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.

Poking around in a running webapp with Jython

One of the great joys of Jython (and Python) is its interactive mode. I have lost count of the number of hours debugging I know I have saved by being able to break out into an interactive shell and poke around inside a running application - examining variables, modifying stuff, doing 'what if' tests and so on.
This Jython interactive servlet looks interesting for this kind of work.

Want a nicotini chaser with that pint of Stout?

Niticotinis sound like just the job for Ireland in the new year when pubs will be smoke free zones (mar dhea).

Procrustean beds

Doesn't this sound gorgeous:
"...a faceted structure relieves a classification scheme from the procrustean bed of rigid hierarchical and excessively enumerative subdivision...".

Everything about this page is wonderful

Everything about Rob Pikes old Bell Labs page is wonderful. Read it twice - especially the first bit. Howzatt for an email address r@google.com - an icon to brevity.