Me and my girlfriend have just been on a short trip to London from Thursday to Sunday.

Today I took a short trip to Vallåsen in Sweden to try out my new ski. From Copenhagen it takes only a couple of hours so we drove from my place around 7:00 AM and hit Vallåsen at 9:00 AM where it opens. It was a perfect weather with sun all day and it was a nice trip though the ski hills are pretty limited.

Today I ran a short 10 km “Marathon test” in 00:49:48. This run was sponsored by Nike and around 1000 people joined in. Initially I planned to get a time below 45 minutes but I have a lot of good excuses for not getting there .. I’m not kidding, I have excuses such as “very cold weather”, “too much red wine the night before”, “not fully motivated”, etc.

The next test run is a 15 km run and I believe and hope it’s possible to do it below 04:50 min/km unless I come up with another set of excuses.

I’m the lucky owner of a “Qtek 9100″ mobile phone so I decided to try out Microsofts Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK by creating a simple SMS application for it. Actually I made this because a BIOS upgrade would wipe out all information including my sent and received SMS’s and I like to keep all my conversations.

After downloading the SDK I took a look at the samples included and they were pretty cool. Using just a couple of lines it was possible for me to intercept an SMS and do whatever I wanted to do with it - powerful stuff. I wrapped this up in a real simple application which would create an XML document of the “SmsMessage” class and perform an “Insert” request on a new “IqSms” service (based on a custom schema) using a core Iquomi web service. The full code is less than 30 lines and now whenever I receive an SMS it will automatically forward this to my Iquomi store where it’s possible for me to see it. Later it should be no problem to attach an XSLT and make my SMSs viewable in a nice format but for now it’s just inserting information so I’m able to work on it later.

So 30 lines of code in all, less than 20 minutes of development time and you have SMS backup through Iquomi .. that’s pretty cool
Here’s a screenshot of the Iquomi iqSms subscription data if you would like to see how it’s stored.

For the last couple of weeks, a colleague and I have been working on a paper on how to implement authorization into XML Store. XML Store is a peer-to-peer mobile persistence layer using a value-oriented approach for retrieving and storing semi-structured data. Value-oriented means that stored data is immutable, i.e. will never change once stored.

Today we finished this paper. The last week has been pretty hard so I’m a bit tired at the moment. If you’re interested you may download a PDF version of the Authorization in XML Store document.

To keep one of my New Year’s resolutions, I’ve today signed up for Copenhagen Marathon 2006. Now, it’s just a simple matter of participating that day in May - it shouldn’t be that difficult :-p

We’re now writing year 7D6h (aka 2006) so I wish you all a happy new year. I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures from my New Year party (I’m the spooky looking guy) - it was a pretty calm party with good friends.

This year I have promised myself to run at least one marathon, complete my bachelor degree in CS and become a MCSD in .NET.

I wanted to test out how easy it would be to create a gadget for Google “Personalized” homepage (Google calls it a “module” but it’s similar to “gadgets” as referred to by Microsoft), so I decided to create one loading my contacts. Now, I added the ability to match up these with my online MSN Messenger contacts (using its COM objects) displaying their online status and allowing me to quickly access common functionality such as “Send Instant Message…”, etc.

After having worked on my own Iquomi project for several years and found no system which really seems to have the same basic ideas as me, I saw a new beta from Google named Google Base. This looks very interesting and seems to have a lot capabilities similar to Iquomi.

Depending on the success of this system it should be possible to use Google Base as one global CMS similar to Microsoft’s “Hailstorm” project from around 2001. From a user perspective this is a great thing - it will allow us to define our information in one location and have several subsystems extract these information for their use - much more than the obvious choices where Google uses it for its own purpose (Google Maps showing location of a profile, Google Froggle to have up-to-date address information, etc) but for other companies as well allowing them to extract information from one global store.

I really like Google’s pragmatic way of defining their systems - notice this small sentence from their web site “We can’t guarantee where your items will appear.”. Basically they tell users they’re able to sell their information to anyone - or at least us it. One major concern about the Hailstorm project was exactly who should be “in charge” of information stored on Microsoft servers.

The format of data may be specified by RSS or Atom format (with extensions) - this is a great idea and might be something I’ll use for my Iquomi project which currently is heavily based on XML Schemas.

I definitely smell some Google Base/Iquomi integration coming up in the future

I’ve updated my newsfeed so it’s being served by Iquomi’s “IqRss” service. This service is merely an implementation of the RSS 2.0 Feed Specification and by using my Iquomi XML-RPC wrapper I’m able to push blog entries from my blogging-system (WordPress) directly into Iquomi.

In Iquomi I’ve defined a custom service method named “FrontPage”. When this method is executed it’ll request my RSS data and do an XSL transformation to provide the final output which will finally be shown on my Theill Web Site frontpage.

Easy and incredible cool