mnot’s Web log

Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames

Monday, May 31 2004

Why I Won’t Be Buying a House in the Bay Area Soon

Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ “There Goes the Neighborhood” captures what many have been saying for a while now; it’s a bubble, a bubble, a bubble....

( 1 comment )

Sunday, May 30 2004

Ubiquitious Fragment Identifiers

Tim Bray is trying out “purple number signs” on his Web site to make fragment identifiers ubiquitous and easy to find. This site has something along similar lines, through this...

( 2 comments )

Friday, May 28 2004

WebDAV Access Control Protocol

RFC 3744 has been published: This document specifies a set of methods, headers, message bodies, properties, and reports that define Access Control extensions to the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol. This...

XML Infoset, RDF and Data Modelling

I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of...

( 5 comments )

Rename with Date.applescript

Hey mac fans — I need to track changes in a lot of documents, so I’ve cobbled together a simple AppleScript that renames the Finder’s selected files with the date:...

Tuesday, May 18 2004

The Syndication Sky is Falling!

A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair...

( 6 comments )

Saturday, May 15 2004

sparta.py 0.4: Data Binding for RDF in Python

After a short pause (OK, nearly three years), I’ve released version 0.4 of sparta.py. Sparta is a simple API for RDF that binds RDF nodes to Python objects and RDF...

( 4 comments )

Wednesday, May 12 2004

Informational Properties of Infosets

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the influences that using the Infoset has on the information you place in it. To put it another way: if you work with XML at...

( 7 comments )

Tuesday, May 11 2004

OxygenXML is Good Enough

I’ve been playing around with the new OxygenXML 4.0 plug-in for Eclipse M8. Overall, it's very good; much better than the competition, although a lot of the slickness can be...

( 1 comment )

Friday, May 7 2004

What is print.google.com?

It looks like Google is starting to index books and magazines; I came across this in a Google search I did today, but can’t find any reference to it on...

XopParser.py 0.2

To help inform discussion of XOP (and to save Sam the trouble ;), I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty (we’re talking two hours) XOP parser in Python. It isn’t particularly efficient,...

Wednesday, May 5 2004

iTunes

I’ve got to say that iTunes 4.5 is scary addictive. Usually, I have a problem in buying music, because by the time I get to the record shop, I forget...

( 3 comments )

Boo!

Without pointing fingers, some people have a bee in their collective bonnet about the dangers of allowing binary content to be represented in XML, care of XOP. Others are up...

( 4 comments )

Monday, May 3 2004

Go PATCH Go

It looks like the HTTP PATCH method proposal might be based on Delta Encoding, which is IMO one of the cooler and lesser-known HTTP technologies. I've heard of a few...

Sunday, May 2 2004

Taxing Wages

I probably shouldn’t go around interpreting OECD statistics, as I’m not an economist (I just play one on the Web). However, the OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration has...

( 12 comments )

Economic Indicators from the Web

An idea for the LazyWeb: Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is a measure of how much goods and services cost in different countries, irrespective of exchange rate; it’s a way to...

Saturday, May 1 2004

Stupid Compression Tricks

I’m watching a company called Riverbed with interest, because they just released a new product, “Steelhead”. In a nutshell, it’s IP datagram compression done with a shared, dynamic dictionary. That’s...