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Desert Thunderstorms

8/24/2007

I'm currently hiking and camping in New Mexico and Utah, which explains this off-topic post. I'll continue to cover big news when I'm able to access email, and will also upload and time-phase these entries for posting when I come into town for gas and supplies. To find more of this type of writing based on past trips, look to the folder link at left titled Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal.

Summer is the time of storms in the deserts of much of the Southwest, just as it is the time of intense heat. Except for its mountainous areas, the Southwest receives most of its meager precipitation in this way. The weather systems that form the thunderstorms of summer are thus vital to the cycle of desert life, and were they ever to fail, so, too, would most of what lives in these dry regions.

There are two essential elements to the weather system that produces these storms. The first is the uneven heating of the desert surface by the sun, which creates variable updrafts that can rise high into the sky. And the second is a summer wind pattern that regularly carries moist air from the Gulf of Mexico into the Southwest – the technically accurate, but rather misleading name given to this element is the "Southwest Monsoon."

When desert updrafts meet this moist Gulf air, they carry it skyward into cooler altitudes, where the moisture condenses into white, decorative cumulus clouds reminiscent of cauliflowers. If the air is sufficiently moist, the clouds can grow in height, becoming "towering cumulus" clouds. And if the updraft is strong, the air more saturated with moisture, and the differential in temperature between warm updraft and cool upper air sufficiently great, then you have all of the necessary elements to create a cumulonimbus cloud - also known as a potential thunderstorm.

The Complete Story on the US INCITS Vote

8/22/2007

I headed in to town from the desert this afternoon to gas up and get groceries, and to catch up on all things ODF/OOXML. In scanning my Google Alerts, I ran into this posting by Microsoft's Jason Matusow, himself just in from vacation. In that post, Jason writes as follows:

Even though there were early predictions of doom for Open XML from Andy Updegrove and Rob Weir (and others), the US vote is likely to be either a “Yes with comments” or “Abstain” – not a ”No” vote. While the parties opposed to ISO adoption of Open XML have gone quiet on the US vote in the blogosphere, I think it is worth taking a close look at this key vote. In order to clarify my opinion – here are the details as I understand them.

Well, it's hard to take a vacation, isn't it? Not only is it styled as "going quiet," but it offers an opportunity for others to present only part of the story. While much of what Jason writes is accurate, it's curious what he leaves out - including the fact that not one ballot, but two, have been circulated to the INCITS Executive Board for simultaneous voting. According to Jason's blog entry again:

By the end of the meeting enough of those who originally cast a “No” vote indicated likely support for a second “Yes with Comments” ballot to begin on Thursday August 16. Thus, the ballot will move to the next phase as “Yes with Comments” heading into a Resolution Meeting on August 29. At that meeting, if Open XML gets 10 supporting votes, the US position on Open XML will be “Yes with Comments.” If it does not get the 10 needed votes, the EB is being asked to consider “Abstain with Comments” as its fall-back position. At this point, it seems a “No with Comments” is off the table.

To read that, you would assume that there is a single ballot under consideration. Curiously enough, there are two ballots that have been distributed, on an equal voting, and either - or neither - may be approved. One ballot is to approve with comments, and one to abstain with comments. Here, then, is the whole story, as given to me during a lengthy phone call with someone who attended the meeting, as well as the schedule and possible outcomes during the time remaining before the opportunity to submit a US position expires.

Preserving Our Past to Warn of the Future: A Reunion with Spirit House

8/18/2007

I hadn't thought about it before I reached Utah, but once I neared the border I knew where I wanted to hike first when I arrived. Six years ago, I took a month-long, solo cross-country trip to hike and write in the Southwest. Then, as now, what I wanted to see most was Spirit House.

There are thousands of ruins spread across the Southwest, each of them interesting and all of them extremely delicate. The greatest number of the most dramatic, like Mesa Verde in Colorado, are protected through heavy supervision. Others, like Walnut Canyon, in Arizona, can only be viewed from nearby walkways. Some, like Canyon de Chelle, are located in the middle of Native American reservations. Canyon de Chelle, perhaps the most spectacular of these, may only be viewed by car from afar, unless accompanied on foot by a guide.

But the great majority of Native American ruins, including the hundreds of cliff dwellings in the Four Corners region, have no such effective protection. Happily, some of these sites are noted on topographical maps, most are sufficiently remote and (in the case of cliff dwellings) often hard to reach without technical climbing skills as well. That hasn't saved them from being picked clean long ago of all of their artifacts, but those activities have for the most part left their fabric largely intact. With the very small budgets of their nominal protecting agencies (the staff of the national parks, national forests, and the Bureau of Land Management), the most that can be done to protect them against further destruction is to avoid publicizing their locations, and hope for the best.

OOXML, ODF and UOF: What’s Up in China?

