Cargo Cult Markup Language

Bill de hÓra has a nice use for a Feynman story I had not heard before.

XML, open source, APIs. Differences betwixt Europe and US

BRIDGING the XML divide.

RSS for system monitoring

A very useful application of RSS. event log monitoring.

The fallacy of business objects

The fallacy of business objects is an IT World e-business in the enterprise article on the logical fallacy that I believe underlies the belief that object-orientation is the route to e-business nirvana.

Harmonising all RSS variants with Atom

A posting to xml-dev which, I believe, merits serious consideration as a technique for avoiding XML-based language Babelization and promote simplicty and interoperability in XML data.

Ian Bicking on factories

An amusing allegory.

XML + Money + Somerset Maugham + Bertrand Russell + Ludwig Wittgenstein + Vilfredo Pareto + Saul Kripke + Buddah + John Cleese

Thats more or less the title for my keynote Wednesday at XMLUK's event in Cambridge.

A book recommendation for object/database people approaching web services/xml messaging/SOA/ESB etc.

Given its importance (nay criticality) in robust web based integration, the whole concept of XML document messaging was conspicuously absent from Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Hohpe and Woolf's book : Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions more than makes up for it. A very useful, pattern-based tour through the messaging paradigm. Messaging is *old*. I'm talking pre-10 M.B. Winchester hard disk type "old" here. However, it is now in the ascendancy as the limitations of object- and database-based integration technologies are dragged into the daylight by the Web Services juggernaught.

More on 404

As Sjoerd points out, you can sally forth a 404 *and* a custom 404 page which is what this URI evinces.

telnet www.nedrichards.com 80

GET /archives/2003_06.html HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 08:08:12 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux mod_.0.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1


...


404 - more honored in the breach than in the observance?

HTTP is an application protocol. In that protocol the return code "404" means "no such resource". Software can trivially detect attempts to retrieve unknown resources and do the right thing. Spiders, link checkers etc.
Now, in the last few years, more and more websites have opted for user friendly variants on "404" in which kosher resources are returned to the agent with a HTTP 200 "all is well" code. Examples range from the elevator music variety - "The resource you have requested is not available at this time. Please contact the webmaster", to the humorous.
Trouble is, these pages basically make life a lot harder for agents such as spiders/linkcheckers that need to see an explicit indication of a resource-not-found. Oh well.

OpenOffice as a visual RDF editor

Oh, the joys of open notations. Matt Biddulph uses a <100 line Python app to extrude RDF out of OpenOffice. Nice.