WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Congrats to James [WebTech]

Congratulations to James Gosling on his award from the ACM for inventing Java. And many thanks to IBM for funding the award!

posted at 6:31 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Glowing Overseas [PhotoTravel]

In the words of the film American Beauty, "there is beauty everywhere". Looking out of the window on my way over here to the US, the sunset was illuminating the engine of the plane and the contrast and colour stuck me as delicious. Maybe not everyone's taste, I admit.

posted at 5:24 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

UBL Specification Drafts Released [WebTech]

Big news from the UBL working group at OASIS. Their work to create a royalty-free data representation standard for electronic commerce has come to fruition after what seems to me to be a very short time, and they have the first draft up for review and comment.

The UBL specifications are important not just because of the high-level documents for which they provide representations (invoices, purchase orders and so on) but because they define building-block elements such as address, order line, and so on which other schema writers can plunder and so create XML vocabularies that can much more easily be transformed into each other and which software can more readily scan 'blind' to discover meaning. I think this is a huge step forward and the team at OASIS, including my friend Jon Bosak, are to be warmly congratulated.

posted at 5:00 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Music's real problem? [SocioPolitico]

Chatting over breakfast, it seemed obvious what is wrong with the RIAA - it's that they are serving their customers! It's just their customers are the media industry, the retail chains, and so on. They are paranoid about anyone in their customer base gaining advantage without paying. Meanwhile, their customers' customers - us - are being ignored and having our fair-use rights eroded.
Update 28-Jan: And on that topic, Doonesbury has insight...

posted at 6:06 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |