Waiting for a Pizza in Sligo

Pregnant Mediterranean Insects

Mark O'Neill expands on the origins of copyright.

Hyperspecialists

Ziggy on hyperspecialism.

OpenOffice 1.1 Beta Available

Beta of 1.1. now available.
I've been using 1.0.2 for a quite a while now. Some oddities as you would expect but a very, very solid tool. Being able to access the XML underneath is just a glorious facility. How did I survive without that?

Blame/thank the Irish for copyright law

I'm reading Ingenious Ireland by Mary Mulvihill. There is a fascinating vignette in it about the origins of copyright - about a 20 minute drive from my house. Drumcliffe Church, better known as the burial place of W.B. Yeats, was the location of a row circa A.D. 500 when some monks objected to a Monk called Columba, copying manuscripts created in other monasteries. In A.D. 561 it went to the supreme court - to King Diarmuid - the High King at Tara.
Diarmuid's judgement was:

"Le gach bain a bainin, le gach leabhar a leabhrán."

which means

To every cow its calf, to every book, its copy

.
Unfortunately, Columba did not give back the copies he had made and 3000 men died in the battle that ensued known as The Battle of the Book at Cooldrumman.

Information Rules

I'm half way through Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Fascinating stuff - especially on the subject of information product (e.g. software application) lock-in. Very even handed - a chapter telling you how to avoid lock-in and a chapter telling you how to create lock-in :-) Open Systems? Yeah, right...

Ampersand attrition revisited

A year or more ago, I wrote an article about the problems of escaping special characters in HTML and XML. The ampersand character is an interesting case because you escape it using - um - another ampersand. That is to say, an ampersand sign, followed by "amp;".
Using the very character you are trying to escape with a sequence that includes that very character is a recipe for oddities. For example, searching Google for the string "amp;amp" today I get 39 thousand hits. When I wrote the article, I got 22 thousand hits. An increase of 17 thousand in about a year. Wow.
Here is my favourite example - American Express Air Miles. The title of the page is:

®* Gold Business Card

20 amp's! A 20 stage production pipe, each of which escaped the original ampersand methinks :-)