O’Reilly and WIT

O’Reilly is publishing a series of articles this month, all written by various women working in technology. For some reason they asked me to take part; I no idea what the criteria were. In fact I carefully didn’t ask who else was invited, so I’ll be as surprised as the rest of you to see [...]

Definition of Open Standards

Rick Jelliffe, who’s been in the middle of lots of standards efforts, writes on the subject at Is our idea of “Open Standards” good enough? Verifiable vendor-neutrality. Worth reading, although he does make the assumption that the term “open standards” means “created by some standards organization”. Although that’s a tempting definition, and the one used [...]

Pat’s Lightbulb

I have the good fortune to work with Pat Patterson at Sun and one of the things we discussed quite a lot shortly before I went on maternity leave was how to make it easier for people to use Liberty protocols for their identity needs. One of the complaints I’ve heard is that there isn’t [...]

International Car Seats

We’re planning on travelling to Australia for a vacation, and since the baby will shortly need a new car seat anyway, I was hoping to get one that matches Canadian and Australian standards. Britax makes car seats in each country but when I called them they said the Canadian car seats did not meet Australian [...]

End of an Era

Now that the XML Catalog specification has been approved as an OASIS Standard, it feels like the end of an era to me. I’ve been chairing the Entity Resolution Technical Committee since its inception way back in October 2000 , working with a good group of people. As Norm put it today, we’d be happy [...]

Friday the 13th

I spent a certain proportion of Friday morning watching the webcast of the Scott and Steve show - the update of the collaboration work that Microsoft and Sun started a year ago. Lots of other people have blogged about what was shown and the implications (try Tim, Eve, Pat, Robin, Greg and Jonathan for some [...]