mnot’s Weblog

all entries

Will HTTP/2.0 Happen After All?

A couple of nights ago, I had a casual chat with Google’s Mike Belshe, who gave me a preview of how their “Let’s make the Web faster” effort looks...
Friday, November 13, 2009 at 05:27 AM

Traffic Server

A long time ago*, the word in high-performance proxy-caching was Inktomi’s Traffic Server. It was so fast it was referred to being “carrier grade” and this could be said...
Friday, October 30, 2009 at 02:30 PM

Working with the US on Education

Dear Ms. Gillard, I am a US citizen who moved back to Melbourne almost three years ago with my Australian wife. We did so largely because we wanted our...
Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:22 AM

#gov2au

Although I'm a bit concerned to see so many references to "Web 2.0", it's very exciting to see Australia talking about opening up government. They've asked for feedback, so...
Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 04:59 PM

RED gets a blog

Just FYI, for those interested: RED now has a blog detailing news and other developments. I’ll still post about it here occaisionally, but most RED-related things are going over...
Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 09:04 PM

Come to the Stockholm IETF!

The Stockholm IETF meeting is shaping up to be an interesting one (and not just because it’s in such a beautiful city). As announced on the mailing list, we...
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 11:43 AM

The Resource Expert Droid

A (very) long time ago, I wrote the Cacheability Engine to help people figure out how a Web cache would treat their sites. It has a few bugs, but...
Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 05:17 PM

面向站长和网站管理员的Web缓存加速指南

The caching tutorial is now available in Chinese, courtesy of Che Dong (and apologies for taking so long in linking to it!). Norwegian should be coming soon......
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 01:32 PM

What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache

Part of my job is maintaining Yahoo!’s build of Squid and supporting its users, which use it to serve everything from the internal Web services that make sites go...
Friday, June 12, 2009 at 10:30 PM

Opera Turbo

HTTP performance is a hot topic these days, so it’s interesting that Opera has announced a “turbo” feature in Opera 10 Beta; Ever felt a Web site was loading...
Friday, June 5, 2009 at 12:09 PM

Most Revealing Google Wave Comment

Everybody’s atwitter (yeah, sue me) about the Google Wave developer preview. Lots of new stuff there, but for me the most revealing comment, almost a throwaway, was here: Did...
Friday, May 29, 2009 at 11:19 PM

Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web

I had a lovely holiday weekend in Canberra with the family, without Web access. Perhaps I’ll blog about that soon — Canberra being in my opinion one of the...
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 09:57 PM

Cobbler / children / shoes / etc.

Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough. I know that at one point I had a transition plan, and started...
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 11:22 PM

The FSF, IETF and Use Patents

Over the past few weeks the Free Software Foundation has had its knickers in a twist about TLS authentication — specifically, its patent encumbrance; That patent in question is...
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 07:50 PM

Caching When You Least Expect it

There’s a rule of thumb about when a HTTP response can be cached; the Caching Tutorial says: If the response’s headers tell the cache not to keep it, it...
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 09:08 AM

Stop it with the X- Already!

Sometimes, it seems like every time somebody has a great idea for a new HTTP header, media type, or pretty much any other protocol element, they do the same...
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 02:44 PM

Have a Drink (or hundred)

Now here's a good meme for the New Year... Instructions: 1) Copy this list into your blog, with instructions. 2) Bold all the drinks you’ve imbibed. 3) Cross out...
Friday, January 2, 2009 at 03:03 PM

OAuth in Minneapolis

There are lots of new “Web 2.0” specs emerging — many beginning with “o” — that are both exciting and concerning. Exciting because the Web is still evolving and...
Friday, November 21, 2008 at 09:46 PM

Dev-Friendly Web Caching

Ryan Tomayko announces Rack::Cache, a HTTP cache for Ruby’s generic Web API; The basic goal is standards-based HTTP caching that scales down to the early stages of a project,...
Monday, October 27, 2008 at 09:47 PM

/site-meta

Metadata discovery is a nagging problem that’s been hanging around the Web for a while. There have been a few stabs at this problem (including at least one by...
Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 03:19 PM

The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly

Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list: As most of you know, over the last several years fairly good progress has been made on standardizing Web services. Many...
Friday, July 4, 2008 at 02:16 PM

The Pitfalls of Debugging HTTP

Some folks at work were having problems debugging HTTP with LWP’s command-line GET utility; it turned out that it was inserting Link headers — HTTP headers, mind you —...
Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 09:20 PM

Atom gets a new audience

Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just...
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 09:42 AM

Moving the Goalposts: “Use” Patents and Standards

It’s become quite fashionable for large IT shops to give blanket Royalty-Free licenses for implementation of “core” technologies, such as XML, Web Services and Atom. I’ll refrain from linking...
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 08:55 AM

Moving Beyond Methods in REST

Having complained before about the sad state of HTTP APIs, I’m somewhat happy to say that people seem to be getting it, producing more capable server-side and client-side tools...
Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 12:55 PM

DAV WTF?

Not many people that I know outside of IETF circles realise that a new *DAV effort has started up; CardDAV. An address book access protocol leveraging the vCard data...
Monday, March 3, 2008 at 01:03 PM

POST and PATCH

It’s 7am, I’m sitting in the Auckland Koru Club on my way home and reading the minor kerfuffle regarding PATCH with interest. For me, the critical difference between PATCH...
Sunday, February 17, 2008 at 02:02 AM

Location, Location, Location

I’m back in the Bay Area for work, and out of curiosity I thought I’d check in on the housing market here. After updating my super-secret source of housing...
Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 04:55 AM

Another Kind of HTTP Negotiation

Here’s one that I’ve been wondering about for a while, for the LazyWeb (HTTP Geek Edition); PUTs and POSTs can result in the creation of new resources, or changes...
Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 01:26 AM

Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts)

I’m following the discussion of RESTful Web description in general, and WADL in particular, with both difficulty and interest (see Dare, Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast)....
Monday, January 21, 2008 at 10:04 PM

Cache Channels Beta

The stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error extensions aren’t the only fiddling we’ve been doing with the HTTP caching model. Now that Squid 2.7 is starting to see daylight, I can explain...
Friday, January 4, 2008 at 01:34 PM

Two HTTP Caching Extensions

We use caching extensively inside Yahoo! to improve scalability, latency and availability for back-end HTTP services, as I’ve discussed before. However, there are a few situations where the plain...
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 04:01 PM

Why Revise HTTP?

I haven’t talked about it here much, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year and a half working with people in the IETF to...
Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 04:50 AM

WADL Documentation XSLT Updated

I've updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to; Fix a bug with finding and displaying XML Schema Make it compatible with xsltproc (and hopefully most other XSLT1.0 processors that...
Friday, November 2, 2007 at 10:53 AM

5005

Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC. For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular...
Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 10:26 AM

ETags, ETags, ETags

I’ve been hoping to avoid this, but ETags seem to be popping up more and more often recently. For whatever reason, people latch onto them as a litmus test...
Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at 08:58 PM

URI Templates Redux

URI Templates -01 is now an Internet-Draft. After sitting on the spec for a while and trying to figure out an elegant solution to the encoding problem, we decided...
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 02:10 PM

Vic Schools Mashup

For the somewhat limited audience of parents looking at neighbourhoods and schools in Victoria, Australia, I present the Victorian Schools / Google Maps Mashup. Note that there are two...
Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 08:14 PM

The State of Proxy Caching

A while back I wrote up the state of browser caching, after writing a quick-and-dirty XHR-based test page, with the idea that if people know how their content is...
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 05:50 PM

Safari 3: Protecting Client-Side State

It's a little thing, but I'm very pleased to see that Safari 3 will check with you before you discard a page where you've entered data on a form;...
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 at 08:08 AM

Expires vs. max-age

I occasionally get a question from readers of the caching tutorial about whether to use the Expires header or Cache-Control: max-age to control a response’s freshness lifetime. Some people...
Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 04:34 PM

Intelligent Design, Eames-Style

For a while, I’ve had the fairly well-known Charles Eames quote “Design depends largely on constraints” as the tagline on my blog (if you read this in a feed...
Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 11:26 PM

Australia != America

We were… refreshingly reminded that we’re not in Kansas (or even California) any more while watching The Daily Show on TV tonight, and this commercial came on; Nando’s is a...
Monday, May 7, 2007 at 09:55 PM

httperf rev

Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement; It is my pleasure to announce two new versions of httperf: 0.8.1 and 0.9.0. version 0.8.1 fixes the known bugs in version 0.8,...
Tuesday, May 1, 2007 at 07:31 PM

Squid is My Service Bus

The QCon presentation (slides) was ostensibly about how we use HTTP for services within Yahoo’s Media Group. When I started thinking about the talk, however, I quickly concluded that...
Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 12:47 PM

Around the World in 24 Days

I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been on the road, a lot. Although I got back a while back, I’m just now catching up. Part of working...
Sunday, April 22, 2007 at 05:32 AM

WWW2007 Developers’ Track

We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before...
Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 09:29 PM

REST Issues, Real and Imagined

I think that most of the debate about REST focuses on the wrong things, leading developers down the garden path at the expense of their productivity and the success...
Tuesday, February 27, 2007 at 07:14 AM

Things to Remember when Moving Country

It’s always more expensive than you plan. The few weeks before you go are the busiest of your life. It’s on the scale of planning a wedding where royalty...
Monday, February 12, 2007 at 03:04 AM

Pipes!

Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is...
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 at 09:55 AM

Developers, Developers, Developers

A reminder: proposals for the Developers’ Track at WWW2007 should be in by February 16th. We’re looking for Web-focused presentations, demos and tutorials for and by developers. I’m particularly...
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 at 01:42 AM

So close, yet so far...

Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 08:58 PM

Connectivity in .au - Help!

So, no that we have a place to live, there are a few choices; Phone — Since we’re keeping jobs as well as friends and relatives in the States,...
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 02:54 AM

Week Two in Victoria

I say “Victoria,” not Melbourne, because we’re currently staying in Forest Hill, courtesy of Roger and Marg, who are on holiday. The good news is that today we signed...
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 01:57 AM

Week One in Melbourne

It’s Christmas Eve, and Charlie and I have been on the ground in Melbourne for a week. So far, we’ve got a new mobile phone (sweet), checked in with...
Sunday, December 24, 2006 at 02:32 AM

SOA Jumps Shark

Uche calls it; So the SOA wars are heating up. More and more smart people are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; but stakes is still crazy...
Monday, December 4, 2006 at 03:22 PM

Schema for JSON

One of the perceived deficiencies of JSON is that it doesn’t have a schema language. I say “perceived” because the problems that a schema language brings often outweigh the...
Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 03:34 PM

Seven Year Itch

In a nutshell: After a lot of angst, back-and-forth, and false starts, we’re moving back to Melbourne next month, seven years and a few days after we arrived in...
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 10:13 PM

Friday Fun: I Hate Cookies

There are plenty of reasons to hate HTTP Cookies, but there’s one thing that especially annoys me; their syntax. Specifically, the Netscape spec allowed an “expires” field that contains...
Friday, October 27, 2006 at 12:08 AM

Thoughts on Declarative Ajax

Dave Johnson writes up a nice summary of the issues of adding new elements to HTML for declarative Ajax, something that I ran into when doing HInclude. Basically, IE...
Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 06:12 PM

Wanted: HTTP Yahoo!s

My team at Yahoo! is looking for a mid-level developer (5-10 years experience) to help build our HTTP/REST toolkit, among other things. The job is mostly coding Perl and...
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 07:29 PM

The Flipperdex

I’ve been playing with sales data for houses in the Bay area for a while, and have always wanted to come up with an index of same-home sales —...
Monday, October 16, 2006 at 09:29 PM

Does the Enterprise (Vendor) Get the Web?

