Day: January 27, 2005

Sixty years

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Allied (Soviet) forces at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

While I can’t find words to express the mix of sorrow, rage, disgust, and shock that still fills me when I contemplate what happened in that camp and others like it across Nazi Germany, I have to try. Because we’re mistaken if we think it will never happen again.

On a more optimistic note, I was encouraged to read Putin’s remarks at the ceremony to the effect that Russia still has anti-semitism and that he is ashamed to have to acknowledge it.

More Holocaust resources:

No rest for the wicked (cold)

Another day, another shovelful. Having grown up in a nominally warmer climate where it only ever really snowed once every couple of years, I never really learned how to deal with snow. It turns out that it’s all about maintenance. Every morning after the snow falls, you go out and shovel the walk and snowblow the driveway. Shoveling doesn’t have to get to the pavement, just close. Every morning thereafter, you keep scraping at the path to get ice, drifted snow, packed snow, etc. clear and give the sun a chance to do its work. Snow shoveling is like living, it’s a journey rather than a destination.

.Mac and XML-RPC

Apple has released the .Mac SDK, allowing developers to integrate their applications with Apple’s members-only suite of web-hosted applications. Interestingly, the “Using the .Mac SDK” page says that “.Mac supports network access via WebDAV, HTTP, XML-RPC, and other open standards.” The focus of the SDK however appears to be on a set of Cocoa classes that wrap an access API, and there isn’t any documentation on what XML-RPC services are exposed by .Mac.

I would imagine that doing things like membership checking and so forth require a lot more work in XML-RPC, but it would still be interesting to see what the service calls looked like. Other than the one mention in the page I cite above, there’s no further mention of XML-RPC anywhere in the docs.

Anyone got any ideas?