Von Neumann's Curse

Some musings on parallelism and the embarrasment of computational power at our disposal - still largely untapped in my opinion - owing to a predisposition to think of processing as centralised. An E-Business in the Enterprise article.

Postel's Law and XML

Aaron claims that XML's draconian error handling violates Postel's Law and is bad.
I disagree. It's not that simple. When XML is used in a machine to machine context ("I'm sending this guys blood pressure figures to that machine over there") you definitely want draconian error handling. I don't want any machine making a stab at interpreting something that is bogus and cannot unambigously be turned into a DAG.
When XML is used in a human facing context (XHTML for example), draconian is, arguably, too draconian. The two cases have to be kept distinct IMHO.

RelaxNG compact syntax

"...this is the best syntax currently available for writing schemas for XML languages". Tim Bray.
No argument from here.

From the archives

I was young and clueless in 1995.

Transactional and persistent queue system for Python

munkware looks interesting.

OpenOffice Release Candidate 3 of 1.1

Now available at www.openofice.org.

So, you don't know your aswap from your lopix eh?

Then the XML acronym demystifier is for you.