In previous years, I had several email lists: my Yahoo! list, my Google list, my desktop. To figure out what to send, I had to merge the lists, which meant reading vCards, and CSV files. This is totally the sweet-spot for Python.

The Mac OS X Mobile Me has a …

Check out Carol Johnson's book The Language of Work: Technical Communication at Lukens Steel, 1810 to 1925 . It puts technical writing in a bigger perspective.

The cool thing is dragging meaning out of a corpus of documents.

No one wants to be Rickrolled. I suppose it could have been funny, once, for about 15 minutes. I didn't think it was all that funny to begin with, but there it is -- a part of the lexicon. However, it remains obscure, and sometimes hard to explain to non-technical folks …

I'm not a fan of XML as the one true language. I've griped before about the attractive nuisance of XML.

Recently, I saw Sean McGrath's New Realities , which lead me to Project Zero , a RESTful/JSONic SOA architecture. Their blog includes postings like A run-time for "the New Reality .

I …

This is a kind of "case study" post. It happens -- frequently -- that I wind up in a situation similar to this one. Usually it involves large, complex pieces of software and lots of people with strongly-held opinions. I'm usually brought in toward the end, and have to discover the parts …

We have a spectrum of interesting needs, and a corresponding spectrum of solutions. Here's one dimension: the structured-ness view.

1. Highly structured data.
2. Semi-structured data, or the "mixed content model". We can further subdivide this into content which is "naturally" hierarchical, and a good fit for XML, and data which is …

First, I'm a pack-rat; I worry about deleting something valuable. Specifically, I worry about orphaned files because the application software is no longer supported or the media is obsolete.

For example, my resume is a Hypercard stack. Really. Hypercard is an OS 9 application, and future OS X's won't support …

While there are lame reasons for using XML, there are good reasons also. The good reasons, however, aren't delightfully clear. They seem to be clouded by the lame issues. I'm trying to sort out the best and most logical reasons for using XML.

Here are 8 typically lame reasons for …

I read "Stamp on the ants ", which lead me to write "XML - One Ring to Rule them All... " because I'd seem some remarkably lame justification for XML. I saw an interesting response in "XML is first class, scripting languages are second class ".

At this point, we have an interesting tangential …