Understanding the art of prognostication is not that dissimilar to understanding weaving. Few things ever occur out of the blue - they just hadn’t emerged out of the background noise just yet, and as such when they do appear,…

As cloud computing goes, so do two complementary technologies - application services, and web services. It’s easier to split these into two distinct sections, though it should be kept in mind that they are simply different manifestations of an…

The syndication model has long been a major facet of the way that the web works, but for the most part its been a largely single direction notification mechanism - you publish content, this updates a syndication queue, then…

I’m beginning to despair about XForms, which is perhaps a good sign. XForms is perhaps the oldest of the W3C technologies that has yet to either die completely or really dramatically take off, and for all that it has…

Within the realm of computational semantics, there is still a fairly broad disconnect between triple pair semantics, the use of RDF (or turtle notation) to create atomic assertions, and the realm of semantics as reflected on the web. I…

Poor IE. Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it seems to have a hard time getting much respect these days. Within Microsoft it has long been the unwanted stepchild - ignored when Microsoft shifted gears towards server-side technologies in…

Real World Haskell has revealed a huge gap in my experience with functional languages as well as presented me with an opportunity to make major strides towards growing as a programmer.

I tried a little experiment in 2008: living smaller.

I caught public transport only. I got rid of extra lightbulbs. I baked my own bread. I froze my own dumplings. I didn’t buy any gadget. I didn’t buy any CD. I didn’t get a flatscreen TV. No home phone; no home internet; no cable TV; no new art; no gin.

A year later, the IT industry was in the worst recession that it had faced in fifteen years, a time that became known as the Tech Nuclear Winter. Senior programmers with thirty years of experience and post graduate degrees - people who sat on standards committees boards and often served to shape the industry - could be found at coffee shops “working on their next projects” while waiting for a job to open up.

Governments need to get a (and financially encourage the) vision of the open research, open development, open source, and open standards communities as a chain that promotes an efficient market for markets.