After lunch, I headed off to see a slightly-off-topic presentation on XML and Internationalization by Yahoo!’s own Sander van Zoest. van Zoest began discussing Unicode overall, covered the UTF variants such as UTF-8, and BOM (Byte Order Marks). Moving into XML itself, he gave an overview of the intended use of the xml:lang tag and […]
I went to the talk on Apache 2.0 Filters by Greg Ames. I already knew a little bit about the Apache 2.0 Filtered I/O model from a session at the O’Reilly Open Source conference, but since I’m going to sit down and write one Real Soon Now, I oughta learn a little more about ’em. […]
Tim O’Reilly gave this morning’s keynote address. (Actually, what’s bizarre is that he’s actually giving the keynote address right now and I’m blogging via an 802.11b WLAN.) O’Reilly spoke about early adopters being a good predictor for technology trends. He compared the models of Napster and MP3.com (distributed vs. client-server models) and how it often […]
I’m off to Vegas tonight for the ApacheCon conference. I’m looking forward to learning about what people are doing with Apache 2.0. I’ve got this idea for a cool Apache 2.0 filter which I’m planning to work on in January. Basically, I’d like to be able to hilight search terms on a web page. You […]
We have many friends living in Israel this year. Last year we used to have a regular gathering on Wednesday evenings to watch The West Wing on our projection TV. Now they’ve gotta wait months for someone to send ’em a tape from the States. They recently got together to watch a couple of hours […]
There are already several good tools for combatting e-mail spam, but what about telephone calls and U.S. Postal Service junk mail? Few people are aware of an organization called the Direct Marketing Association which is used by many (but not all) telemarketers and junk mailers. From what I understand, the DMA rents a centralized database […]
My parents bought me an external Firewire CD burner for a birthday present (back in June) but the thing didn’t work. When I met them for dinner last night, they gave me a new one which although is a wimpy USB 1.1 model, at least it’s a name brand (Iomega Zip CD650). Turns out that […]
I recently got a cell phone that allows you to program custom ring tones. So I programmed in the first 8 bars of the Ashim Theme that Mike Cafarella and I composed (with apologies to the Norwegian Folk Song) back in 1996. I can’t reveal the whole set of lyrics to the Ashim Theme due […]
I’m concerned about linkrot in blogs. Blog entries tend to mention interesting stuff by hyperlinking to news articles, websites, and other blogs. Since it’s so easy to create a link to something (rather than excepting a relevant paragraph), you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a 404 when you try to visit that link at a […]
I’ve gotten a handful of the Nigerian money-laundering scam emails over the past year, although it seems like I’m getting one or two a week now. I’m reminder of a story in Wired Magazine about some Netizen who decided to catch the scammers on film. Apparently this person had a lot of time to waste […]