A couple of interesting things have happened recently; first, Jonathan Marsh has a new job; WSO2 is a year-old startup which provides support services around Apache’s Axis 2 Web...
Friday, October 13, 2006 at 08:32 PM

URI Templating, the Spec

As mentioned a while back, there are a variety of places where it would be useful to be able to describe the structure of a URI, rather than just...
Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 01:24 PM

More JavaScript Updates

Hot on the heels of the last batch, Stefan pointed me to Jesse Skinner’s addDOMLoadEvent, which seems to avoid the problems I found earlier (you know you’re in for...
Sunday, October 1, 2006 at 09:45 AM

Javascript Updates

I’ve updated the url_template.js and json_form.js libraries to fix some bugs, to make the demo I gave at XTech run more smoothly. It should work well on Safari, Mozilla...
Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 10:19 PM

Surfing the Barcoded Web

Apple’s shipping an iSight camera in just about everything these days, and one of the coolest apps to use it is Delicious Library. If you follow that to its...
Saturday, September 16, 2006 at 11:01 PM

Some Questions for Software Vendors

Everyone seems to be gushing about Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. While any headway is good in the horrible landscape that is Intellectual Property, my initial reaction is that it...
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 01:00 PM

This Site Powered By...

A while back, I mentioned that I was considering changing my hosting setup. In the end, I decided to outsource, for a few reasons; Administration — There’s always an...
Sunday, September 3, 2006 at 08:32 AM

Caching Performance Notes

There have been some interesting developments in Web caching lately, from a performance perspective; event loops are becoming mainstream, and there are lots of new contenders on the scene....
Monday, August 21, 2006 at 12:52 PM

Un tutoriel de la mise en cache

Many thanks to J.J. Solari for translating the Caching Tutorial to French!...
Friday, August 18, 2006 at 08:49 PM

Putting the Web back in Web 2.0

Timbl has this great term “Webizing” that he uses to talk about giving existing systems the benefits of the Web architecture. Despite the first part of “Web 2.0”, I...
Monday, August 14, 2006 at 10:58 PM

On Patents, Briefly

This would be funny, if this wasn’t so scary. Subscribed nevertheless....
Monday, July 10, 2006 at 08:20 PM

Friday Fun: Percent Encoding

If you boil down the BNF in both RFC2396 and RFC3986, path segments can contain the following characters without percent-encoding them: ALPHA DIGIT ! $ & ' ( ) *...
Friday, June 30, 2006 at 06:15 AM

Welcome, Hugo!

Hugo has finally blogged the big news. He’s left one of the coolest jobs in the world — working for the W3C — to come to another one of...
Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 07:55 AM

Bringing Back the Link - With a Twist

Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents...
Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 10:23 AM

Microsoft's RESTful Robots

A friend (who shall remain anonymous) pointed me to Microsoft’s announcement today regarding their foray into robotics, of all things. My eyes glazed over until they rested upon the...
Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 08:15 AM

Friday Fun: Feed Authentication with Cookies

See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.While you’re there, it would be interesting to know what happens if you...
Friday, June 9, 2006 at 10:32 AM

Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services

When I joined Yahoo, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to their use of “Web Services”. There, that phrase means any kind of machine-to-machine communication...
Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 05:43 AM

Caching Web 2.0

I just finished my XTech presentation, “Web 2.0 on Speed”. here are the slides [pdf]; I’m going to try to s5 them soon. There isn’t much new in this...
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 07:39 PM

The State of Browser Caching

Updated 2006-06-03 One of the big problems that Web developers have with HTTP caching is that they don’t know how the caches behave; while the specs say one thing, the...
Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 06:02 PM

Yaron Uncloaks!

Yaron publicly says what he’s doing at Microsoft (scroll down); I hear that HTTP stuff is pretty cool. If anyone cares you can peruse a bunch of blog entries...
Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 08:43 AM

Vendor-pires

Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*; The single, most important feature that inspires my enthusiasm about WS-* is that it has universal support from all the major vendors....
Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 08:16 AM

Housing Derivatives

The Economist gives a heads-up [subscription required] about the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s plans for housing derivatives; In the next few weeks, the CME is likely to open trading in...
Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 05:07 PM

XTech

It’s official; I’ve got a last-minute slot at XTech, talking about all things Web caching....
Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 09:40 AM

DOM vs. Web

Back at the W3C Technical Plenary, I argued that Working Groups need to concentrate on making more Web-friendly specifications. Here’s an example of one such lapse causing security problems...
Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 12:16 PM

Three Months at Yahoo!

I’m quickly coming up on three months as a Yahoo, and a bunch of people have been asking me how things are going, as well as what I’m doing....
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 10:48 AM

Another WS-*

A friend in the trenches put me on to the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Paging through the quotes, there are a few that are especially...
Friday, April 14, 2006 at 05:41 AM

Viva Italia!

According to ABC Online (that's Australian Broadcasting Corporation to the Americans out there): Two Melbourne men have been elected to the Italian Parliament. It is the first time Italians...
Thursday, April 13, 2006 at 09:32 PM

Bug Syncronicity

I’ve had a lyric running through my head for the last day or so, thanks to a couple of bugs. I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles /...
Thursday, April 13, 2006 at 08:51 AM

Looking for a Big House? Wait!

Most discussion you see about the housing market these days tends to focus on a) whether there’s a bubble (reliable sources say yes, at least in many places) and...
Sunday, April 9, 2006 at 08:15 AM

Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?

It’s become axiomatic in some circles — especially in WS-* land, as well as in many other uses of XML — that the preferred (or only) means of offering...
Friday, April 7, 2006 at 10:44 AM

What good is SOAP to HTTP?

I’m a little confused by Mark Baker’s stance regarding SOAP; he seems to encourage the Web services world to use SOAP on top of HTTP in a fashion compatible...
Thursday, April 6, 2006 at 09:58 AM

Workers of the World, Untie

A few snippets from the day; 1) The Wall Street Journal reports on the divergence between productivity and wages; Since the end of 2000, gross domestic product per person...
Sunday, March 26, 2006 at 08:14 PM

Don’s False Choice

True to form, Don’s using his witty charm and good looks (such as they are ;) to shape discussion of a topic… in this case, REST, where he splits...
Monday, March 20, 2006 at 11:35 AM

Web Authentication

There’s some excitement out there about “Cookie-less HTTP Authentication.” While it’s tempting to say that cookies are evil (the fru-it of the dev-il), using them for authentication isn’t actually...
Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 06:48 PM

WS-Transfer, WAKA and the Web

Microsoft and friends (of the keep your enemy closer variety, I suspect) have submitted WS-Transfer to the W3C. I found the Team comment interesting; e.g., WS-Transfer can therefore be...
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 at 09:26 PM

Feed History Redux

Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History. The big (and hopefully, last) change this time is the use of the “previous” and “subscription” Atom link...
Wednesday, March 1, 2006 at 03:40 PM

Invalidating Caches with POST

Have you ever posted a comment to a blog, found it missing, so you re-posted it, only to find two entries? Annoying, huh? Aaron pinged me the other day...
Saturday, February 18, 2006 at 03:14 PM

Prosper

So, a few weeks ago, I was sitting in the Galleria with Pete and Brian, having a coffee and talking about work. When, up comes two women with clipboards,...
Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 11:03 PM

Offline

Interesting; there are not one but two sessions at the upcoming ETech about taking Web applications offline. Given the current bent of O’Reilly conferences — speed dating for VCs...
Tuesday, February 7, 2006 at 11:24 PM

And Now for Something Completely Different

For the past three and a half years, I’ve learned a lot, had a tremendous amount of fun, and made some really good friends working at BEA Systems in...
Friday, January 27, 2006 at 03:02 PM

Little Orange “feed” Buttons

About two years ago, I got a little grouchy about those little orange XML buttons, and exhorted people to label them properly with RSS. Then came along a little...
Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 08:46 PM

How Web-Ready is XMLHttpRequest?

I’ve been playing around with some ideas that use XMLHttpRequest recently, but I keep on bumping up against implementation inconsistencies on IE vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. Mozilla. Although...
Monday, January 23, 2006 at 11:30 PM

Para publicadores de conteúdos e Webmasters

The RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters has been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the efforts of Maurício Samy Silva. Note that while the title says “RSS”,...
Friday, January 13, 2006 at 04:43 PM

Safari and Content Sniffing

It took two years, but Apple has finally taken steps to limit Safari’s content-sniffing ways; Safari now displays certain documents that have text/plain headers as plain text rather than...
Wednesday, January 11, 2006 at 01:17 PM

Making headway on OPTIONS

On the heels of mod_cgi, PHP now does the right thing (at least in 5.1) when setting the Allow header. mod_dav is still broken, though. Backstory here....
Monday, January 9, 2006 at 11:36 PM

Colour Management in OSX

After hearing about how I lusted after Bob’s D100 in Japan last November, Anitra kindly splurged on a Nikon D50 for my birthday, and I was re-introduced to serious...
Sunday, January 8, 2006 at 01:12 PM

2005 in Feeds

Another year has gone by, and rather than cataloguing music, movies or books that I liked, here are some feeds on the Web that I enjoyed reading throughout the...
Monday, December 26, 2005 at 11:36 AM

RFC 4229: HTTP Header Field Registrations

The useful end of RFC 3864 (at least regarding HTTP) is finally* here. When you need to know where a particular header is defined there’s now one place to...
Saturday, December 24, 2005 at 09:02 AM

How to Throw a Holiday Party

One thing I detest about many technology companies is their tendency to treat employees like overgrown 15-year-olds with no social skills. This was most evident at Java One’s “Social...
Thursday, December 22, 2005 at 02:42 PM

Choosing a School in a Global Marketplace

Every parent should take a flip through the OECD’s Education at a Glance*, their annual look at the state of learning in most industrialised countries. Why? First of all,...
Wednesday, December 21, 2005 at 01:17 AM

Where have the Professional Journalists Gone?

Like a blogger trying to pump up their buzz, the New York Times declares; Australian Unrest Spreads to Other Cities What’s happened now? Have Melbourne and Brisbane been overrun...
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 at 10:23 AM

The End Is Nigh?

Bloomberg calls it; In the U.S. bond market, the housing bubble has burst. Bonds backed by home loans to the riskiest borrowers, the fastest growing part of the $7.6 trillion...
Tuesday, December 6, 2005 at 01:54 PM

RFC 4287: The Atom Syndication Format

Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that it’s (necessarily)...
Monday, December 5, 2005 at 04:13 PM

Leveraging the Web: Caching

The first in an occasional series about the real-world benefits of REST and the Web architecture, as applied to HTTP. I used to work for a fairly huge company...
Saturday, November 26, 2005 at 12:38 PM

Travel Notes: Japan

My pictures from a week in Japan are now up. This was a trip for the Addressing WG, with a day beforehand to get over jetlag, and a few...
Wednesday, November 23, 2005 at 12:35 AM

It's Official: Blogs are Everywhere

One of the oldest continuously-run enterprises in the world (and a former employer of my wife), Oxford University Press, first publisher of the King James Bible, namesake of a...
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 at 11:08 PM

TripSense

Just got an e-mail from Progressive, who want people to sign up for Tripsense; What driving habits determine whether you’re a safer driver than others? We’re trying to determine...
Friday, November 18, 2005 at 12:06 AM

REST vs..?

