Category Archives: General

The European Commission has voted against software patents overwhelmingly. Only a few months ago, things looked desperate — Poland was the only European country with the courage to keep on fighting — but now the technology world can celebrate its … Continue reading →

A short while ago, I wrote about how my megginson.com domain has suffered severe collateral damage from security flaws in Microsoft Outlook, even though I’ve never used the product and do not run Windows. Today, I noticed that my IP … Continue reading →

I’ve decided to switch Quoderat to a full-text feed, as I’ve already done with my other weblog, Land and Hold Short. I don’t use Google ads in my weblogs to try to earn revenue, and I’m too lazy to read … Continue reading →

A close acquaintance of mine has no hearing in one ear. As disabilities go, that’s not a very serious one — most of the time it means nothing worse than appearing to ignore people who start talking on her deaf … Continue reading →

[Update: a nice analogy from Jon Udell, and a thoughtful response from Tim Bray.] WSDL is too abstract to be useful, according to both Tim Bray and Norm Walsh (and for what it’s worth, I agree with them). Tim and … Continue reading →

(Personally, I think it would be healthier if we worked out the wrinkles in REST by writing lots of code rather than writing lots of blog entries, but blog entries are easier, and XML people have never been shy about … Continue reading →

I’ve been spending a lot of time deleting comment and pingback spam from my two blogs (most of it from the moderation queue). My first impulse was to ban comments and pingbacks completely — after all, some blogs seem to … Continue reading →

Anne van Kesteren complains that the relationship between XML Namespaces and XML attributes bugs him, and I think that his annoyance might be justified. It’s been many years since we did the 1.0 Namespaces spec in the old XML working … Continue reading →

Nobody, or at least, almost nobody in the software engineering world believes in the waterfall design model any more. Like Santa Claus, waterfall sounded like a great idea (old guy comes down chimney and leaves free stuff in living room; … Continue reading →