Mozilla just released the first official beta of Firefox 3.6, featuring built-in support for themes (Personas), improved performance, and more. Early adopters, your download is ready.

IBM marketing guy Rob Weir has half of a new series of blogs The Final OOXML Update up. Readers may be surprised that I agree with many of the points he makes, among them, the importance of a balance of interests, the need for continued participation and the need for followthrough on the BRM decisions.

The 3/25 numbers on the left are a counter to show how much longer the story will remain on the home page (3 minutes, 25 seconds, based on us squinting at a blow up). It’s notable that users are asked to vote a story up or down without seeing comments or how others have voted.

Has Keyboard Cat captivated you in 2009? You’re not the only one. Online video has continued to grow in popularity while P2P is on the decline, according to the latest data from Sandvine. The trend is good for both content producers and users alike.

Google today unveiled Maps Navigation (beta, of course), an extremely upgraded version of its current Maps software that’ll be free and, from what we understand, available by default on all Android 2.0 devices.

Reviewing a few long-term, continuing multi-publishing projects I have been involved in recently, I am struck that several are morphing in a particular direction. The projects might have started as publishing paper or webpages, and moved to publishing high-level XML, but increasingly the commodity that needs to be packaged and distributed (for re-skinning and re-use by third parties) is the whole indexed dataset: in effect the website (without the implication of HTML pages.) The client-person doesn’t GET a webpage, they get a whole website (this is for B2B not B2C.)

More projects seem to be coming across my desk that ultimately involve building information systems whose primary requirements come from legislation or regulations. And sometimes even the detailed requirements. Legislation is sometimes quite a nice Requirement Specification: it is expressed…

A few months ago, a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web. So I took a fresh look at the status quo, and where the current sweet spot is. Here are my conclusions, and how things panned out for this particular job.

A solid refactoring, the kind that you don’t do every year, also needs to involve a tooling up, but scoped to making the new desired architecture something that programmers won’t subvert but find natural. In a way, the programming languages become the interfaces that provides the boundaries for the layers of the system.

A lot of Schematron can be implemented directly in a mildly enhanced version of RELAX NG without (I think) explosions, before it all runs out of steam.