fun with Inkscape 0.46 svg How earth shattering could an upgrade from 0.45 to 0.46 be? In this case there are some really neat new features. For those who are unfamiliar with the software, Inkscape is a visual svg editor. When I first tried svg… read more Brian Redfern

The Joys and Dangers of Impedence-Free Societies A couple of weeks ago, when I was in New York for the AJAXWorld conference, the city welcomed me with a major downpour most of the time I was there. The metaphor about storm clouds building over Wall Street was… read more Kurt Cagle

The W3C's new SEX 1.0 specification As we approach the atomic limit of silicon, and hence the upper bounds of Moore's Law, our insatiable appetite for computing power and petabyte-scale applications will be increasingly met by a horizontal scaling of computer power: ever-larger server-farms. The platforms… read more Dan Zambonini

XML 2.0 XMl 2.0 offers new features such as automatic transformation and no more schemas! Ric Johnson

Why only REXML? Bill recently commented on another small flare up on the REXML front. It is too bad that Ruby doesn't have a better set of libraries for XML. As Bill mentions, Python does a great job with XML. He mentions ElementTree,… read more Eric Larson

What do linked-data and RDFa have in common? One valid answer to the question in the title would be: I'm both into linked-data and RDFa. Hey, but that's not the answer you are interested in, right? We'll have a look into both and find a better answer by… read more Michael Hausenblas

A non-standard guide to standards behaviour Patrick's forward-looking post mortem is worth a read by everyone involved in standards over the last year. Rick Jelliffe

On OOXMLDIS 29500 Update: via a recent follow-up comment from Rick Jelliffe, we have ourselves our QOTD, If DIS 29500 mark II has been accepted, then the narrowness of the victory needs to be something that Ecma and Microsoft take very seriously: standards… read more M. David Peterson

[MTS08] Flight w/ Piers Hollot; Dinner w/ Jeff Barr and Tara Hunt; Lunch w/ Brady Forrest, David Recordon, and Brad Fitzpatrick I'm just getting back to Salt Lake City after spending the last 4 days in Seattle/Redmond at the Microsoft Technology Summit. Had a *GREAT* time, meeting, for the first time, a few folks that I've known through email and/or user… read more M. David Peterson

Cliffhanger! [UPDATE] I thought I'd give some graphs for the results of the ballot-changes of DIS 29500 mark II. These are the results as at Wednesday, and I think they are the finals. (There is one non-P NB whose vote I… read more Rick Jelliffe

Where are the JCP documents kept? The Java Community Process is the mechanism Sun set up to develop and evolve Java "in Internet time". It brings together "a cross-section of both major stakeholders and other members of the Java community". A group of experts make the… read more Rick Jelliffe

[AWS:EC2] Elastic Compute Cloud Stretches Out, Adds Reassignable IPs and Availability Zones To Offering If there was any single issue with EC2 that was harder to overcome than any other -- at least mentally if not physically and/or technically -- is was that of not having access to a static IP that you could… read more M. David Peterson

First impressions of Open XML: revisited There has been so much disinformation put out about the limited review time for OpenXML, that it might be salutory for people to revisit a review of the Open XML draft I put on this blog dated Thursday May 25,… read more Rick Jelliffe

Reaping what you sow: How a standard for Java would have made it better today Three programmers gathered at the next cubicle to mine yesterday, clucking and snorting as is their want. I looked over to ask what was going on. "A bug in Java" they said. The problem was with ZIP files, specifically some… read more Rick Jelliffe

[MTS08] Blogging Microsoft Technology Summit Placeholder for ongoing notes from the Microsoft Technology Summit... --- M. David Peterson