Piotr Woloszyn

Microsoft SQL Server does not allow to replace an existing XSD schema in a straight forward manner. There is a way of extending a schema by adding new schema component to an existing collection but it will not help if we need to replace a schema:

ALTER XML SCHEMA COLLECTION [relational_schema.]sql_identifier ADD 'Schema Component'

We cannot drop the schema collection and recreate it as it might be used by a table. The way forward would be to untype all XML columns using the collection, then drop and recreate the schema collection and as a last step type the XML columns to that new schema collection:

ALTER TABLE my_table ALTER COLUMN my_xml_column XML

DROP XML SCHEMA COLLECTION my_xml_collection

CREATE XML SCHEMA COLLECTION my_xml_collection AS 'content of my XSD'

ALTER TABLE my_table ALTER COLUMN my_xml_column XML(my_xml_collection)

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Industry has been trying to tackle problem of location based services (LBS) for years. There was always something stopping wider adoption: mobile providers having brain of the size of a peanut finding always a reason to reject the request for the location data (famous code of conduct), clunky mobile handsets with no capabilities what so ever to accept in convenient way user’s input or to display in an acceptable way results, expensive mobile data pushing most of the possible users of the LBS systems off. I could go on and on about the reasons. Let’s just add one more: content. The ideas for location based services exist for years and I believe are very good. There are endless ideas which could improve our way of interacting with context sensitive data, ideas which could be possibly monetized.

Which year is now? It has been at least 7-8 years since I started to put interest in that. But what has changed, what has improved, what hasn’t? Certainly the capabilities of mobile handsets has improved with the new era of the “touchy” handsets changing completely the user experience. Let say it loudly: it becomes acceptable experience now. The problem of the cost of data becomes valid but more and more operators offer (unlimited) data packages for reasonable price. The wide adoption of Wi-Fi and wireless internet capabilities of modern handsets play important role here as well. Nothing really changed in the Telco Towers in term of availability of the location data. Ok, maybe you can get your location but forget about any ideas based on sharing your location with other people. Ain’t gonna happen. Luckily there are services like Yahoo Fire Eagle which tries to fill the gap, services which facilitate users sharing own location with push model and serving that location to interested parties (other applications), doing this in a secure way where the user can control who can see what and when by delegating authorization to own data. There is as well wider presence of mobiles with a GPS module built-in or connected via bluetooth.

We can see improvement and work done in all areas. So, what’s the reason for this rant? The reason is that the experience of using LBS services is still horrible! Let’s take the simplest possible service: “what’s nearby” search. I can get my location as accurate as it can be via GPS but I still can’t really find what I am looking for. Real life situation: I am near Blackfriars station in London, I know that that there is a branch of the Halifax bank nearby, possibly on Fleet Street. Can the new technology help me? The answer is NO. The Google Maps found couple of banks near Fleet Street, but not what I was looking for. The same Yahoo! GO service. Nokia Maps: no love neither. So, let’s face it: mobile location based services suck due to still poor content.

Popularity: 32% [?]

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I was looking for a way of synchronizing my private Google calendar events and my professional Outlook calendar with Nokia N95 8GB. As it turned out it is possible to have quite neat configuration with 2-way syncing to and from your mobile. What is interesting it can be used with other phones as well, not just Nokia, not just Symbian 60 3rd.

The solution has two distinctive parts:

• 2 way synchronization of Google Calendar with the phone
• 1 way synchronization of the Outlook Calendar with the Google Calendar

There is a free service GooSync which helps with first problem. It works with many, many different phones and as basic version is free. The biggest limitations of the free version is that we can synchronize just main calendar, so people using multiple calendars might have to consider using Premium version of service. As a result of registration and installation the goosync software you will have a new synchronizer added to the standard Nokia Sync application.

Next… To pump out events from Outlook to Google Calendar you can use Google synchonizer. Install it on a computer where you have Outlook (note: the supported Outlook versions are 2003 and 2007) and setup 1-way synchronization Outlook -> GCalendar. The application working as a deamon will push events every X minutes to your Google Calendar.

To synchronize your phone with your calendars go to the Sync application on your phone and choose the goosync.com http syncing. You can use WiFi or GPRS to connect to the syncing service. Unfortunately you cannot schedule the synchronization, you will have to do it manually.

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