the schemas that RelaxNG can express that Schema can't, but I don't care about those cases. Saved me a few weeks work that can go towards other efforts. That alone made it worth the trip.

Miguel was giving demos of the latest Mono drops, including a Mono base photo browser. He also showed a compiler bootstrap -- something only a geek could love. I noticed that many of the Microsoft folks were paying very close attention to what Miguel was showing and seemed very impressed and complimentary towards it. Joshua Allen has already commented to this effect. I have a few more thoughts on Mono/.Net/CLR that I'll save for another post.

Sam and I talked about blosxom hacking, python and pybloxsom hacking. I think it would be awesome if Sam decided to switch to using pyblosxom. The other thing that we talked about was doing a version of the Weblog/Metaweblog APIs using SOAP instead of XML-RPC. There's a technical reason for doing this, which is that there's no way to multiply categorize an entry using an XML-RPC based API. As I've posted before, I think that this is an important feature for blogging software to have. This would also be a wonderful API to use to consolidate comments and the various kinds of *Backs s that have been proposed.

Two other notorious bloggers that I met were Dare Obasanjo and Josh Allen from the XML core technology team at Microsoft. I was especially pleased to hear Dare say, many of the people using XML would be just as happy with s-expressions, something that I've been saying for a while now. I know, we ex-lisp hacker whine alot.