Necker

John Udell on Necker. Read Jon's post and you will understand why I chose Necker's cube as my favicon.

Thunderbirds are go!

For years now I have been a committed, carnaptious devotee of Eudora for e-mail.

Although I love it deeply, its approach to handling attachments has finally driven me to move on. In Eudora, attachments get separated out of e-mails into an "attachments" diretory. At that point, the connection between the e-mail and its attachments is brittle. Move e-mails around folders to organize them and the attachments stay put. This results in an attachments folder that grows without bounds and a set of e-mail folders that don't quite stand-alone anymore because of references to files in the attachments directory.

A couple of days ago I followed the advise of some fellow Propylonistas who loudly sing the praises of Thunderbird.
It is indeed a wonderful thing. A veritably oasis of calm in a sea of e-mail entropy.

Firstly, it imported all my Eudora folders (and attachments) without a hitch. Secondly - it stores e-mail attachments inline so that you can move complete mails around folders.

And most impotantly - it stores mail in plain old text files using mime encoding for the atttachments (just as God intended). (Yes, there are times when I process mail with grep and Python and Emacs and...). Proprietary binary formats? Just say no!.

Its got funky spam protection stuff too. Whats not to like. Sign me up!

The sad truth about how Web Service technologies are sold

Ted Neward on the unfortunate object-think endemic in the current spate of Web Service tools.

Software as fungus

An off the wall ITWorld article on the subject of growing as opposed to building, complex systems.

An overview of the Public Services Broker Architecture

I have written up a paper on the Public Services Broker architecture (PSB). It is available on the Reach website in the papers section.

The PSB is a Service Oriented Architecture for e-Government currently under construction in Ireland.

Over the next while, we will be publishing more documents about the architecture and the interoperability framework. A refresh of the interoperability guidelines (RIGS) is underway incorporating the feedback received.

All comments on the architecture overview or any of the RIGs welcome.

document-centric versus data-centric XML again

A possible definition, prompted by the recent tag share post.

Document-centric XML is XML in which instances exhibit power law distributions of element types.

Data-centric XML is XML in whcih instances exhibit a uniform distribution of element types.

Not perfect but useful nonetheless I think.

Link Darts

Sometimes its fun to hover over a page of links and just pick one, basically at random. It like throwing a dart at a dart board. Sometimes you hit the bulls eye, most times you don't.

Today I hit a bulls eye of sorts by landing on glug. Scroll down to to the ascii art beneath the fortune cookie and throw a dart.