Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

A new website, The poetry archive, opened recently, wherein poets read their own material. Significant content already, I'm hoping it will grow. I like well read poetry, and (in most cases) surely the poet can't be beaten? Good luck to them.

XBEL is one of those useful bits of XML that I've never managed to fit in. Eminently sensible, I only wish browser support was more forthcoming; or to be explicit, I with Firefox could sort out their bookmark markup. Same goes for the subset as used by Sage, my blog reader, a Firefox plug-in.

LDAP, from Redhat?

Redhat have opened an LDAP based server. They seem as proud of the fact that they have solid documentation as the fact that the software is available. From a user perspective, I guess that is true. Today I have concerns about backup as well as storage management. Redhat boast of 4-Way Multi-Master Replication, which is great... but if you are laying down a couple of gigabytes per month, is that what you want? I have a feeling there is a technology missing somewhere. Offsite backup at that sort of rate? What are the appropriate technologies. I doubt very much if my organisation is alone, or anywhere near a big user.

Eric has a piece on Web 2.0. Eric has put a sensible piece together. I like his definition. Web 2.0 appears to be the full appropriation by web developers of mature technologies to achieve a better user experience.>. Todays terminology, seems to make a dull, but factual summary of the marketing hype.

This is becoming a series of links!

I read Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog, and todays offering has a couple of quotable quotes, re FOSS.

Betting against FOSS is like betting against gravity. And free software doesn't mean no revenue, it means no barriers to revenue. Just ask your carrier.

The point being, Sun doesn't have a single customer, worldwide, that will run an unsupported product in their datacenter. Do such customers exist? Surely. They're called developers. Or startups. Or companies or economies that want to build their own internal support teams. That's the target for the Solaris Enterprise System. That's who uses free software without support contracts. And you're not going to win them over if you don't provide them with free and open source products.

Makes eminent sense to me. Sun are changing, and using cold hard logic for the change.

Talking of Eric, a gang of Frenchmen or women I guess, are attempting to outlaw FOSS. Conspiracy theories abound on other blogs. This piece seems a bit more factual. I'd comment more if I could translate the acronyms.

And Relames, msv, rngconv and xmlgen? Ever heard of them? If you are using versions from the arc, it may be that you haven't started picking up the latest (and greatest) from the 'overnight' drop url here, on the sun site. msv.dev.java.net. Not exactly intuitive is it? I wish Sun would publish this as the url to get them from, instead of gaily pointing us to the 2003 version. This is good software, please don't hide your light under a bushel Sun. I wish I had Jonathan Schwartz email. He's probably in a position to do something about it.

The Microsoft Office XML standardisation saga continues. The more serious followers are starting to rise. I found this a fair summary, with links to most of the deeper commentaries.

Google has had hacks for some time now. I just hadn't realised how many.

As often, Sean McGrath brings up a useful site. A 'reverse' dictionary and yranoitcid bunch of dictionaries. Thanks Sean.

DC has, over the years, advised my frequently on using sed. Now sourceforge is offering a tutorial. I think I'll have to make time for that.

I've been hacking on Tony Grahams elisp code for his excellent XSLIDE major mode for emacs. Its an emacs addition I've used regularly for a number of years. This is the home page, though the source is also on sourceforge. My first time with elisp, though I did use Schema for a while, the shift to true functional programming is quite difficult for me, despite being at home with XSLT. Getting used to using lists again is novel, but nice. The subtleties in terms of differences, elisp to lisp to scheme are bugging me, but no more than I expected. I seem to surface every now and then, panting, almost with steam coming out of my ears.

I see we have a Preview review of Office 12 from Redmond. Big interface changes, More info on the zipped XML format (same as the ODF ideas?) and a couple of hover improvements (more accessibility issues might be another view of that). Nice to see its getting an airing though.

RFC4287 is now available. Atom to you and me. Nice one guys. I really wouldn't like to predict how it will fare compared to RSS (or