More and more people are getting turned on to the advantages of using REST as a higher-level abstraction for networked applications, often comparing it favourably to SOAP and Web...
Monday, November 7, 2005 at 05:12 AM

Frameworks

Stumbled across this, from Ian Bicking; My problem with a lot of MVC web frameworks is that they are really a way of codifying one developers internal thinking about a...
Sunday, October 30, 2005 at 09:44 PM

Calendar <-> Feed?

Does anybody know of a program or service that will look at a calendar file (e.g., vCalendar, iCalendar, hCalendar) and publish the entries on it as an RSS feed, where...
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 10:43 PM

Emulating W3C ,tools with mod_rewrite

I don't know if this has already been done (it's not exactly rocket science), but for the benefit of those who want to emulate the W3C's cool ,tools functions with...
Sunday, October 23, 2005 at 01:02 PM

Why Just GET and POST?

Why is it that Web browsers — Amaya excluded — don’t support PUT and DELETE? After all, if there are enough VCs foolish enough to part with their money for...
Saturday, October 22, 2005 at 12:30 PM

OPTIONS Getting Better

Roy Fielding has just closed a bug that’s been around since 1996, and which I’ve previously lamented here; The block has now been deleted from all active branches of httpd...
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 at 03:38 PM

XSLT for the Rest of the Web

I’ve raved before about how useful the XSLT document() function is, once you get used to it. However, the stars have to be aligned just so to use it; the...
Tuesday, October 18, 2005 at 05:43 PM

2.0

Does anybody else chortle quietly when they see “2.0-this” and “2.0-that”? It’s getting absurd; first we had “Web 2.0” (never mind that this term has been used for years...
Wednesday, October 5, 2005 at 04:33 PM

Bennet Murray Nottingham

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 at 10:59 PM

Feed History -04

Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a...
Monday, September 5, 2005 at 10:29 PM

RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters

I took a pass at a revision of the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters on the train this morning, as I realised it was dreadfully out of...
Thursday, September 1, 2005 at 10:42 AM

sparta.py 0.8

I’m happy to announce that version 0.8 of sparta, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. This revision requires rdflib 2.2.1,...
Monday, August 29, 2005 at 09:31 PM

Bubble Fun

It seems that the debate has switched from if there’s a housing bubble to when and where it will pop. “Americans pay for their houses with money they borrowed from...
Thursday, August 25, 2005 at 06:14 PM

Wanted: Blogging Fund Manager

Does anybody know of a mutual fund manager who also has a blog? I’d be interested if someone in the financial industry had such a rich channel to their...
Thursday, August 25, 2005 at 02:25 PM

Advertise on the BBC!

Is it just me, or is this a thinly-veiled press release? I don’t see how Bluetooth is relevant; they might as well point out that it runs on electricity...
Monday, August 15, 2005 at 08:25 PM

Putting History in Your Feed

I’ve had a few e-mails asking how I got this site’s RSS feed to include its history, so here are the instructions for doing it in Moveable Type (the...
Monday, August 15, 2005 at 08:02 PM

Feed History -03

Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include: Added fh:archive element, to indicate that an entry is an archive Allow subscription feed to...
Monday, August 15, 2005 at 01:44 PM

Adding Semantics to Excel with Microformats and GRDDL

When I worked in the financial industry, I quickly noticed that Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. It may make IT execs tear their...
Saturday, August 13, 2005 at 12:00 AM

Separating the Data Model from its Serialisation

For some time, I’ve noticed that people defining XML formats spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the structure of the format. This is especially apparent in standards...
Wednesday, August 10, 2005 at 02:26 PM

HTTP Performance (again)

Some folks at IONA have written a paper entitled Where HTTP Fails SOAP. I had a chance to look at this before I got it published, and their conclusions...
Monday, August 8, 2005 at 10:03 AM

Who Do We Work For?

The FT Global 500 is pretty much what you seen when you look up “capitalistic orgy” in the dictionary. It’s a compilation of the largest 500 mega-corporations in the...
Saturday, July 23, 2005 at 12:09 PM

Transformational Standards

Don Box (whose blog doesn’t seem to be taking comments any more, so I’ll do it over here) points out some very cool technology he’s using, Microsoft’s Office Communicator....
Friday, July 22, 2005 at 09:57 AM

John Kerry, Spammer

Both my wife and I signed up to johnkerry.com’s mailing list during the last federal election cycle. After he lost, we inevitably lost some immediacy of interest in what...
Thursday, July 21, 2005 at 07:38 AM

Core Image Fun House

Am I just behind, or is Core Image Fun House the coolest thing ever? With Core Image, Apple has basically built Photoshop into the OS, except that all of...
Monday, July 18, 2005 at 06:59 AM

Making Syndication Enterprise-Grade

After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and...
Saturday, July 16, 2005 at 10:37 AM

Don’t use the ‘feed’ URI Scheme

It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘pcast’)....
Friday, July 15, 2005 at 10:13 AM

Naked & Angry

Talk about ground-breaking online business models! Naked & Angry lets you submit your own patterns that people will vote on for seven days; the winners will get $500 and...
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 at 09:34 PM

Never Mind the Corporate Blogs; Here’s the Wiki

While a lot of companies are exploring blogs as a means of building communities, Intuit* (makers of Quicken, TurboTax, etc.) has skipped directly to the next logical step; using...
Saturday, July 9, 2005 at 02:50 PM

One Description to Bind them All? Nah.

You can describe just about anything with sufficient precision in plain English, given enough words. In practice, this doesn’t happen; specialised fields — whether science, finance or art —...
Friday, July 8, 2005 at 08:04 AM

(Statistical) Information Wants to Be Free

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that as of today, their online publications and tables are now free to download, instead of requiring an account and a per-download...
Friday, July 1, 2005 at 08:03 PM

JavaOne

So, this week was my first JavaOne. It felt like most other industry conferences; an exhibition floor, free lunches, good technical sessions, and so forth. The big news this...
Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 05:56 PM

Perspectives on the Addressing Experiment

I don’t talk much about it here, but I’m honoured to be the Chair of the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group. This is something of an experiment for...
Monday, June 27, 2005 at 08:17 PM

Another, More Disturbing Reason Not to Buy a House

As you might guess, I’m not too keen on buying a house at the moment, due to what I (and others) perceive to be a bubble in prices. That’s...
Thursday, June 23, 2005 at 09:01 PM

Bubble News Roundup

This week the Economist continues casting doubt upon the notion that housing prices will continue going up, up, up: This boom is unprecedented in terms of both the number...
Monday, June 20, 2005 at 08:31 PM

Getting Rid of QNames in Content

Or, What’s Wrong with XInclude? QNames are evil (at least in content), so I never really liked the WSDL convention of using them to name and refer to constructs. It...
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at 05:48 AM

Web Description at the W3C

The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats; This mailing list is dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and...
Tuesday, May 24, 2005 at 08:11 AM

Prefetching (again)

There’s been quite a kerfuffle over Google’s Web Accelerator, because it prefetches Web content. It’s amusing to see these issues recycle over time; in the late nineties, prefetching was...
Sunday, May 22, 2005 at 04:37 PM

Freakonomics

After hearing a review on NPR and reading the Economist’s, I was (as was once said) with child to read Freakonomics. After finding myself in a queue of 411...
Sunday, May 22, 2005 at 10:16 AM

XML Base: Evil?

If you accept that QNames in content are evil, the next logical question is whether XML Base is any better. In fact, if you turn your head a certain...
Saturday, May 21, 2005 at 11:22 AM

WADLing towards Web Description

Marc Hadley has released WADL in the wild, and I’m intrigued; based on a first look, I’d say it’s the most promising Web (as opposed to Web Services) description...
Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 09:39 PM

OxygenXML, Now with Visual Schema Editing

OxygenXML 6.0 is out, and it sucks even less. The biggest news is — finally! — a visual Schema editor. This may be the biggest threat yet to Gudge’s...
Tuesday, May 17, 2005 at 09:19 AM

Effects of Australian Tax Cuts

Last week, the Australian government announced a new budget. It included a number of tax cuts that were even more ambitious than expected. To help figure out who these...
Sunday, May 15, 2005 at 10:58 AM

Google's Cache-Control Extensions

I happened to look at the HTTP headers returned from Google News just now (what can I say, I’m a HTTP geek), and I noticed something unusual; Last login:...
Thursday, May 12, 2005 at 09:05 PM

Notes on Generational Accounting

Social Security represents a pact between generations—a financial and social commitment among people of all ages. — US Social Security Administration Although George Bush has caused a brouhaha with...
Tuesday, May 10, 2005 at 09:36 PM

Greasemonkey and the Web

There’s a lot of cool apps emerging for GreaseMonkey (and GreaseMonkIE and PithHelmet, for IE and Safari respectively). It seems like these extensions have a love/hate relationship with the...
Monday, May 9, 2005 at 08:08 AM

Arguments for Buying a House Now

In the interest of equal time, two quotes attributed to Keynes; If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million,...
Sunday, May 1, 2005 at 10:02 PM

Questions Leading to a Web Description Format

A while back, I published a series of entries (1,2,3,4) about would-be Web Description Formats, with the intent of figuring out which (if any) is suitable, or whether a...
Friday, April 29, 2005 at 11:38 PM

Data Modeling and Abstraction

Today’s release of Tiger includes a new but little-discussed framework for developers, CoreData. What’s most interesting to me is its similarities — and differences — to SDO, IBM and...
Friday, April 29, 2005 at 02:08 PM

Personalised RSS and Cookie Sharing

Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser? If they were, sites would be able to automatically personalise the feeds you subscribe to; would people...
Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 09:14 PM

Syntax for Distributed Computing

XML is arguably one of the bigger things to come onto industry’s radar for a while, and as a result programming languages (e.g., ECMAScript, Comega, Java) are changing to...
Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 10:20 AM

Try This RSS Experiment

Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often...
Tuesday, April 12, 2005 at 09:32 AM

Coffee, Tea, or Shove that Phone Right Up Your…?

As if flying wasn’t enough of a trial already, you may have heard that the FCC is considering lifting their ban on mobile phone use in airplanes. While the...
Sunday, April 10, 2005 at 09:26 AM

Tempest in a Teacup, Counterclockwise*

Those who have been preoccupied by Two Funerals and a Wedding may have missed news of a developing diplomatic crisis in Australia. Sir Michael Somare, the Prime Minister of Papua...
Sunday, April 10, 2005 at 08:46 AM

A Call to OPTIONS

Web metadata discovery is not a new topic, and one on which the final word has not been spoken. However, one of the most basic means of discovering something...
Sunday, April 3, 2005 at 06:59 PM

Can Somebody Explain to Me...

RDF has a simple, usable, universal model; everything’s nodes and arcs, so it avoids the problems of the Infoset, which IMO are brought by its complexity and special cases....
Friday, April 1, 2005 at 05:47 PM

Memory, Sweet Memory...

