This summer was the seventh year that the CSW Group sponsored their XML Summer School in Oxford, England. CSW’s offices are on the outskirts of Oxford, but they rent facilities within the ancient university to hold the classes. For the last few years they’ve held it at Wadham College, with a beautiful campus that was first build in the early seventeenth century. (To hear my father describe it, I’m an Oxford don, so I try to explain “Dad… it’s a consulting…

This installment of my series on writing about software is brief: O’Reilly has an excellent online publication called So You Want to Write a Book?, and it’s full of good advice whether you plan to write a complete book or not. O’Reilly isn’t the only publisher of computer books out there, but they’re certainly one of the key ones, and this book offers excellent advice for preparing your content and for assembling all the necessary information if you want to move…

I’ve found the recent U.S. TV ads of Groovy Mac Guy and Staid PC Suit Guy to be pretty annoying, especially considering the recent discussions by Mac people of how appealing Ubuntu has been looking to them (Dave Megginson, Tim Bray, and others they point to). It would be nice to add a Linux guy (who, to be honest, would probably look a lot like Comic Book Guy) discussing with the PC guy how much open source software they had in common, but I suppose Mac guy would then say that with OS X,…

I’ve been listening to music on the Pandora internet radio site for a while now. After creating a free account, you define a “channel” by naming one or more artists, and then they play whatever music they have by that artist and music that they judge to be similar. Similarity rankings are based on attributes they’ve assigned to different artists and judgments by their listeners who’ve clicked the Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down icons available with each song. Of course,…

John Cowan recently announced the availability of release 1.0 of TagSoup, his Open Source Java tool that parses even the ugliest HTML and lets you treat it like well-formed XML.

If you click this link, you’ll find that it leads to an Amazon web page where you can buy Abelson and Sussman’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. This link also links to an Amazon page where you can buy the classic computer science textbook, but I’d rather that you followed the first link if you’re going to buy it. The URL includes a parameter telling Amazon that you came there from a site created by someone with the Amazon affiliate ID…

I’ve written here before about RDF/A (now known as RDFa), the spec for embedding RDF triples into XHTML using existing XHTML markup. I’ve felt for a while that it holds great promise for making RDF easier to use and easier to incorporate into typical web pages, thereby allowing the creation of a real semantic web of RDF data. I had vague plans to write an XSLT stylesheet that would extract the RDF triples from an XHTML file’s RDFa markup, and for sample input I did put together…