Plone is to Zope as XML is to SGML

This story uses the noun "Plone" (as in "Plone") as a verb.

Interesting.

Plone is what you get when you assemble some cool stuff on top of a Zope substrate, parcel it up, get people behind it, etc. Plone is very wonderful stuff because (at leat in part), Zope is very cool stuff. Zope in turn is very wonderful stuff because (at least in part) Python is cool stuff.

The verbification of Plone reminds me of the birth of XML. We got XML by assembling some cool stuff on top of an SGML substrate, parcelled it up, got people behind it, etc. People use XML as a verb in a way they never used SGML as a verb.

Interesting, things, verbs...I mean nouns.

XTech 2005 - Call for participation is out

The call for participation at XTech 2005 is out.

Postscript programming?

I see the Postscript is the twentieth most popular programming language :-)

Methinks that this list needs to take account of whether or not a programming language is used directly or generated from another program.

Yes, I was that nutcase who strapped a 300 baud dumb terminal to an Apple Laserwriter with a view to drawing wireframe teapots by programming the beast in Postscript directly.

I eventually got my teapots by writing programs (in Pascal as it happens - 17th on the list) that wrote out the Postscript program to a text file.

On the output side of programs that write programs is the natural home of Postscript.

Python 2.4 Final Released

Python 2.4 Final has been released. See here for details.

A twelve year old with a sheet of bubble wrap

Inefficiency revisited is this weeks ITWorld e-Business in the Enterprise article.

The subject is bubble wrap. Well, sort of. The subject is data normalization. A sort of intellectual bubble wrap.

Actually the subject is resilience of systems and the relationship between normalisation and resilience...

and bubble wrap.

Geek langsyne

bitsavers.org brings you a must-have tutorial Vax VMS 3.0 from 1982!

I have a photocopy of it somewhere. Crickey! That was (gasp) 23 years ago.

They don't make 'em like they used to. [Via Lambda the ultimate.]

Spot the change control item

I was in Brussels most of this week. My room number was 404. How perfect is that! :-)

Anyway, being a geek, it was difficult to gaze upon the beauty and splendour of the Town Hall and its famous architectural anomoly without thinking of it in computing terms.

In commercial IT, it would be known as a "change control item". A flaw that is simple to state yet ... rather expensive to fix.

In commercial IT, we see "buglets" on a par with the Town Hall anomaly on a regular basis. Unfortunately, software is rather abstract and explaining the cost implications of fixes is sometimes very challenging. You cannot simply stand on front of it and say "look!" :-(