Just added a 512M module to the Powerbook for a total of 1G (was 768M), for a pittance — $79! — courtesy of Amazon. Everything’s much snappier, especially Eclipse; I...
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 at 07:01 PM

Site Updates

After a deeply wounding comment about this site’s design from SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHO THEY ARE last week, I’ve refreshed the mnot.net stylesheets and front page design. OK, truth...
Friday, March 25, 2005 at 04:58 PM

Nevermore

A while back, I wrote up a description of a pattern for avoiding messages like “click submit only once.” I didn’t do much after that, because I’ve been a...
Monday, March 21, 2005 at 04:20 PM

Sparta.py 0.7

I’m happy to announce that version 0.7 of sparta.py, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. My goal for this release...
Thursday, March 17, 2005 at 09:56 PM

Travel Warning

I personally like Airbus planes, especially the A340, but Risks Digest has given me a reason to avoid some of them; [A]fter (an earlier) disaster, more than 20 American...
Thursday, March 17, 2005 at 09:45 PM

More notes on the Bay area housing market

Carlos sent me an interesting summary page about the Bay area housing bubble. I wish there were more links substantiating the assertions there (a few ring false), but it is...
Saturday, March 5, 2005 at 05:22 PM

Using XML in Data-Oriented Applications

So, you’ve got some data that you need to give to somebody else, and you want to use XML to do it; good for you, you’ve seen the light...
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 at 09:09 AM

document(Web)

I love the XSLT document function. With it, you can access the whole Web from a stylesheet; this gives a lot of flexibility, in the right situation. For example,...
Tuesday, February 22, 2005 at 10:50 PM

The Map is Not the Territory

Werner makes an excellent point; [W]e need to continue to take care that we do not consider The Model to be The Truth. The web based internet is a...
Monday, February 7, 2005 at 02:39 PM

Who’ll Clean Up?

Listening to people talk about the economy -- and the housing bubble in particular -- made me wonder; what happens after it bursts?

Saturday, February 5, 2005 at 11:22 PM

JSON and XML

I’m intrigued by the JSON effort. While many people (and vendors) have chosen XML for data interchange because it’s not platform- or vendor-specific, these folks have chosen the other...
Monday, January 24, 2005 at 11:21 PM

WS-Who's on First?

There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL. WS-Addressing doesn't have MEPs, but it does allow you to create patterns of messages.Meanwhile, SOAP has bindings and WSDL has bindings, and WS-Addressing have bindings too. But, a SOAP binding binds an underlying transport, a WSDL binding binds an abstract interface, and an Addressing binding binds abstract properties.That's not the properties in SOAP, by the way, which aren't exactly the same as the properties in WSDL.

Sunday, January 23, 2005 at 12:12 AM

On How Google Fixed Comment Spam

More than a year after my modest suggestion, Google takes a step to fix comment spam. Hopefully, other people who re-publish Web content (like mailing list archives) will start...
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 at 07:41 PM

Melbourne

Since the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group is visiting my (sort of) home town in a couple of weeks, I've updated the Opinionated Guide to Melbourne that I sometimes give to people by e-mail and put it on the Web. /me dons flame-retardant suit...

Wednesday, January 5, 2005 at 02:17 PM

Tufte would be Proud

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released an SVG-based "animated population pyramid" that very nicely visualises the change in that country's population over time.

Friday, December 17, 2004 at 12:13 PM

text/python?

I’m thinking about whether it would be a good idea to have a media type for Python source files, call it “text/python.” The main benefit that I see to...
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 at 06:28 AM

Sparta.py 0.6: RDF (and RSS!) Made Easy

Based on feedback (thanks, John), it's now mapped to an object that implements a subset of the interface of sets.Set, and produces a full sets.Set when you call the copy() method. rdf:Seq is mapped to a list, joining rdf:List; this allows Sparta to work with RSS 1.0, along with other formats that use Seq. The factory takes an optional schema_store argument, so you can store schema hints for Spara separately, if you wish.

Monday, December 6, 2004 at 05:42 PM

Shop ‘til you Drop

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish. But you should hear what he’s saying in private. Roach met...
Friday, November 26, 2004 at 05:09 PM

What's Going on at Amazon?

I tend to use shopping carts at online stores as to-buy lists; if I'm interested in something, I'll hold it in a shopping cart and muse on it for a while.... Having someone use your site to save their shopping list is a gold mine; you get to see what they're interested in, and they tend to come back to you a whole lot more, because they've built up a lot of state.... Well, Later has apparently come and passed; I've finally made a choice about my next digital camera, and upon adding it to my shopping basket, discovered that -- wait for it -- the camera was the only thing in there.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 09:31 PM

FYI

For some reason, people are considering a change, such as this one. Might I make another suggestion [pdf].

Friday, November 5, 2004 at 01:49 AM

Partisan Hackery

I’m not the first to blog this by any means, but it’s notable enough to interrupt our regular… err… broadcast. Stop what you’re doing and see John Stewart take...
Saturday, October 16, 2004 at 08:18 PM

Why POST is Special

In a recent post, Don gave his take on the enlightening nature of WS-Transfer; Honestly, WS-Transfer has been in the oven for quite a while. It’s been interesting to...
Sunday, October 10, 2004 at 03:56 AM

A Foolish…

Tuesday, October 5, 2004 at 10:02 PM

Is there a Web Services Architecture?

As I'm sure many others were, I was intrigued to see that Microsoft published an Introduction to the Web Services Architecture the other week. Unlike their usual collaborative selves, they did this without any partners, co-authors or even acknowledgement to the outside world; it reads as if Web services is a beast that was bred purely within the gates of Redmond.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004 at 11:57 PM

The ‘Web’ in Web Services

I was very interested to see the reaction that people had to WS-Transfer over the last few days. While the SOAP Resource Representation Header had opprobrium heaped upon it (""), Transfer passed by with nothing more than a few nodding heads and people saying "aha." In my view, WS-Transfer deserves a lot more of that criticism; if anything, the Resource Representation Header tries to supplant MIME, not HTTP.

Monday, September 27, 2004 at 06:38 PM

Back

If you're wondering where the promised travel stories from Melbourne got to, you'll have to wait a bit longer. Right after I got there, Anitra was bit by a spider (a supreme irony, really) and had to go to the emergency room, because all sorts of unpleasant things were happening.

Sunday, September 19, 2004 at 10:00 AM

And now for something completely different: Roadblog!

I'm typing this from the Red Carpet Club in San Francisco International Airport, about to disembark on a snap vacation to Australia. By 'snap vacation,' I mean that I didn't have a gleam in my eye about this trip two weeks ago, but thanks to generous fares from United ($650 round trip!)... Anitra and Charlie are staying behind for this one; she couldn't get away from work, and will be going to Australia to hear some wedding bells (shhh, big secret) in January.

Wednesday, September 8, 2004 at 08:12 PM

HTTP Header Registries

An update to the Internet-Draft that provides initial values for the HTTP Header Message Registries is now available.

Wednesday, September 8, 2004 at 10:53 AM

Saving the Village with Wal-Mart

In BusinessWeek, Chris Kenton brings us a thoughtful piece about the Faustian bargains that localities are making in the name of progress; [A]t the end of the day, we...
Monday, September 6, 2004 at 01:49 PM

Innocent Fraud

...I have learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief -- what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom -- and the reality. And in the end, not surprisingly, it is the reality that counts.-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Economics of Innocent Fraud"I'm just starting this book, but it's pretty thought-provoking so far.

Thursday, September 2, 2004 at 02:23 PM

HTTP Authentication and Forms

It's no secret that HTTP authentication isn't used as often as it should be.
Thursday, August 26, 2004 at 01:45 PM

“It seems that the housing party is over”

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article, “Hot Housing Market Simmers Down.” I can’t reference it directly because I’m not a subscriber, but it basically notes that, according to the...
Wednesday, August 25, 2004 at 11:11 AM

sparta.py 0.5: RDF made easy

Version 0.5 of sparta.py is now available; with this release, it's roughly feature-complete.
Saturday, August 21, 2004 at 07:35 PM

On Jargon and Applicability

Alfred Marshall, who is credited with turning economics from a sideline to a proper discipline of its own, had this to say: (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done.... (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.
Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 11:58 PM

Preliminary Experimentation Indicates...

Baileys Irish Cream (2 measures) Kahlúa (3 measures) Macadamia nut liquor, or dark rum (e.g., Myer’s) (1 measure) Coconut Milk (4 measures) Cream, or half and half (3 measures) Banana...
Sunday, August 8, 2004 at 09:25 PM

Resistance is Futile

Bill points out the inevitability of the Pythonification of the world. I couldn’t agree more; if you listen to the whispers in the halls, all of the old objections are...
Sunday, August 8, 2004 at 08:47 AM

The ‘Document’ in Document-Oriented Messaging

(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”) One of the foundations of most vendors’ approach to Web services is called document-oriented messaging. This is the notion that interoperability is improved by describing...
Thursday, August 5, 2004 at 05:31 PM

ComputerSpeakerPhone

Oh LazyWeb, please give me software that lets me use my Powerbook as a Bluetooth speakerphone…...
Thursday, August 5, 2004 at 04:15 PM

The Age Gets RSS Feeds

Melbourne’s The Age now has RSS feeds available — hooray! I’ve been scraping them and bugging the staff for a while, so it’s nice to see that Fairfax (now “Fairfax...
Monday, August 2, 2004 at 12:20 PM

The Whole Web in a Python Dictionary

A few days ago I blogged a straw-man API for client-side HTTP based on dictionaries. This turns out to be well-aligned with a project I’ve had on the back burner...
Saturday, July 31, 2004 at 02:15 PM

Corporate Citizenship

Apple is making an executive summary of the 9/11 commission report and the major speeches from the Democratic National Convention available for free on the iTunes Music Store. They deserve...
Friday, July 30, 2004 at 05:33 PM

Dictionary as API?

From the Daily Python URL comes another noteworthy API for XML; XMLFragment. I haven’t tried it yet (it doesn’t appear to be separately available, hint, hint), but I like the...
Monday, July 26, 2004 at 09:32 PM

A Monkey’s Lunch is…

Baileys Irish Cream Kahlúa Macadamia nut liquor, or dark rum (e.g., Myer’s) Coconut Juice Cream Banana Ice The labs will be working on the exact proportions; stay tuned....
Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 01:20 AM

Web-izing The Finder

Timbl has talked about Web-izing databases and languages; what about operating systems? Despite Microsoft’s legal troubles brought about trying to integrate the browser into Windows, it’s a good idea. Here’s...
Sunday, July 18, 2004 at 01:56 PM

Safari as HTML Editor?

Surfin’ Safari hints that the next version of WebCore will be able to edit as well as render HTML. Does this mean that we’ll soon see Safari sport an “edit”...
Saturday, July 3, 2004 at 01:38 PM

Geopolitical Arbitrage

To develop a previous theme; As markets become more transparent and liquid, it becomes more easy to see opportunities for arbitrage. A wide-scale example of this (to stretch the definition...
Friday, July 2, 2004 at 12:08 AM

Internet Mapping For the Little Guy

When Tim O’Reilly gave his keynote at eWorld this year, one of his major points was that Internet-based mapping (e.g., Yahoo maps, Mapquest) had failed to take off, despite their...
Thursday, July 1, 2004 at 09:36 PM

Come One, Come All

The W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services promises to be a quiet, calm, tightly-scoped discussion of a well-understood topic, lacking any controversy whatsoever. What else could possibly...
Thursday, July 1, 2004 at 10:19 AM

More on the Housing Bubble^H^H^H^H^H^HMarket

HSBC has apparently been indiscreet enough to call it a bubble, but I can’t find the actual report (“The U.S. Housing Bubble — The case for a home-brewed hangover.”). Anyone...
Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 08:59 PM

SOAP: Protocol or Format?

Way back when the XML Protocol Working Group started kicking around, Henrik and I had a long-running, low-level “discusssion” about whether SOAP was a protocol or a format. Henrik won,...
Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 04:20 PM

Social Security

If you work in the United States or intend to retire there, grab yourself a copy of today’s Wall Street Journal, which contains a special section that covers this topic...
Monday, June 28, 2004 at 04:10 PM

XML Language Bindings Done Right

John Schneider was in the office last week and gave me a demo of something he’s been working on for a while, E4X — by far one of the coolest...
Wednesday, June 23, 2004 at 12:29 PM

What?

