I've now written up some notes on the OOXML BRM, and what you can do about it.
After several happy years of employment, I've now left CSW, and I've set up a small consultancy company 67 Bricks with an old friend and colleague. We are providing "Insight from Information" - and I'm looking forward to using a lot of the experience in knowledge management, the Semantic Web, XML, and team building that I've acquired over the last few years. I'm blogging our progress at the 67 Bricks blog.
This year, I was presenting again at the XML Summer School. My talks were "Blueprint for an XML application" and "Automating the Recognition and Identification of Knowledge". As always, it was a lot of fun, and it was really enjoyable to meet or catch up with some of the greatest XML experts in the world, as well as having some great discussions with the delegates.
I'm a member of the BSI's expert group to review OOXML, and I've recently been writing code to automatically validate the XML examples in the specification.
I'm giving a presentation at the Oxford SWIG (Semantic Web Interest Group) on Wednesday 14th March - the title is "Birds, Kittens and Ann Widdecombe". I'm mostly talking about SKOS, an RDF syntax for controlled vocabularies such as thesauri and taxonomies.
My partner Michelle Reid has set up as a freelance proofreader and editor, after some time working directly for companies such as Oxford University Press as an editor. She's promoting her services via her blog, and her most recent post The Rights of the Writer provides a list of rights that authors have, echoing Daniel Pennac’s "The Rights of the Reader".
I've written an article about Rediscovering JavaScript. It's aimed at developers who may know a bit about JavaScript, but haven't been keeping track of the various changes to the language and libraries that there have been over the last few years. I've been keen on developing in JavaScript for a long time, and I've been disappointed that many "serious" developers dislike it; but with the rise of Ajax this seems to be changing.
The article talks about the Prototype library, the logging library log4javascript, and walks-through the process of writing code to sort HTML tables (inspired by Stuart Langridge's sorttable) using functional programming idioms.
Added my FOAF profile (see the Friend of a Friend project)
Speeding up Log4J in JDK 1.5 by removing unused log methods from the bytecode - a longer article explaining how the log-removal code that I posted yesterday works.
Remove all overhead from log4J calls that are not used using JDK 1.5beta's instrumentation packages. Just a zip of the code at the moment - more to follow.