1. The first is processor power and battery life.  Even Apple has recognized that Intel has the industry beat here, and is moving Macs to Intel processors by 2007.  In my dream Mac I'd have a Pentium M (Centrino) chip to give me great performance and a healthy battery life.
2. The second is a large number of applications that will run on Macs.  I'd like it if any program available for Windows ran on my Mac.
3. The third is the most advanced improvement in user interface design since mice and graphical user interfaces - a truly usable tablet interface.  This capability can fundamentally change the way you interact with your computer.  I'd like the best in class operating system with this capability, which is Microsoft Windows XP Tablet Edition.  (I'm not the only one who thinks this might be possible.  Apple has even joined a Windows Benchmarking program.)
4. And last of all, I'd like the neat apple logo to show off how cool I am.

• Step 1: Take a Toshiba Techra M4 with 15" display and 1.9GHz Pentium M, with all the bells and whistles, throw on your favorite windows applications including Microsoft Office and Adobe CS2.
• Step 2: Apply an Apple sticker to it (they cost about $150 but come with a free iPod ;-).

Then bask in the envy of any Macficionado friends you have left. ;-)

     

I know you're probably tired of me touting each step of progress in WS-Addressing's end game, but we toil through design by committee for months and sometimes years to reach the point where we can see the visible results. Toward the end the milestones accelerate infrequency and importance.  We need to shout a bit when we get there for our own self-worth.

So... today WS-Addressing was published as a Proposed Recommendation.  This means that the Working Group is done (as represented by Last Call), the larger community is done (as represented by Candidate Recommendation), and now implementers have done their due diligence (as represented by Proposed Recommendation).  The Proposed Recommendation is placed before the W3C membership in the form of the Advisory Committee, who may provide advice and comments to the Director who will determine whether there is any doubt about the quality, utility, harmlessness, and general benefit of the specifications.   If not, they will be issued as a W3C Recommendation.

I expect my final tout will appear in about 6 weeks so you're safe from Addressing milestone reports till then :-).

[Photo shows a prayer shingle offered by our former chair MNot's prayer during the WS-Addressing FTF meeting in Yokohama last November.  I think we're well on track to beat that date!]

WS-Addressing 1.0 passed the last two predictable hurdles in the last week in it's march towards completion.  Last Tuesday, the required interop matrix filled up, allowing the WG to declare the spec sufficient to enable interop between vendors.  But the push for interop didn't end there!  We needed four implementations interoping, and we have 5 at 100%, with a sixth awfully close.  Optional features also overacheived.  I put together a little rollup in the test results to show our progress and the minimum we'd need to declare victory. I think it shows we blew past our requirements.  This is a significant milestone in Web Services, as the energy throughout the stack seems to be shifting dramatically towards proving interop rather than writing specs.

And then another milestone yesterday, with the Working Group accepting the test results and the specs as complete, and referring them to the Director, who, with the advice of the Advisory Committee, should move them to final Recommendation in the coming weeks, hopefully without any fuss.  Congratulations to all those contributing to this effort!

At the tail end of the W3C plenary, Paul and I were able sneak away for a couple of stunning caches. First was one in the Esterel mountains, reached by climbing narrow winding roads through steep valleys topped by red rock outcroppings I and draped in sheets of blooming yellow Mimosa trees.

We eventually wound our way to the top of a ridge, looking down the length of a rugged valleys. A broad path, probably a logging road, led along the top and we traversed back and forth, trying to find the easiest way down the slope the last tenth mile To the cache.

At last we picked our way down through the wild lavender, tea trees, and scrubby cork trees, finding a boulder which sheltered the cache and wayposted a decent trail that led directly back to the car (oh well!)

As we opened the cache the wind sprung up with a vengeance, but died out again as we closed the cache back up. Perhaps someone left a genie in the cache? Photos are part of the Cannes set, starting here.

The second cache was a straightforward two-stage multi cache that led as on a circumnavigation of Ile Sainte-Marguerite, which is the "Angel island" of Cannes.  A short boat ride, awesome views of the sea (complete with windsurfers and kites), the Esterel Mountains, Cannes, and the snowy alps in the distance. Very nice!  Again photos are part of the Cannes set, starting here.

A little late getting photos posted, but the week before last I spent in the South of France at the 2006 W3C Technical Plenary. Mostly I was stuck in the hotel in meetings or feverishly working online, rewarded in the end by successfully completing several milestones:

• WS-Addressing Candidate Recommendation completion.  The final issues were closed and dealt with and the interop work approached (but didn't quite reach) completion.
• The WSDL Working Group held it's (probably) last full face to face meeting, as it enters it's fifth year.  It now goes into a bit of slow motion waiting for implementations to catch up.
• Put the finishing touches on the two "binding" specifications I co-authored with IBM, Oracle, and SAP.
• Delivered a hopefully amusing lightning talk at the Tech Plenary, with Paul Downey, on the Chad voting bot and how Single Transferrable Voting can make getting to consensus, well, just a lot more fun.

In between I had some excellent company, excellent food, including a 9-course truffle menu at La Bastide Saint Antoine, and even toward the end of the week a couple of refreshing outings to find geocaches.

Photos are available in the Cannes set.  Check it out! 

Between the major building blocks of the Web Services infrastructure there is naturally a little mortar to hold the whole building up.  I had the opportunity to help bring two of these small pieces of mortar out into public view.  They were published yesterday on MSDN and other partner's web sites.

WSDL 1.1 Binding Extension for SOAP 1.2 

This specification describes how to indicate in a WSDL 1.1 document that a service uses SOAP 1.2.

SOAP 1.1 Binding for MTOM 1.0

This specification describes the application of the MTOM attachment mechanism, originally defined for SOAP 1.2, to SOAP 1.1 envelopes.

Basically, these two specs provide the tiny pieces of missing specese to allow technologies in the "1.1" space to work with the final W3C versions.  This helps bridge the gap between the old and the new, and facilitates implementations (like ours) which support both versions of SOAP with some degree of parity.  Tiny specs, but useful, representing a certain level of completion within the stack.

And, though I had the pleasure of co-authoring primarily with Chris Ferris of IBM, this is the first time Microsoft and Oracle have co-authored a document together.  I've worked for years with Oracle representatives, sometimes towards different technical agendas, and I hope this represents the beginning of better alignment between our views of Web Services standards, and leads to more direct cooperation between our companies both within and outside the standards fora.