Check out the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group; it looks like our last, best hope for extending the browser platform to grow the Web....
Wednesday, June 16, 2004 at 12:33 PM

Use Cases for Web Description Formats

One thing about Web description formats that hasn’t seen much discussion yet is how people intend to use them. The WSDL Working Group has a Usage Scenarios document and a...
Monday, June 14, 2004 at 10:46 PM

Extreme URL Scraping and Debugging

Because Web sites often don’t make information available to us in the way we’d like, we have to bring the mountain to Mohammed and scrape screens. I’ve played around with...
Saturday, June 5, 2004 at 09:45 AM

Send Wiki and Comment Spammers a Message

Netcraft reports that “Search Engine Optimisers” are unable to resist the siren call of spamming. Digging a little deeper, it turns out that this is part of a little contest...
Saturday, June 5, 2004 at 08:18 AM

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....
Monday, May 31, 2004 at 11:00 PM

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...
Sunday, May 30, 2004 at 12:05 AM

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...
Friday, May 28, 2004 at 10:43 PM

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...
Friday, May 28, 2004 at 10:16 PM

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:...
Friday, May 28, 2004 at 10:05 AM

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...
Tuesday, May 18, 2004 at 01:22 PM

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...
Saturday, May 15, 2004 at 03:51 PM

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...
Wednesday, May 12, 2004 at 03:38 PM

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...
Tuesday, May 11, 2004 at 04:26 PM

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...
Friday, May 7, 2004 at 03:52 PM

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,...
Friday, May 7, 2004 at 10:11 AM

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...
Wednesday, May 5, 2004 at 10:21 PM

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...
Wednesday, May 5, 2004 at 05:11 PM

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...
Monday, May 3, 2004 at 01:42 PM

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...
Sunday, May 2, 2004 at 07:35 PM

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...
Sunday, May 2, 2004 at 06:06 PM

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...
Saturday, May 1, 2004 at 11:46 PM

How do we use SOAP Headers?

Way back when in the XML Protocol Working Group, one of the concerns that came up was the processing model for SOAP headers. In particular, while SOAP 1.2 does a...
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 at 10:15 PM

Using WebDAV as a Description Format for REST

In the past, I’ve talked about reusing WSDL as a format for describing Web resources, as well as coming up with a bespoke format. One path that I’ve overlooked so...
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 at 05:00 PM

Understanding Arnie

I think I'm starting to sympathise with Our Great Governor in California; the state senate has passed a bill banning the production or sale of foie gras. That's right, when...
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 at 08:27 AM

Typography Out of the Box

Don Box: As for OpenOffice’s lame typography support, have you tried Microsoft Office 2003. I still have ~$200 left of quota over at the company store… Hmm. In OSX, It’s...
Monday, April 26, 2004 at 09:22 PM

Madonna Dead

This is why heuristics aren't such a hot idea. UPDATE: For those wondering what this is about, the original version of this article had a picture of Madonna, the actor/singer/etc.,...
Saturday, April 24, 2004 at 11:33 PM

Sean’s Words of Wisdom

Sean McGrath always has carefully considered positions, and he hits it out of the ballpark with this one. A few thoughts; Eventually though, to fully realise RESTian SOA we need...
Tuesday, April 20, 2004 at 10:27 AM

Asynchrony: There Is No Spoon

One of the things that people find compelling about Web services is its promise of asynchrony. “HTTP is only request/response, and therefore synchronous; it’s terrible for long-lived business processes, where...
Monday, April 19, 2004 at 01:23 PM

Describing Generative Identifiers in WSDL

To use WSDL to describe RESTful interactions, you need some way of accommodating generative resource identifiers. In a nutshell, this means some part of the URI is dynamic. For example,...
Friday, April 16, 2004 at 08:16 PM

Five Favourite Protocol Design Papers

Lots of papers come and go over the years; take a look at any tech conference, online bibliographies (even subject-specific ones; Webbib is a favourite), and you’ll be inundated. However,...
Thursday, April 15, 2004 at 09:03 PM

A(nother) Description Format for REST

I’ve talked before about describing RESTful Web resources, going as far as prototyping a new format. That work was predicated on the assumption that WSDL wasn’t adequate. However, Dave Orchard...
Wednesday, April 14, 2004 at 10:14 AM

More Software that Everybody Should Download

Spike is a networked clipboard that allows you to easily share text, pictures and other interesting things with others near and far. The nice part is that a) it uses...
Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 09:24 PM

GMail

People of Fremont, you might want to consider your voting choices a little more carefully. Liz Figueroa (your senator) has decided that Google’s GMail is “like having a massive billboard...
Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 10:17 AM

Leading from Afar, or Out of Touch?

From the Washington Post: This is Bush’s 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking...
Monday, April 12, 2004 at 09:37 PM

Elegance in Integration

Elegance in integration is multiplicity — solving one problem in ways that aid another. Elegance is optimization. Elegance is assembly — an apparatus readily put together and taken apart. Elegance...
Friday, April 9, 2004 at 11:02 PM

xml:id is Coming

This is a good idea for so many reasons. The media type registration will have to be changed to take advantage of it, but I believe that RFC3023 is under...
Friday, April 9, 2004 at 08:32 AM

The Market for AdWords

Google’s AdWords program allows advertisers to target their dollars at specific words; for example, I can say that I want to buy advertising on search results when the terms are...
Thursday, April 1, 2004 at 07:56 PM

Python Just Got a Whole Lot Cooler

OK, so I know they’ve been around for a while, but I haven’t really got into Python’s metaclasses until just now, because I’ve been… well… busy. This excellent presentation about...
Monday, March 29, 2004 at 08:30 PM

Behind the Scenes at Your (very) Local Music Store

Aaron Swartz has started to document the iTunes Music Store; this is a good example of a non-browser, cross-platform application reusing HTTP. It would be interesting to see the interface...
Monday, March 29, 2004 at 03:20 PM

Growing the Web

Ian Hickson is thinking about client-side technologies (scroll down a bit). Some of his ideas resonated; Sortable tree views and list views with rich formatting. Do a search on eBay,...
Sunday, March 28, 2004 at 02:39 PM

XGrid and BEEP

I just stumbled across Apple’s new preview of XGrid, their ad hoc clustering technology. It’s got lots of cool features, like discovery via Rendezvous (aka ZeroConf), a job control dashboard,...
Tuesday, March 23, 2004 at 11:39 PM

Thoughts on a Suburban Nation

Interested in living in actual communities, rather than subdivisions or “pods”? Tired of spending most of your life in a car? I’ve been getting a lot of books from the...
Monday, March 22, 2004 at 09:43 PM

Outage in the Web: Server Configuration

In an otherwise excellent article, Jon Udell blames the lack of one-click subscribe in syndication formats on lack of vision; How users will interact with the formats and APIs is...
Wednesday, March 17, 2004 at 11:51 AM

Google Spam Redux

Someone calling themselves Scott Wiseman has started sending messages to the HTTP-WG mailing list. Although anyone has a right to make on-topic posts to the list, Scott is stretching it;...
Wednesday, March 10, 2004 at 09:50 AM

The Problem With Infosets

An interesting issue poked its head up at the W3C Technical Plenary last week. XML Protocol (known as SOAP to mere mortals) is defined in terms of XML Infosets —...
Sunday, March 7, 2004 at 09:05 AM

The Powerbook is Dead; Long Live the Powerbook

I’ve just got back from a two-week business trip, during which my 15” Titanium Powerbook showed increasing signs of shaking off this mortal coil. Specifically, the bottom 1/3 of the...
Friday, March 5, 2004 at 02:23 PM

Atom Theme Song?

This just popped up on the iTunes “new releases” list. I think we’re going to see some Atom-related products called “Tomato.”...
Monday, March 1, 2004 at 02:42 AM

Caching Tutorial Update

I’ve published a revision of the Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters, the first non-trivial edit in some time almost since I wrote it in 1998. That said, there...
Sunday, February 15, 2004 at 09:20 PM

A Strategy for Atom Migration

One of the problems facing the syndication community as a whole is the number of formats that have been minted. This a particular concern for Atom as the newcomer; a...
Sunday, February 15, 2004 at 02:43 PM

Economic Approaches to Spam

SPF is getting a lot of attention, but it’s got some pretty fundamental limitations, as well as some shorter-term practical problems. What else is there? An approach that makes sense...
Sunday, February 15, 2004 at 08:41 AM

Redefining the Ability to Pay

I know little about the politics or economy of Canada, but a proposal by Tony Clement (Conservative) is interesting. Mike Moffatt explains; The innovative “JumpStart” program he’s proposed would tie...
Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 11:30 PM

Krugman on Bush

Paul Krugman points out continuing efforts to shore up George Bush, the Myth; By my count, this year’s budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president...
Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 11:30 AM

XOP and MTOM

The XML Protocol Working Group (of which I’m a member) has released a first draft of XOP, XML-binary Optimised Packaging, and a revised draft of MTOM, the Message Transmission Optimisation...
Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 11:18 AM

RSS.py, version 0.45

This minor revision fixes the “admin” namespace’s URI to agree with the feed validator and pretty much all other implementations. From the docs; This library provides tools for working with...
Tuesday, February 10, 2004 at 08:15 PM

Video Chat — It’s Here

We’ve been playing with iChat AV, and I’ve got to say that it puts video chat in the same class as E-Mail and Web; killer app. This isn’t video chat...
Monday, February 9, 2004 at 06:57 PM

Irony Defined

In the same week that Melbourne is yet again called the most liveable city in the world (a regular occurrence), John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, has negotiated a...
Monday, February 9, 2004 at 10:48 AM

Delusions of Churchill

George Bush on why he should be re-elected: “I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.” Well,...
Sunday, February 8, 2004 at 09:37 AM

Messages vs. Files

Jon Udell is thinking about the benefits of data being globally available, rather than localised to a machine. I’m in complete agreement; in the last two years, I’ve used Linux,...
Saturday, February 7, 2004 at 09:18 AM

XPointer: Friend or Foe?

One of the uglier corners in the Web architecture is the relationship between fragment ids (the bit of the URI at the end, after the “#”) and content negotiation. In...
Saturday, February 7, 2004 at 08:33 AM

Caltrain Scheduling Changes (and other thoughts on Public Transport policy)

Caltrain has proposed a set of schedules that re-introduce weekend services and tweak a number of trains’ timings and stops, to enable “bullet” service. These changes are honest attempts to...
Friday, February 6, 2004 at 11:19 AM

Singing the Brief

I’m so sick of watching presidential candidates confidently telling news anchors that they’re doing well in the race, and explaining how well their ideas are going across. Where are the...
Wednesday, February 4, 2004 at 01:14 PM

What is NetKernel?

Just got some mail regarding the Cacheability Engine which led me to NetKernel; NetKernel is a Java-based virtual REST operating system for internet applications. NetKernel is a scalable microkernel which...
Tuesday, February 3, 2004 at 09:48 AM

Anybody in the house know Latvian?

I found a link in the referrers to a Latvian blog where they’re discussing a previous entry here. Can anyone offer a translation? Google and Babelfish don’t do Latvian (something...
Thursday, January 29, 2004 at 09:21 PM

Orkut

I have to confess to being a bit underwhelmed by Orkut after all the hype; it feels like just YASN. I’m not complaining — it’s cool, and until I write...
Thursday, January 29, 2004 at 03:17 PM

Can we stop it with the orange XML buttons already?

