Excruciatingly good

Get an earful of Florence Foster Jenkins and your appreciation of the subtleties of a soprano voice will be forever enriched.

Joining the ranks of the favicon enabled

Yes, I now have one. Its a necker cube thing. An appropriate illusion, given that the concept of a 'website' onto which to put a favicon is something of an illusion.

A good new book on XML

Elliotte Rusty Harold's new book - Effective XML - 50 Specific ways to improve your XML. Is well worth a read. Lots of solid advice. I don't agree with all of it but on the whole, very good stuff. Laid out in chunks so that you can dip into it easily. Recommended.

Fat Macs and Power Macs

An amusing juxtaposition. Todays discerning Mac user probably packs something like a Power Mac with 512 Megs of RAM.
Roll backwards ten years and the discerning Mac user packed something like a Power Mac with a cool 512 K of RAM :-)

Reminder: XML Ireland Event Tonite

Tim Bray and Lauren Wood speaking this evening in TCD. Be there or be ASN.1.

Invoices through the ages

Every article I have written for ITWorld's e-Business in the Enterprise newsletter so far has been completely serious. This article Invoices through the ages is no exception.

The role of markup

The role of markup is to follow a documents structure, not to define it..
There are scenarios in document-centric XML where this is exactly what you need and traditionally, XML editing tools haven't been good at the sort of 'get out of the way' support required.

Open Source Migration Guidelines for the Public Sector

IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines available on this page [PDF] make interesting reading as does the comparison spreadsheet.