Some poetry from Guy Kewney in an XML rant

The full piece is here: http://www.pcw.co.uk/Analysis/1139183.
I've added some punctuation and line breaksin what follows, but doesn't it read well?

"...and teams of beavering clerks,
setting up identical two-phase commit,
in a mental state of complete tedium."

Worthy of Sir John Betchman!

All six parts of interview with Guido van Rossum now available

Well worth a read from start to finish

Bill Venners: What didn't you like about the DOM API?
Guido van Rossum: There are too many things that look different than what they are.

Yup.

Groundhog day in feedreader

Wow. Posts to my blog from ages ago have popped up as new entries in my RSS agregator feedreader. Weird.
I've also managed to get it to consume 175 MB of RAM on one occassion. Still its a pretty cool little thing - all in 1 exe. Just as nature intended apps
to be:-)

Living in the heart of action (in 1599)

Okay, so nothing much happens these days where I live in Collooney. But if this was the fifteenth century again, I'd be doing some serious reportage blogging from the Castle down the road with the Battle of the Curlew Mountains raging all around me.

Simon Phipps switches to Mac Powerbook G4

I want one too:-(

This makes me feel old

ParseMe.1st. SGML - a simplified superset of XML :-)

Types, roles, groups etc. in access control. Is it a mess or am I missing something?

I've been playing around with some CMS/Portal systems lately and noodling the problem of providing fine grained access control. There seems to be a consensus of sorts around the core techniques (classifying logins, adding roles to them, putting them in groups etc.) However, my experience is that they are all implemented differently in different systems and the whole thing has an innate ability to become...well...ugly and complicated. Am I missing something?