It’s like having a “get your ASCII here” button; completely meaningless. There are literally thousands of XML formats out there, so you’re not really being helpful by labelling it as...
Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 02:04 PM

Legal Implications of Feedback on Weblogs

As alluded to before, you’re taking on legal risk when you allow people to say things to you. Yes, this is crazy, but hey, it’s the US legal system. Go...
Sunday, January 25, 2004 at 10:17 PM

Rebates and Privacy

Last weekend, I bought a Pioneer DVR-A06U DVD/CD Writer from Fry’s, for about $120, after a $30 manufacturer’s rebate. This weekend, I started filling out the rebate paperwork. All of...
Saturday, January 24, 2004 at 06:33 PM

iTMS does RSS

This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool. I’ve updated the RSS Tutorial to point to this...
Thursday, January 22, 2004 at 10:22 PM

©

Over the past month or two, I’ve been noticing a little link on larger news organizations’ Web articles, such as that of the New York Times and Christian Science...
Thursday, January 22, 2004 at 12:23 AM

RESTful SPAM?

Just got this: Subject: DELETE to stay in debt, OPEN to become debt free. Non Profit Debt Elimination So close.. if they'd just said GET instead of OPEN......
Wednesday, January 21, 2004 at 10:08 AM

Papa Leave

This week’s Economist has an interesting article about parental leave in Sweden (alas, the Web version requires a subscription), a long-standing and generous benefit; they can take up to 13...
Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 06:48 PM

Decentralised Registration

Wouldn’t it be great if, whenever a business, government organization or just the guy down the block came up with a new format for their documents, they could easily get...
Monday, January 12, 2004 at 04:35 PM

XQuery on the Web

There’s a lot of interest out there about exposing XQuery 1.0 / XPath 1.0 / XPath 2.0 in Web interfaces. On the face of it, this is quite a compelling...
Monday, January 12, 2004 at 01:13 PM

Jeffrey Record

From the Washington Post: The Army War College has published a paper questioning the scope and approach to the war on terror. Record’s core criticism is that the administration is...
Monday, January 12, 2004 at 01:12 PM

Paul O’Neill

Well, this should liven things up… “These people are nasty and they have a long memory,” [O’Neill] tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the...
Sunday, January 11, 2004 at 10:11 AM

Officially Unofficial

Rod Chavez has posted an article about running BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 on OSX to O’Reilly. It’s really, really cool that this works, and I’ve had the entire platform (including...
Thursday, January 8, 2004 at 10:02 PM

Cheap Eats

What a steal. If you live near San Francisco, or are visiting this month, make sure you check out Dine About Town — three-course, chef-selected prix fixe menus at over...
Wednesday, January 7, 2004 at 07:47 PM

Traffic

Anitra is trying to beat a head of traffic that's built up behind an accident upstream; was able to check on the excellent SF Bay area real-time traffic map. I...
Wednesday, January 7, 2004 at 07:57 AM

More blogs

Welcome to the jungle, David Orchard, Chris Ferris and Tom Glover (Tom, we need RSS, OK?). (Yes, I know what song you can’t get out of your head now… get...
Tuesday, January 6, 2004 at 02:49 PM

Extensibility and Interoperability

In his blog, Sean McGrath wonders about two potentially competing faces of standards; extensibility and interoperability. If “compliance” to X is open-ended via an extensiblity mechanism, then “X-compliant” means very...
Saturday, January 3, 2004 at 09:58 PM

Mail.app and X-Faces

Mail already shows you a little picture of someone when they’re in your address book. Why doesn’t it send and display X-Faces? Can somebody write a plugin to do this?...
Saturday, January 3, 2004 at 05:31 PM

The Semantic Web’s Dirty Little Secret

Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms: Additional support for this activity has been provided by DARPA under the DAML...
Tuesday, December 30, 2003 at 02:42 PM

Comment Spam and Google

Hyperlinks have been disallowed in comment bodies on this blog for a while now, and I've just removed the link associated with comment authors as well. This is based on...
Monday, December 29, 2003 at 12:02 PM

What I want in a digital camera

Before all of this “Web” stuff came along, I was a photographer; I designed an… unusual university program that had me study fine art photography, photojournalism, aesthetics and the physics...
Sunday, December 28, 2003 at 09:49 AM

Next trip: Molvania

Inger put me onto a new travel guide, and I’m already planning the trip. Molvania (“A land untouched by modern dentistry”) looks like a really interesting country. For example; Molvania’s...
Saturday, December 27, 2003 at 05:36 AM

What’s after Red Hat?

Shortly after I moved to Melbourne in 1995, I set up a Red Hat Linux box in a little corner of our apartment on Flinders Lane. Shortly after that, the...
Friday, December 26, 2003 at 05:57 PM

Travel Notes: Vienna, Venice, Bolzano

We’ve lived in California for more than four years now, and Anitra grew up in Melbourne, with the result that she first saw snow falling from the sky when she was 25. When we had an opportunity to take a week’s holiday right before Christmas, we decided against somewhere sunny; why more of the same? Instead, we booked some tickets to Washington (so as to drop off the kid), then to Munich, and spent some serious time researching our advent travel opportunities, with the help of the Die Bahn Travel Planner, a couple of DK guides, and Google. Here are my notes from planning the trip, as well as my thoughts on what’s good if you go. See also the pictures.
Friday, December 26, 2003 at 11:11 AM

Cool OS X Software roundup

Small apps that make my life much, much easier: Kung-Log — Weblog writing and management, off-line (thanks, John) Shrook — RSS reader extraordinary Address Book — Yes, it comes with...
Monday, December 15, 2003 at 08:55 AM

For those who've had kids recently.

Anitra turned me on to what happened to Steve from Blue’s Clues. As he would say, “Cool!”...
Saturday, December 13, 2003 at 12:02 AM

Now I remember why I switched...

The other day, I bought a copy of an extremely nifty piece of software, Virtual PC. It didn’t come with an OS, but that’s OK, because I have a copy...
Friday, December 12, 2003 at 11:23 PM

Notes on Atom

As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the...
Friday, December 12, 2003 at 12:11 AM

Tim and Sam talk about offline content

Tim Bray's latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS; But, pointed out Sam, think of it as a synchronization/offline problem. If I stick the whole essay in the feed,...
Thursday, December 11, 2003 at 03:07 PM

Oh, for shame, Apple, for shame.

mnot-laptop:~> uname -a Darwin localhost.local 7.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.0.0: Wed Sep 24 15:48:39 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-517.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc mnot-laptop:~> echo "<a href='/'>test</a>" > ~/Sites/test.txt mnot-laptop:~> chmod a+r...
Wednesday, December 10, 2003 at 11:43 PM

Python for the CLR

IronPython is an implementation of Python for the CLR with some intriguing initial perf numbers. [ via Jeremy Hylton’s Weblog ] Shame I don’t have a Windows box where I...
Tuesday, December 9, 2003 at 09:29 AM

Why Do Web Server APIs Suck So Much?

HTTP provides considerable benefits to Web applications that take advantage of it; everything from scalability (through caching), client-integrated authentication, automated redirection, multiple format support and lots more. I’ve been drafting...
Monday, December 8, 2003 at 10:43 PM

Perspective Enhancement

The BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | UN warns of population surge" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3302497.stm">BBC reports that the UN is a bit concerned about population growth. Pretty much everybody knows this, I’m sure,...
Monday, December 8, 2003 at 10:33 PM

A Description Format for REST

Adam asks if there’s a description format for REST. I don’t know of any that have wide acceptance (and I think the hard-core RESTafarians will answer “REST is self-describing, that’s...
Sunday, December 7, 2003 at 11:17 PM

The New RDF

I spent a little time on the plane the other day reading the latest WD of the RDF Primer. I didn’t attempt to review the entire document set, as reading...
Sunday, December 7, 2003 at 10:31 PM

QNames are Evil

How's this analogy: Putting QNames into your XML content is like using TCP packets as delimiters in an application protocol. Both can be technically done, but they force an awareness...
Saturday, December 6, 2003 at 12:40 PM

Hoping for Better XML Editors

I’m getting a few requests for clarification and additional information from 3rd party vendors regarding my previous rant on XML editing. With any luck, XML editing will get much more...
Wednesday, November 26, 2003 at 09:29 PM

housekeeping

I've done some adjustment to this Web log; you may or may not notice the differences. Most of is is cosmetic and tightening up of the templates, but I've also...
Sunday, November 9, 2003 at 11:15 PM

DIME is dead.

'cause Gudge says so, and as we all know, Gudge is always right....
Thursday, October 30, 2003 at 05:36 PM

You say tree, I say URI...

I can't help but wonder if what Adam wants could be had using plain old HTTP by just defining a new format that is nothing but a list of links...
Tuesday, October 21, 2003 at 10:38 PM

ROTFL

Love your work, Banksy. A statement from Tate Britain said that a man "had left a personal possession in one of the galleries"....
Friday, October 17, 2003 at 06:09 PM

Cross-Platform DRM and other artefacts of Hell freezing over

Now that hell has frozen over, it's interesting to speculate how far Apple will dip their toes in, and what their market opportunities are. Case in point, Tristan Louis considers...
Friday, October 17, 2003 at 10:16 AM

Humboldt Fog

Saute Wednesday has exposed one of our vices... ashed goat's cheese is like nothing else on earth. These days it's Humboldt Fog (from the Mollie Stone's around the corner; hell,...
Tuesday, October 7, 2003 at 10:06 PM

RSS-Data and Web services

Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few; data encoding - Jeremy's view of SOAP...
Friday, October 3, 2003 at 05:22 PM

Loose Coupling, Late Binding and REST

Mark Baker says that REST is SOA + late binding. While I see the truth in this, I think it's pretty orthogonal, and it's not that compelling for most SOAish...
Friday, October 3, 2003 at 01:59 PM

Modularity by reference

Many XML-based formats could benefit from using references to promote modularity. For example, imagine a catalogue format; <x:catalogue owner="Bob"> <x:widget id="foo" name="FooWidget"> <x:description>The Foo Widget</x:description> </x:widget> <x:widget id="bar" name="BarWidget"> <x:description>The...
Thursday, October 2, 2003 at 10:22 PM

Why do XML editors suck so much?

I'm seriously sick of using programs that call themselves "XML editors" because they colourize markup. I'm talking about XML Spy, Oxygen, BBEdit, and thousands of lesser programs. All of them...
Thursday, October 2, 2003 at 09:46 PM

RSS and E-mail

Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I've wondered the same thing myself. As far as...
Wednesday, September 24, 2003 at 02:57 PM

Seen this week's Economist?

