RE: The Results (Was RE: ASN.1 and XML)

["Al B. Snell" <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> >Aye, around that time I was designing nuclear bunkers...
> 
> Aren't you glad to be obsolete? 

I was doing it to assuage boredom, mainly, not for a living. They bordered
on James Bond Bad Guy Underground Lairs, in fact, but I digress...

> >Roger Waters, Radio KAOS, last track quite nicely captures the sentiment
> >:-)
> 
> Point is, they got excited because it did work as well as it needed to.
> Can we do better?  Do you think Simon does this for his health?

Where I work currently, I design bits of bespoke software for clients few
people hear of. This usually turns out to be 50% solving the actual
problem, and 50% working around the cruftiness (technical term, roughly
translates to "the property of being the spawn of Satan") of the platform
and tools we have to use - either because it's all we can get, or it's a
standard forced on us by something we have to communicate with.

Most of this is because somebody made something that was Good Enough and
let it evolve with time. This begat Unix, Windows, HTML, C++, and Perl,
the Five Banes of My Life. There are others, too.

I am worried that XML will become another! It is starting to work it's
fingers into my market sector - I welcome it beneath DocBook since we were
using SGML beforehand, and the restrictions of XML appease the neat-freak
within me. An attempt from the people the client-who-shares-loads-of-CSVs
share their CSVs with to shift to XML was intercepted and prevented before
it reached me, luckily, so I didn't have to foam at the mouth at them :-)

> >I hope I get to meet you one day, Len :-) I know I've been coming over as
> >Mr. Militant on this issue, but what I see as misplaced evangelism touches
> >a raw nerve! I'm fluffy really.
> 
> Nah, ya got passion.  I like that in people.  Ask Simon how many times 
> I've driven him over the edge.  He is really good when he is fired up.

"Simon, how many times has Len driven you over the edge?"

Or was it a rhetorical question? :-)

> Me, used to be fluffy.  Now I come in, stare down at the badge and 
> say, "MY GOD! I'M AAAAAA GEEEEEK!" and I curse the day I quit looking 
> for music gigs.  I became boring and then I became irrelevant.

I never had that day... I'm currently a leaf node in a large tree of
engineers and mathematicians, with the odd lunatic thrown in for good
measure. Born into it :-)

> 
> len
> 

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software