XML 2007 Last-Call Deadline

The XML 2007 talk submission deadline is looming; there’s only one this year (and it’s this Friday, August 31st!), so if you miss it, you miss out. I’m one of the reviewers. If you want a high grade if I’m assigned your paper to review, read these hints on writing good abstracts first.

Since the [...]

Apache and Logrotate

I use apache to serve a few sites from the firewall box in the basement and for some reason it kept dying on a regular basis. This started fairly recently, some time after I set up separate access log files for each of the sites.
The error logs showed entries like
[Sun Jun 10 06:28:03 2007] [...]

Knitting and XML

Eve’s XML and knitting analogy got me thinking.
You can think of a written knitting pattern as being the schema, with a set of instructions, just like the schema’s content model. Then each knitted item you make that conforms to that knitting pattern is like the document instance that conforms to the schema. Schemas can be [...]

Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

The bookclub discussed Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Reading this was a reminder that one reason I go to bookclub is to be encouraged to read books I otherwise wouldn’t, and to get more out of them than I can on my own.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wikipedia review) is the story [...]

Virus Spam

Spams carrying viruses aren’t anything new but every now and again something comes into my email box that is a bit different. Like this one.

Dear user of textuality.com, mail system administrator of
textuality.com would like to let you know the following.

We have detected that your account was used to send a
huge amount of spam during this [...]

City Mayhem

Today was my turn to take the boy to his soccer camp; it also turned out to be the day after the police shot someone on a main street. The aforesaid street was completely closed down for a block which caused a certain amount of traffic havoc. I got a close-up look at the deserted [...]