Concise and witty, as always....
Saturday, September 20, 2003 at 10:05 PM

A rodent of *truly* unusual size

The BBC reports an... inconceivably large rodent, aka "Guinea-zilla". They "... could have run in huge packs," and weighed 700kg. 700kg?!? I'm going to have nightmares tonight......
Thursday, September 18, 2003 at 02:47 PM

Roundup

Next time somebody says "let's install Bugzilla to track that" consider Roundup instead (unless you *like* painful, bloated software). Roundup is well-architected, modular, extensible, small in footprint, and Pythonic. You...
Saturday, September 13, 2003 at 12:06 PM

Click Submit Only Once

I shudder when I see these words. Everyone I’ve asked has, at least once, gotten two orders of something online (personally, I’ve had the SonyEricsson store ship *three* duplicate orders);...
Saturday, September 13, 2003 at 10:46 AM

Anna Lindh

I was in Stockholm earlier this summer as a stopover on the way home from Helsinki. One morning, Jorgen and I were walking along Strömkajen, waiting for a ferry, when...
Friday, September 12, 2003 at 07:48 PM

The Gherkin

One of the most interesting examples of architecture I’ve seen in a while is the nearly-finished Swiss Re building(aka 30 St. Mary Axe) in London, also known as “The Gherkin”...
Wednesday, September 10, 2003 at 02:08 PM

iPod update

Our problems continue. We took advantage of the $39.90 restocking fee to upgrade to the new 20G iPod; no difference at all in the battery behaviour (although the circle pad...
Wednesday, September 10, 2003 at 08:04 AM

Frank Chu update

As previously noted, I often pass San Francisco figure Frank Chu on the way to and from work. This morning, I noticed something new - there's a professionally-printed ad on...
Thursday, August 28, 2003 at 10:24 AM

The 'i' stands for 'idiot'

I got Anitra an iPod (an intensely desirable object) last week, because the new car (new to us, at least) doesn't have a CD player, and she's got a long...
Monday, August 25, 2003 at 08:50 PM

Atomic Draft

Somehow, I've been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft. I'm reasonably happy with the language around the requirements, but a lot...
Sunday, August 24, 2003 at 12:43 AM

Registering Media Types

I've had a fairly large and annoying bee in my bonnet for the past few months, regarding media type registration. It started buzzing when I tried (and failed) to...
Saturday, August 23, 2003 at 02:18 PM

HTTP Performance

I've heard several people in the industry assert that HTTP fundamentally limits the performance of applications that use it; in other words, there's a considerable disadvantage to using it, and...
Thursday, August 21, 2003 at 04:50 PM

Web Services

If you're lost in a sea of specs, pundits and opinions, might I suggest two very well-written, thoughtful papers: Principles of Service Oriented Integration by Sean McGrath at Propylon [pdf]...
Monday, August 18, 2003 at 05:53 PM

WebCapture

Here's something different. WebCapture "is a secure capture and playback system that records, in context, all web session pages that comprise an e-business transaction." "Capturing the INTENT and PROCESS is...
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 at 08:50 AM

Photos and metadata

I love iPhoto's interface and its functionality, but the fact that the metadata is so closed is frustrating. I think I'm going to be able to import the RDFPic metadata...
Monday, August 11, 2003 at 10:53 PM

Structured URIs

I just found a draft finding that the W3C TAG published about a month ago, regarding the use of metadata in URIs. This is very cool, and I especially like...
Monday, August 11, 2003 at 05:25 PM

iDisk Offline

Marc Hadley points out that the version of iDisk in OSX Panther looks like it will enable offline functionality with caching; it also looks to do some synchronization. I'd really...
Monday, August 4, 2003 at 02:03 PM

RSSJobs

RSSJobs looks interesting; hopefully, we'll see more of these "non-traditional" uses of RSS as time goes by....
Monday, August 4, 2003 at 10:38 AM

NewAirplane

Boy, I'd sure like some of whatever the Boeing folks are smoking. [ via The Economist, print edition, pg. 8-9 ]...
Saturday, August 2, 2003 at 12:12 AM

Subversion

Ted Leung points out that caching PUT (and other WebDAV methods) would suit Subversion - probably the most interesting WebDAV application under open development - quite well. The only thing...
Tuesday, July 29, 2003 at 04:01 PM

httpRange-14

Mark Baker is the latest in a series to weigh in on the TAG issue regarding what a HTTP URI can identify. I haven't followed the debate closely, but it...
Tuesday, July 29, 2003 at 12:39 PM

Caching PUT

If we WebDAV-enable Web applications, people will be able to interact with them like filesystems. To blog something, you'd be able to write an entry in the text editor of...
Saturday, July 26, 2003 at 04:07 PM

Blogging with WebDAV

One of my personal background tasks in the last couple of months has been finding sample applications to excercise Tarawa with. Although my load is high and I've only got...
Saturday, July 26, 2003 at 03:46 PM

Dude

I spent more time today saying "dude" than I ever have before (proportionally), because I took a little drive. As you may have guessed, Antibes left me a little cold,...
Saturday, July 26, 2003 at 03:20 PM

Profiling HTTP

Mark Pilgrim is starting to think about issues surrounding the transport, transfer and general moving around of the Format Formerly Known as Echo (nee Pie). This feels suspiciously like a...
Friday, July 25, 2003 at 11:42 PM

On Antibes

Pros * Makes everybody jealous when you say you're going there * Great beaches and the Alps nearby * Sailing! Cons * Very hot and humid, especially when you're used...
Friday, July 25, 2003 at 08:17 AM

BosBlog

Adam Bosworth gives us a small taste of his thoughts re: Web services, with a promise of more. Glad to see the writer's block has broken!...
Friday, July 25, 2003 at 02:28 AM

RSS Profile Testbed

Back when we were exploring the possibity of a profile of RSS, I set up a wiki on the topic and promptly let it run wild, to see what would...
Monday, July 21, 2003 at 01:50 PM

The RSS Advisory Board

Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection. It appears that the copyright for RSS 2.0 is...
Friday, July 18, 2003 at 02:07 PM

Switcher

I'm very happy to say that, after using Windows on the desktop for about a year, and various flavours of Unix on the desktop for about six years, I've Switched...
Tuesday, July 15, 2003 at 10:03 PM

Hey Dave

This is exactly what namespaces are for....
Friday, July 11, 2003 at 10:14 PM

Too much money, not enough sense

Adam Curry explains how he's bought placement in RSS aggregators. Trouble is, RSS isn't universally supported, as evidenced by the echo project, and he feels cheated. Now, I'd understand this...
Thursday, July 10, 2003 at 08:50 AM

On Helsinki

Pros: * They're serious about this "midnight sun" thing * Discovered I actually like herring * Fantastic mobile phone coverage * Hima & Sali * Free bicycles! Cons: * They're...
Saturday, June 28, 2003 at 01:24 PM

Caching is often enough

I feel compelled to respond to Norm Walsh's thoughts on caching. It's important to distinguish between the capabilities of a specific product (such as WWWoffle) and the technology that it...
Saturday, June 28, 2003 at 01:15 PM

GoogleStuff

You might notice a few ads in the Weblog and a few other places on the site; I'm playing with Google AdSence, first pointed out by AaronSW. This is really...
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 at 09:27 PM

Bees and Ants

The W3C Semantic Web wiki has an entry called 'BeesAndAnts' that very effectively conveys something that I've been trying to articulate for a while (and, as usual, failing). It's not...
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 at 08:02 AM

SOAP1.2

We finally did it. More than two years ago, I went to North Carolina almost by accident; at the last minute I asked David Fallside if I could come to...
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 at 07:36 AM

Starting Fresh

Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS. I and many other people have been tempted in the past to do this, and...
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 at 05:35 AM

On Tallinn, Estonia

Pros: * quick 1.5-hour boat ride from Helsinki * cool, still-foreign-looking passport stamps * full of beautiful european architecture / city planning Cons: * v. aggressive postcard-selling girls on EVERY...
Monday, June 23, 2003 at 02:38 PM

RSS History as state transfer

Mark Baker responded to my thoughts on RSS history a while back, and I'm *finally* getting around to responding (nothing like a hotel lobby to clear your thoughts...). I agree...
Sunday, June 22, 2003 at 10:14 PM

Economics of standards

Looks like a good to-read list: John Beatty: Economics of Standards (via John Beatty, one of my fellow BEA-ers; hi John!)...
Sunday, June 22, 2003 at 10:10 PM

Question for the day

Is a Weblog a medium or is it a genre? (yes, this is a Weblog post about Weblogs. Oh, dear God, I've been sucked in...)...
Friday, June 20, 2003 at 05:23 PM

Spot the difference...

What does this interesting new, ad hoc work have to do with this interesting , new standards work and this interesting, new-ish effort by GK?...
Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 11:07 PM

Weblog data modeling

Sam Ruby has announced a Wiki about what a weblog entry is. Couple of things out of the way first; * 'log' is confusing; I thought he was talking about...
Monday, June 16, 2003 at 03:53 PM

OxygenXML

Sean McGrath, Macintouch and others point out OxygenXML, a pretty slick-looking XML editor. Either it's pretty new and only now coming onto the scene, or I've had my head deeper...
Saturday, June 14, 2003 at 09:40 PM

Web-izing the Palm Pilot

Having a network-enabled (even if only through BlueTooth and infrared) is a heady experience; the ability to access the Web and sync applications from anywhere - really anywhere - is...
Thursday, June 12, 2003 at 08:05 PM

Identifying RSS-Like Formats

I'm surprised by Dave Winer's continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given howstrongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions. If RSS 2.0 had a namespace,...
Thursday, June 12, 2003 at 12:45 PM

Newest Toy

Got the Palm Tungsten T the other day ($309 from buy.com, - $50 trade-in). Nifty, much better than the aging handspring I was toting around. Cool apps include Kinoma for...
Friday, June 6, 2003 at 10:42 PM

RSS Soundbite

Tim Bray is looking for an RSS soundbite, what some people would call an elevator pitch, I suppose (aren't they supposed to be level? Never mind). I made an attempt...
Wednesday, June 4, 2003 at 09:58 PM

Real-World RDF

Jo Walsh has created a Semantic Web system that appeals quite strongly - a means of using RDF to map to the real world in "gonzo geographical data collection". Very...
Thursday, May 29, 2003 at 02:30 PM

XCAP

Jonathan Rosenberg published a new Internet-Draft, XCAP, to the SIMPLE Working Group in the IETF. Here's the skinny: Abstract This specification defines the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol...
Thursday, May 29, 2003 at 02:05 PM

While we're talking about standards...

I agree with just about everything that Jim Waldo says here (at least for protocol standards). Well said!...
Wednesday, May 28, 2003 at 09:59 PM

One-Man Standards

Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line: The same philosophy dictates an end to the disagreement over RSS. If they want respect for the formats and protocols...
Wednesday, May 28, 2003 at 09:53 PM

RSS, Subscribers and Business Models (oh, my!)

Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header....
Sunday, May 25, 2003 at 10:06 PM

Look what the browser dragged up...

Oh... My... Gawd... I'm sooo confused. It's a Web site, and it has an RSS feed, and it uses Moveable Type, and it even has a blogroll down the side,...
Monday, May 19, 2003 at 10:05 PM

A sign of bad times?

Hmm. Passed the 12 Galaxies guy on the way home from work today. Usually, he's very polite and keeps to himself. This time, he was yelling at passers by and...
Friday, May 16, 2003 at 08:30 PM

Are we bored of RSS Standardization yet?

Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn't that mean it'll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh. I agree with most of Tim's assessment; the IETF...
Sunday, May 11, 2003 at 12:14 AM

RSS Profiling Wiki

Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS. I don't think blogs are the best medium for this kind of development - it's too...
Saturday, May 10, 2003 at 09:16 PM

IT Survey in the Economist

If you are in "the industry," you owe it to yourself to go out and pick up a copy of this week's Economist. Alongside their customary digs at Larry Ellison...
Saturday, May 10, 2003 at 11:35 AM

We need WikiVerbs!

Before, I was wondering about the intersection of Wikis and the Semantic Web. I've since done some noodling and prototyping, and the idea came together on the train home tonight....
Friday, May 9, 2003 at 11:14 PM

Conneg based on XML Dialect

I know at least one person who will think that this is a good idea. Anybody else? I'd looove to do this work......
Thursday, May 8, 2003 at 02:04 PM

Tarawa

I've finally gotten sick enough of a project that I've been working on for waaaay too long to release it to the unsuspecting^H^H^H general public. Tarawa is, in short, a...
Monday, May 5, 2003 at 11:21 PM

The Genius Bar is dry

Don't get me wrong - I love Apple and all things apple. But, the Genius bar at the Apple Store never fails to annoy. Every time I go in with...
Sunday, May 4, 2003 at 08:51 AM

Yet more proof of things being seriously wrong in the US these days...

