Lets hear it for dynamic typing

From the Walnut guide to the E language

"Many of the most complex yet most reliable systems in the world today have been developed with dynamically typed languages. If you are a Java programmer, unshakeably convinced of the perfect correctness of static typing, all we can do is urge you to try E first and form your conclusions later. We believe you will find the experience both pleasant and productive, as the long heritage of programmers from Scheme to Smalltalk to Perl and Python have found in the past."

Does the GPL stand up?

Interesting bit at the end of this Dave Weinberger blog entry. The ability of the GPL to stand up in court as it were, has never been validated because it has never gone to court. I never thought of that.

transport != transfer

Mark Baker continues to fight the good fight. HTTP is not a transport protocol dammit! Its a state transfer protocol. Different. Very different.

Grey beard

I've given up removing the grey (Hello USA "gray") hairs in my beard. Too numerous now and risk leaving something akin to crop circles if I cut 'em all out.
Next up, put on a few more pounds, get a bit balder, buy the confortable pants with the braces. Is this a vision I see before me :-)

The beginning of the end of the pie-chart for business reporting?

Some thinking out loud about visualisation of business information in a Webby world. e-Pictures in the e-Enterprise.

XML Namespaces are a train wreck

interview with ERH on Artima. Quote:

Far and away the most common problem I've seen has been with namespaces. Namespaces are a real pain. They are difficult to understand. They are poorly designed. And a lot of the APIs that are out there either deliberately or accidentally try to pretend that namespaces are something other than what they actually are.

Yup. I've written about namespaces a couple of times recently. A study in XML culture and evolution attempts to tease out the cultural reasons for the differences of opinions over namespaces. This article XML namespaces explains the perils of lending money to a certain sort of person :-).