8/17/2007

Microsoft has seemed to be flying high in the Peoples Republic of China lately. Bill Gates spent several days in Beijing earlier this year in meetings with high-level officials, after hosting Chinese President Hu Jintao the spring before at Gate's own home. And legitimate copies of Microsoft products appear to be at last gaining ground in comparison to pirated copies, albeit at the price of discounting them to almost unimaginable levels (students can now reportedly obtain a Windows/Office bundle for the incredible price of $3). Many credited Microsoft's pragmatic decision to accept Chinese realities and not insist on having everything its own way.

Others, though, wonder whether the Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking everything they can get, and giving little in return. David Kirkpatrick asked that question in the title of his April Fortune piece, titled How Microsoft conquered China: Or is it the other way around? Kirkpatrick hitched a ride on Gates' April trip to Beijing, and witnessed the rock star status and high level access Gates enjoyed. In the end, Kirkpatrick concluded that both sides are doing just fine, thank you, even if China may be doing a bit "fner."

But perhaps not. One story I've been following in China for some time is the development of China's own home-grown open document format standard, called UOF (for Unified Office Format). Now, two stories involving UOF, OOXML and ODF have appeared in the last ten days in the English language version of the state-owned Xinhua news service that provide an interesting temperature reading on the warmth of the Redmond-Beijing relationship. (You can read more about UOF here and here.)

At Kin Bineola

8/15/2007

I did not visit the ruins of Kin Bineola the night I arrived nearby, but made camp and turned in instead. August is the month of thunderstorms in the Southwest, and especially in New Mexico. By midafternoon, the anvil shapes of thunderheads were spreading in the four corners of the sky, and not long thereafter grey skirts of rain began their slow descent to the parched earth beneath them. Thunder rumbled richly across the valley, and the sky acquired a rich assemblage of angry grey clouds, towering ivory domes blushed with gold by the setting sun, and a double rainbow arching overall.

I dislike tents. I rarely use them in the Southwest, and revel in the stars above. Usually, there is no rain and never are there any noxious insects to annoy, unless you choose to lay yourself down by the rare, still waters. But this trip, I should have known better and brought one along, as nature has made its habits known here for long enough that I should not have expected it to make an exception just for me.

So there was naught to do but rig my ground sheet up as a rough lean-to against a barbed wire fence, and listen to the pit-pit-patter-pit of rain from dusk to midnight as the occasional thunderstorm struck a glancing blow, scattering droplets via gusty winds as it passed in the night, and illuminating the valley floor in sudden bursts of light as it rumbled by.

In the Lands of the Anasazi

8/13/2007

I'm currently hiking and camping in Nevada and Utah, which explains this off-topic post. I'll continue to cover big news when I'm able to access email, and will also upload and time-phase these entries for posting when I come into town for gas and supplies. To find more of this type of writing based on past trips, look to the folder link at left titled Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal.

When you think of spectacular Native American ruins, you're likely to first envision the magnificent cliff houses of Mesa Verde, and their cousins in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. But there are less-well known and equally dramatic sites that can be found near the intersection of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, with the grandest to be found in and near Chaco Canyon.

These buildings were constructed at the same time as the cliff houses, but they are more mysterious. While Mesa Verde and the other cliff ruins in canyons throughout the region were clearly once habitations, the purpose(s) of the "Great Houses" of Chaco Canyon is ambiguous. For example, they contain many rooms, like the cliff houses, and the circular kiva chambers as well. But unlike the cliff dwellings, fireplaces and granaries are very few. If they were dwellings, then, where did they cook? And where did they store their food?

Many archaeologists today therefore believe that the Great Houses of Chaco were not full-time dwellings, but rather some sort of cultural centers, acting as gathering places for a more distributed population. This, despite the great size of the buildings, with hundreds of rooms, and their impressive height - some are as tall as five stories. Indeed, the buildings raised by the Chaco culture were among the largest buildings in the world at their time. And like the cliff dwellings, they were all built – and then abandoned - at roughly the same time.

OOXML Approval Vote Fails in INCITS

8/10/2007

As I reported on July 23, INCITS, the US balloting body on the OOXML vote, put out a ballot to see whether the US should vote to approve OOXML, with the ballot to close on August 9. That ballot has now closed on schedule, and there is a public link that shows the vote - which failed, with 8 in favor, 7 opposed, and one abstaining. As I noted previously, a vote of 9 in favor would have been required for passage. That number is a simple majority of the 16 INCITS Executive Board members that have voting privileges on this ballot (in fact, the Board has 18 members, but due to attendance rules, only 16 of the 18 had voting priviliges on this ballot).

There is a second leg of the vote, which also failed: out of the total number responding (in this case, all 16), the abstentions (one) are subtracted, yielding a number (fifteen) of which two-thirds (in this case ten) would need to be in the affirmative.

