The support of my peers....

[tyggerjai]

So. My greatest recent professional triumph is writing a tool to parse, unpack, and present IMS Learning Objects. The parsing is the painful bit - they're really just zip files with webages (and often swf files) inside, unpacking is a breeze, but there's a manifest file, about which I have previously ranted, that's supposed to contain metadata about the contents. And the standard for that metadata is fucked - it allows bidirectional inheritance, inheritance from multiple nodes without a clear order of precedence, etc, etc, and strict adherence to the spec is not only (IMPO) impossible, but never gives clients what they expect or want anyway. So, since the spec *is* so vague, it all becomes an exercise in guesswork anyway. And, though that increases the pride I can take in having built a tool that works *at all*, it disturbs me, on some level I feel that surely, *surely* the IEEE and IETF know what they're doing, and the fault is mine ... right?

Hah. A recent survey of real-world LOM objects, designed to assess the usage of metadata in the field, had to be curtailed because most of the metadata sent in was not, in fact, parseable. The metadata that was parseable, or that the surveyors parsed by hand, was so far out of whack as to be useless anyway.

Vindication. I will wave this report in the face of the next product manager to ask how LOM support is coming along....

sol.
.

Comments

[bunnikins.livejournal.com]

You're slipping, my love - I almost followed that rant.

How rages your quinsey? I shall thump you tonight if the sniffles I have turn into quinsles..........

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

I made it to work, but had to come home before the raging quinsy lowered my legendary self-control to the point where I actually committed homicide.

So now I am home, and soon will be in bed, where my quinsy may rage to its heart's content.

sol.
.

[bunnikins.livejournal.com]

You're at home in bed?

YAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAHYAH!

Not fair.

Hope you feel better, though...

A bit.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

But I'll feel even betterer when you get home, bringing me sweet, greasy KFC comfort-food....

sol.
.

Re: A bit.

[bunnikins.livejournal.com]

Ok then, what do you want? answer soon, cos I'm leaving work in 7 minutes....:)

Re: A bit.

[bunnikins.livejournal.com]

TOO LATE!

I shall surprise you:)