From the Montreal Gazette - "Deborah Wolfe, a Canadian citizen who was just breast-feeding her son and changing his diaper while en route between Houston and Vancouver, says her "subversive"...
Saturday, May 3, 2003 at 10:28 PM

Semantic Syndication

Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module. This approach is the most sensible for ANY application of Semantic Web technology (as I've argued before). Rather than...
Saturday, May 3, 2003 at 10:59 AM

RSS Traffic Characterisation

I'm setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server. Assumptions: * 5000 people will eventually subscribe to the...
Saturday, May 3, 2003 at 10:02 AM

Mail.app broken?

One of the joys of moving to a mac for my personal machine is using Apple's excellent Mail.app; IMHO it's the best GUI mail client yet. However, I'm having a...
Saturday, May 3, 2003 at 07:40 AM

ZeroConf is cool

Anybody know how to get ZeroConf working on Linux, so that I can advertise services on my server to the Macs at home?...
Thursday, May 1, 2003 at 11:14 PM

RSS Schema and dates

Sam mentions dc:date; that's what I was thinking, except that 'date' on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics. dcterms:issued seems to...
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 at 08:43 AM

Wiki as Semantic Web?

Anybody else notice how you can use a Wiki like a Semantic Web engine? For example, define a WikiName, say PersonThing. Only use the PersonThing WikiName on pages that identify......
Monday, April 28, 2003 at 10:16 PM

I'm an overlord and I'm OK...

[ I tried to post this as a comment on Sam's blog, but I think there may still be transitional issues over there... ] Overlord? COOL... I don't think I've...
Monday, April 28, 2003 at 05:08 PM

Amazon and Privacy

Amazon sent my wife a nice, juicy bit of SPAM this morning. "Get the Amazon.com Platinum Visa card!" This despite her having her "Communication Preferences" set to not allow anything...
Monday, April 28, 2003 at 08:44 AM

RSS history module

For discussion: RSS history module (the eventual result of this)....
Sunday, April 27, 2003 at 08:22 PM

It's alive

For those who have been helping, it's alive, has been for almost a week, but I still want to do a bit more documentation, hunt down a few bugs, and...
Saturday, April 26, 2003 at 08:56 PM

ETags

It's not necessary to lament the lack of ETags on generated Web pages; cgi_buffer automagically generates and validates them for Perl, Python and PHP scripts. Yes, I keep on shamelessly...
Thursday, April 24, 2003 at 06:01 PM

now available - Photoblog!

OK, here's the deal. As previously reported, we got the nifty Ericsson phones that come with free cameras. They're Internet-capable. The next obvious step is to hook it up to...
Thursday, April 24, 2003 at 12:27 AM

Current favourite TV

Anitra and I have taken to watching What Not To Wear. Yes, it's a fashion show, but it's probably the most non-American show on right now; very refreshing and wicked...
Wednesday, April 23, 2003 at 10:34 PM

RSS needs Profiling

Tim says thatRSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I'm not. I'm interested in putting it on everybody's desktop, and making it...
Tuesday, April 22, 2003 at 11:22 AM

Sam wants namespaces

Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, "why?" but upon reading his next post, I get it. The Big Problem with namespaces the first...
Tuesday, April 22, 2003 at 11:06 AM

RSS.py 0.43

RSS.py has been revved; fixed some problems with addItem (now takes an index argument to say where to add the item; default is first - used to be last), and...
Saturday, April 19, 2003 at 04:44 PM

Pellet, indeed.

Don's worried about the glaciating influences of having a stable spec for RSS 2.0. I couldn't disagree more. Like Don, RSS is my hobby; has been since about 1999, when...
Friday, April 18, 2003 at 10:30 PM

Let's try this.

RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I've often said), so I've gotten off of my duff and done something about it. For your interest, an Internet-Draft of RSS 2.0....
Friday, April 18, 2003 at 11:57 AM

Flair?

There seems to be a a lot of new blogs showing up from inside companies... I can only wonder if it's becoming the microserf equivalent of flair....
Thursday, April 17, 2003 at 05:01 PM

HTTP header sniffing

LiveHTTPHeaders for Mozilla is the best HTTP header sniffer I've seen yet; up till now, I've been using WebTee, but for *most* purposes, this is much better. Enjoy....
Tuesday, April 8, 2003 at 01:20 PM

Macrosoft, Part II

Dave seems excited by Macromedia's announcement. I'm less enthusiastic. Not only does it lock you into one vendor, but their product, well, sucks. Anitra loaded up Flash MX on the...
Thursday, March 27, 2003 at 05:39 PM

RSS standardization (again)

Jorgen hits a subject that's of great interest to me; RSS standardization. I originally started the Syndication list to get RSS moving towards some sort of recognized standard; more recently,...
Tuesday, March 25, 2003 at 09:07 PM

Friendster

Not sure I like the name, but Friendster looks interesting. In a nutshell, it's a social networking tool that's very similar to the FOAF efforts, but with better UI and...
Friday, March 14, 2003 at 02:10 PM

Prototyping Kirk

Just finished reading Blue Latitudes, which follows the trail of Captain Cook, both in history as well as geography; Horowitz follows (roughly) the path of cook, sailing and flying to...
Thursday, February 27, 2003 at 11:41 PM

Australia thinks twice

Word is that somewhere in the neighborhood of200,000 Melbournians got out of bed yesterday and decided to give a peice of their minds to the government. Good thing, too; you...
Friday, February 14, 2003 at 09:52 PM

Why oh why is it so hard?

One of the goals for me in using computers is to make my data and access to it platform-indenpendent; I've switched platforms too many times (Mac->Ultrix/Digital Unix->Linux->SunOS/Solaris->Windows NT->Linux->OSX->Windows2000->WinXP->?); I can't...
Thursday, February 13, 2003 at 09:57 PM

mnot : Bookmarks : Travel

Travel bookmarks have been reorg'd and cleaned; the RSS feed gives you the latest additions. Suggestions welcome....
Thursday, January 30, 2003 at 07:50 PM

Blogging Zipf

I always wondered why so many people had their blogs' comments and even trackback indicators turned off. Go ahead and surf around; it's a rare blog indeed, at least in...
Sunday, January 26, 2003 at 08:30 AM

Interestinger and interestinger...

So all the sudden everybody's talking about RSS again. It came up spontaneously at work - DaveO proclaimed "I'm totally getting into RSS" unprompted the other day. Very cool. Now...
Tuesday, January 21, 2003 at 11:15 PM

Location, location...

Dave takes issue with people's comments about the Bay area. I have mixed feelings; SF has a lot against it - cost of living and some measures of quality of...
Tuesday, January 14, 2003 at 08:21 PM

Master and Commander

If you haven't read Patrick O'Brian's astounding Aubrey/Maturin novels, now's probably your last chance before at least one is made into film, by none less than Peter Weir. I am...
Saturday, January 11, 2003 at 10:38 PM

Keynote

I'm no SVG expert, but this sure seems like it. Gotta get me a copy of that....
Wednesday, January 8, 2003 at 08:24 PM

Switching

Aaron points out the Apple Switch commercial starring Yo Yo Ma. Cool; how long before we see a Switch ad with TBL? :)...
Wednesday, December 11, 2002 at 03:58 PM

RSS Wishes

Wouldn't it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?...
Sunday, December 8, 2002 at 02:08 PM

Mozilla Prefetching

I'm extremely wary about the new prefetching feature in Mozilla. The Web caching community has tried this from about every angle, but the general consensus of professionals (with one...
Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 08:37 AM

Eh?

Hixie, Mark and others are talking about serving up application/xhtml+xml selectively to browsers. One question; how do you do this without either doing the wrong thing (e.g., if a shared...
Tuesday, November 26, 2002 at 01:17 AM

What is an RSS Channel?

Almost forgot - today I put an exploration of the semantics of RSS:Channel out there for comment. I've been thinking about various aspects of this for a while; not sure...
Monday, November 25, 2002 at 09:15 PM

RSS XP

RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn't important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!...
Monday, November 25, 2002 at 09:13 PM

New toys

We just replaced our phones with Sony Ericsson T300s with T-Mobile; sooo cool. I've never really been interested in WAP, WML, etc., but now the floodgates have opened. Unfortunately, there...
Sunday, November 17, 2002 at 02:09 PM

RDF Model and Syntax

Jack William Bell makes a precise, short and readable effort at explaining why RDF is simple and important. In the article and subsequent discussion, it's clear that RDF model and...
Saturday, November 16, 2002 at 04:09 PM

IETF Transparency

Finally, the IESG puts its money where its mouth is; this tool allows you to see the status and individual AD's comments about a particular I-D. It's only a start,...
Sunday, November 10, 2002 at 10:58 PM

You Are Crazy.

unböring is a great campaign - I'd love to know who their agency is. It's so... Swedish; the one with the creamer and the guy on the bicycle is classic....
Friday, November 1, 2002 at 04:43 PM

Googlism

Cool....
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 at 01:10 PM

Macrosoft?

Jeremy Allaire talks about establishing a "rich client" platform because HTML is "stagnant." Two questions; will it be standards-based, and what about SVG? I'd really rather not have Macromedia succeed...
Thursday, September 12, 2002 at 11:06 AM

iCal, youCal

iCal is out, and is pushing me ever so closer to taking my perfectly reasonable Dell laptop and shoving it down the throat of the next IT person that I...
Tuesday, September 10, 2002 at 10:39 PM

So funny... so true...

The Story About the Baby is the funniest thing I've read in a while, doubly so considering it's about children. Every geek parent has thought these thoughts. (from memepool)...
Tuesday, September 10, 2002 at 10:30 PM

Pardon our dust...

I'm trying out movabletype, as there were some pretty severe limitations doing it with the bookmarks......
Friday, September 6, 2002 at 12:15 AM

Global house prices

I've been following the Economist's new Global Housing Index with some interest. They seem to have softened their view somewhat, but I'm hearing more about a global housing bubble recently...
Tuesday, September 3, 2002 at 04:21 AM

RSS 0.94

I see Dave is once again rev'ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I'm...
Tuesday, September 3, 2002 at 04:10 AM

Buzz - Continuing thoughts on F2F

One of the most intriguing parts of this, to me, is section 3.1.2; "How people meet: being in the in-group." Possibly because I'm usually not in the in-group... Storper theorizes...
Monday, August 26, 2002 at 06:22 AM

Unequal Relief

This pisses me off. Victims of terrorism certainly should get some support - that's the function of government in a society. But why should that support take the form of...
Monday, August 26, 2002 at 05:21 AM

Face-to-face communications

This article (you can google for the original paper) is, to me, pivotal to emerging Web standards. Both Semantic Web and Web Services are about machine-to-machine communication; the promise...
Saturday, August 24, 2002 at 05:41 AM

DC:Date

Harumph. Date is a datatype, not a property....
Saturday, August 24, 2002 at 05:34 AM

RDF and RSS

Interesting; I'm glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough. However, it still doesn't approach what I see as the critical problems with using...
Saturday, August 24, 2002 at 02:22 AM

Don Box on Tolerance

Don talks about the evils of tolerance in receiving implementations, and I say Amen, brother! Preach! The classic approach works when there are relatively few implementators; however, when the whole...
Tuesday, August 20, 2002 at 05:57 PM