The link above includes links to the individual comments filed by eleven Executive Board members.

Another LinuxWorld Press Release (this one’s from the Linux Foundation)

8/08/2007

LinuxWorld does tend to bring out the press releases, and here's one more. At the end of this blog entry you'll find one issued today by the Linux Foundation (a related article by Elizabeth Montalbano of ComputerWorld can be found here). As you'll see from the release, I'm taking on a more formal role at LF in addition to being an At Large Board member and outside counsel. And I'm very pleased to share the news that Karen Copenhaver, who many of you will already know as one of the best known national experts on open source licensing, is also joining the management team. We're both keeping our day jobs at our respective firms (Gesmer Updegrove LLP and Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP), but each of us will be spending substantial time assisting LF and its mission in our new roles.

I'll be providing a special focus on the standards side of LF's work, while Karen will be providing particular expertise on open source licensing. Together we'll be collaborating on legal and overall LF strategy as members of the senior management team. It's a great effort to be part of, and a privilege as well, given the crucial role that both open source and open standards will play in the future of software, and the fact that each needs the support of the other. The Linux Foundation is unique in being the crucible in which this peaceful and productive coexistence is being perfected.

A Standards Game for a Summer’s Day

8/04/2007

There is no question that all over the world the competing interests in the Open XML standardization process are going to use all tactics available to them within the rules. - Microsoft's Director of Corporate Standards Jason Matusow

Those on both sides of the ODF vs. OOXML competition are always accusing each other of spinning and misrepresenting each other's actions and statements. It's fair, and even important, for both sides to call each other out on actual misrepresentations, since the public is rarely, if ever, going to have first-hand knowledge to rely on. But when one side calls the other out, how does the public know which one to believe?

That's where what historian's call "primary sources" come in – not second hand regurgitations and repackagings of what someone else said, but the words themselves that someone said or wrote, straight from the source, complete and unedited.

Right now, you're hearing all manner of second hand accounts of what's going on in Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and other places around the world as the Fast Track process for Ecma 376 (the specification built on the Microsoft Office Open XML, or OOXML, formats) winds to a climactic finish. But which side should you believe, when you can't be in the room to hear what was actually said, and by whom? Is one side really consistently making misrepresentations, or is that just FUD spinning by the other side?

Interestingly, I've often found that the farther afield you go from the center of the conflict between ODF and OOXML (and therefore the farther you are from public reporting and scrutiny), the less careful people become. As a result, in such places the public statements made more closely match what you hear second hand from the US and European bloggers, because the chance of a call out is less. But why believe me? After all, this blog post is about primary sources.

Well, here's a chance for you to make your own judgment, based upon a primary source rather than a subjective call-out. That primary source is a statement posted by Microsoft SA (as in South Africa) at a PR site called MyPressportal, urging the South African National Body to vote "yes" on OOXML. The version below is complete and unaltered.

Massachusetts Falls to OOXML as ITD Punts

8/01/2007

[Updated: You can view the comments at Slashdot on this blog entry and story here.]

In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth. The announcement was made even as it appears more questionable whether the National Body members of ISO/IEC JTC1 will conclude that the formats are in suitable form to be granted global standards status, and despite the fact that the ITD received comments from 460 individuals and organizations during the brief comment period announced on July 5.

Most of those comments, "addressed revisions made to the Data Formats section [of the proposed changes to the Enterprise Technical Reference Model, or ETRM], specifically the inclusion of Ecma-376 Office Open XML as an acceptable document format for office applications along with the Open Document Format (ODF)." That number is several times the input received in connection with the original draft of the ETRM in August of 2005 that originally included ODF but not Microsoft's OOXML.

The decision was posted today at the Information Technology Division's Web site in a statement attributed to Henry Dormitzer, Undersecretary of Administration and Finance, Interim Commissioner, Department of Revenue, and Bethann Pepoli, Acting Chief Information Officer. That statement read in part as follows:

The Commonwealth continues on its path toward open, XML-based document formats without reflecting a vendor or commercial bias in ETRM v4.0. Many of the comments we received identify concerns regarding the Open XML specification. We believe that these concerns, as with those regarding ODF, are appropriately handled through the standards setting process, and we expect both standards to evolve and improve. Moreover, we believe that the impact of any legitimate concerns raised about either standard is outweighed substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based document format standards. Therefore, we will be moving forward to include both ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats. All ">comments received are posted on this web site.

The "Fair and Balanced – let someone else decide" decision by the current administration and interim CIO Bethann Pepoli stands in sharp contrast to the positions taken by predecessor CIOs Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez, backed by then governor (and now-presidential hopeful) Mitt Romney. Both Quinn and Gutierrez insisted on including only "open standards" in the ETRM, and withstood significant pressure from Microsoft to give ground and accept OOXML prior to its adoption by ISO/IEC JTC1.

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