Quick list: technologies on my mind

Some possible blog entries for the next few weeks.

• headings and thoughts on web services history and future. Mashup and AJAX are ugly. Can the simplicity of the web survive "rich" applications?
• programmatic PDF manipulation - is XSL:FO enough?
• RSS: actual deployment fairly easy, but which version to select?
• RDF and ontological web stuff. (We should at least go to RDF.)
  
• XML modelling: the old abstract-versus-specific debate (do your modelling through "anonymous" elements with name and type info in attributes, or create shed-loads of custom elements. It's really flexibility versus strong typing all over again...)
  
• How to time ASP.NET 2.0 deployment

mcommerce is errrrm coming on

Met folks from MobileATM and Acclimatise today. Somewhat serendipitous connections between all, and mcommerce and climate change wouldn't normally seem obvious bedfellows. But on reflection they are points of comparison. Both are real pace-of-change totems in our society where we don't know if the tipping point has been reached, and won't know till some time after we reach it.

MobileATM, a joint venture between LINK and Morse, is the first vision of mcommerce that I've seen that could easily gain acceptance. It takes a market that is not too segmented by provider or banking partner, and puts the banks in the position of trust and lets them do the marketing - despite the best efforts of phishers, people generally trust their banks - meanwhile the mobile operators are returned to carriers, which on the whole is what they do best. Two problems they have though - the mobile providers still do some of the billing (making it not cheap to use), but more significantly barriers to consumer acceptance will be high because of the need for application installed on phone and multi-stage security requirements.

I think they will most likely make a success of it if the banks take more of the cost away from the consumer and/or partner with mobile providers to preinstall the application on phones.

today's tedium: "access denied" on ASP.NET recompile

OK, today's tedium was a fairly frequently described problem regarding occasional "Access denied" messages on recompiling ASP.NET 1.1 applications. Very tedious as it sometimes necessitate a reboot. I've had to put up with this for about a year now. Now, I swear I have researched this problem frequently and found anti-virus programs fingered as the likely culprit, as in Junfeng Zhang's blog entry, which at least taught me a lot about how to use FileMon to debug certain kinds of errors - and it was activity from Microsoft's Index Server logged in the FileMon log which prompted me to find this canonical MS solution which has it down . Kick myself again from not searching KnowledgeBase first - the answer is SOMETIMES there! Maybe this post will save someone else from the same problem.

Google Desktop privacy?

Never mind the well-documented queries over Google Desktop privacy as we blur, inevitably, the boundaries between local data and online data , there are some local privacy issues too. If Google Desktop Search has permission to crawl the whole disk, users will be able to search one another's documents, even if they can't. Brings a new dimension to the wallet search - I look forward to the first case citing Google Desktop Search in a divorce case. While less interesting intellectually than the "big issue" of commercial companies learning about our private data, I can foresee more obvious personal damage in the shorter term...