If you follow the news of either hi-tech media or music, you already know that Radiohead is selling their new album “In Rainbows” to customers online for whatever they want to pay. A deluxe boxed set is also available for a fixed price of 40 pounds.

An op-ed piece by a recent Dartmouth graduate in today’s New York Times titled The Fakebook Generation (registration required) tells us how college students really use Fakebook. It turns out that they don’t need software for social networking, because they have dorms and classes and libraries and sports teams and clubs and even parties for that. According to its author,

I drive a Honda Accord EX. To even write that, I had to look at the back of my car to remember the “EX” part, because it never meant anything to me. I try to remember to mention it when I call the dealership to ask about the availability of some part, because it might matter to them, but it doesn’t to me.

A colleague recently asked about converting a collection of XML documents to the US-ASCII encoding (that is, to documents where everything is either a US ASCII character or a numeric character reference such as é for the é character). I have several utility stylesheets for converting the encoding of XML documents, and a slight change to one of them gave me a new version that would create a US-ASCII version of any XML document:

When people started retroactively applying the term “psychedelic punk” in the late seventies, the late sixties Texas band the 13th Floor Elevators were among the first to earn the title. Tom Verlaine’s band Television covered “Fire Engine” live, but the Texas band’s most well-known song (mostly because of the Nuggets compilation that everyone had) was “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. I’m not sure whether it’s annoying or just trippier that…

How do we assign metadata to data? Ontologies often say “here is some information about the metadata we’d like to have for our data”, but the actual assignment of metadata that conforms to an ontology is usually more work than developing the ontology. Who assigns this metadata, and why do they do it? You have three choices: people who do it because they’re paid to, people who do it because they want to, and automated processes. I’m reading up on doing it with…

I’ve written before about using OpenOffice to convert Microsoft Office files to OpenOffice files (and hence XML) with a shell prompt command that starts up OpenOffice with the MS Office file, does a Save As, and then quits OpenOffice. Because it can be done from the command line, this makes conversion of multiple files with a batch file or shell script much easier.