Come back Michael Jackson. All is forgiven

What goes around, comes around. Uche's article nicely explains the power of generators as a paradigm for XML processing. I remember many, many years ago working with JSP/JSD (Jackson Structured Programming) and Jackson System Design - both of them created by the Computer Scientist Michael Jackson. Both methods feature a paradigm known as "inversion" which essentially allowed you to add coroutines and generators to languages that didn't have them - to great effect. We used it (under the tutelage of Dave Croydon at Fiamass) very sucessfully from 8086 assembly language!

Ah, the years, the years,
Down the bitrotten silicon
the raindrops, plough.

Tim Bray on Microsoft Office 11

Tim Bray on Microsoft Office 11.

Unicode will eat your brain

Its complicated. Perhaps even really complicated when you take all versions of Unicode, versions of virtual machines, string libraries, xml nuances etc. into account. But at least this much seems pretty clear: use UTF-8 for transfer and UCS-2 internally for most work.

The Identity Management problem will kill eCommerce unless it is sorted.

The Identity Management problem will kill eCommerce unless it is sorted. This ITWorld article ponders the problem from an e-Services perspective.

Mitch Kapor and Andy Hertzfeld - familiar names. An open source PIM project is born. Looks very interesting. Uses Python (specifically wxpython) too.

Digital Identity in the real world

Digital Identity in the real world. Authorisation codes sent to mobile phones to authorise individual secure transactions? Sounds like the credit card authorization code model. Sounds like good ole one time pads as used in the second world war. Sometimes the best solutions are the oldest:-)