1. Es wird entweder Schwarz-Gelb oder Schwarz-Rot geben

2. Bei Schwarz-Rot: Wer wird KanzlerIn - Schröder oder Merkel?

3. Was passiert, wenn sich Schwarz und Gelb bzw. Rot nicht einig werden - nochmal neu wählen?

4. Wer Schwarz wählt, wählt Schwarz-Gelb, wer SPD wählt, wählt die große Koalition. Ein anderes Ergebnis gibt es nämlich nicht.

5. Egal ob Schwarz-Rot oder Schwarz-Gelb: Die Grünen sind in der Opposition. Wir brauchen eine starke Opposition - und Grün kann das bekanntlich gut. Die Grünen werden in der Opposition sehr genau darauf schauen, ob es bei der Union wieder zu Korrputionsaffären kommt und diese publik machen.

6. Die Wahlprogramme von Union und FDP widersprechen sich oftmals massiv: Beispielsweise will die FDP weniger Überwachung (anschaffung des großen Lauschangriffs), die Union mehr Überwachung (Vorratsdatenspeicherung). Analog spricht sich die FDP (getreu ihrer freiheitlichen Grundsätze) für den Datenschutz beispielsweise bei RFID aus - die Union will dabei Rücksicht auf die Wirtschaft nehmen (was letztlich keinen Datenschutz bedeutet...) FDP und Grüne würden also in diesen Aspekten gut zusammen passen...

7. Bei der "Spitzentechnologieförderung" sind sich alle Parteien, sogar Die Linke.PDS einig.

8. "Erneuerbaren Energien" - eine "Spitzentechnologie", fest in der Hand des Mittelstandes - haben in den letzten Jahren Tausende von Arbeitsplätzen geschaffen. Insbesondere auch in Ostdeutschland. Weiteres Wachstumspotential ist vorhanden - Untersuchungen sprechen von bis zu 400.000 neuen Arbeitsplätzen bis 2020. In Deutschland. Von Deutschen Unternehmen.

9. Deutschland ist weltweit führend bei der Technologie für "erneuerbare Energien". Angesichts der stetig steigenden Ölpreise ein Wachstumsmarkt, und wir sollten unseren Vorsprung hier nicht verschenken! Experten schätzen dass 2012 Windenergie die billigste Energiequelle sein wird.

10. Die Ölpreise werden weiter steigen.

11. Apropos "Die Linke.PDS" - warum greift Lafontaine eigentlich im Duell mit Stoiber nicht diesen, sondern die SPD an? Wird er dann auch um die Arbeitslosigkeit zu bekämpfen eine Rechtschreibreform machen?

12. Unter Rot-Grün ist die Zuwanderung in die BRD zurückgegangen. Das "Zuwanderungsgesetzt" ist also eine zusätzliche Hürde, keine Erleichterung. Eigentlich braucht Deutschland durch die niedrige Geburtenrate aber eine deutlich höhere Zuwanderung als derzeit vorhanden. (Eine höhere Geburtenrate und familienfreundlichere Einstellung der Bürger wäre natürlich auch sehr hilfreich...)

13. Die Großstädte haben den höchsten Ausländeranteil, aber mit die geringste Ausländerfeindlichkeit. Im Osten, wo die NPD gewählt wurde ist der Anteil der Ausländer besonders niedrig - gönnen die uns unsere Ausländer nicht?

14. Merkel war für den Irak-Krieg und hätte Deutsche Soldaten in diesem ungerechtfertigten Krieg geopfert.

15. Die Mehrwertsteuererhöhung wird die "Konsumflaute" in Deutschland nicht beheben, sondern verschlimmern. Und weniger Konsum bedeutet wiederum weniger Mehrwertsteuereinnahmen... unter Umständen würde also sogar eine Mehrwertsteuerabsenkung mehr Einnahmen bringen - weil die Leute vielleicht wieder mehr Einkaufen als derzeit!

16. Das wirklich Traurige an Stoibers Kritik "am Osten" ist, dass sie für die gesamte BRD gilt, nicht nur für den Osten. Die Frustrierten entscheiden die Wahl.

17. Stoiber spielt knallhart - ER kann keine Wähler im Osten verlieren, aber wenn er in Bayern mehr Wähler bekommt als die FDP bundesweit, so hat er mehr Macht in der künftigen Regierung. Was interessiert ihn die CDU? Ausserdem hat es offenbar der Union insgesamt keine Stimmen gekostet - ein Meisterstück!

Fazit: Ich werde Grün wählen - Ich kann mir 10% Grün in der Opposition gut vorstellen, und ich glaube dass wir das brauchen um Korruption zu vermindern!

John Goerzen suggested to skip Skype and Google Talk, and go for SIP phones directly.

One of the FAQ questions he lists is "Is SIP here to stay?". Well, in Germany, every major DSL reseller does offer Internet Telephony over SIP (the guys selling your normal land line of course do not...)

Apparently they even give you for a few Euros a DSL-Wireless Router where you can connect your phone, and which will do a least-cost-routing between your landline and your DSL SIP connection. I.e. if your destination host is a registered SIP number, you can call him for free using your normal phone! Also they have peering agreements, so you can usually call the users of the other companies also for free.

So SIP definitely is the protocol the industry in germany uses (apart from e.g. Cisco using it for their in-company phone network I've read somewhere)

Skype on the other hand, is a closed thing. Sure, they do offer Skype-out, but thats about it. There is no free peering between Skype and other services. From what I remember, Skype-out is also 2-3 times as expensive as what the DSL providers charge you here for the same service. Oh, and you don't need to have a DSL line with them, e.g. Web.de and Freenet.de let you subscribe for free, and you'll even get a german phone number, and with freenet 100 free minutes into the german PSTN.

Basically, Skype is an instant messenger which can do voice links. Just like google talk...

Well, google talk is new, and on their web page they suggest they might add SIP support later on. Then you could use Google Talk with your DSL providers account do dial out. If google plays nice (and they still have a record of playing nice, e.g. by using Jabber as their protocol)

SIP, while being a widely adopted standard, has its downsides, too.

I've been playing around with SIP half a year ago. There is lots of software available, and most works just fine. Asterisk is a full-blown PBX, you can do conference rooms with it (can you do conferences in Skype by now?), do interactive menus, gateways to PSTN, H.323, AIX... you name it.

Interaction between the numberous SIP clients usually works fine, but can be troublesome occasionally. (If more than one company would do Skype software they would have the same problem, I guess...)

Where Skype certainly is better, is in getting through firewalls. Which isn't really a good thing: firewalls are there for a reason... Well, anyway. Skype uses an ugly hack for this: it will promote regular Skype users with a good network connection (read: at universities and companies) to so called Super-Nodes. These then relay calls for people behind firewalls. So if you have a good connection, do NOT use skype... (apparently some universities and companies have already banned skype for that reason)

SIP users need to have one or more servers in the internet to relay their calls for them, if they are both firewalled. Well, not always, sometimes techniques such as STUN can be used to pierce the firewall. Anyway, if you often are behind some firewall and cannot setup a SIP proxy, you need to use an SIP provider. E.g. the DSL providers given above, or Free World Dialup mentioned by John.

Anyway, do try SIP. I can't await to see GnomeMeeting with SIP support in Debian, until then you can use e.g. linphone or kphone.

For my mothers computer (running Windows XP) I downloaded the latest ATI "Catalyst" drivers. These drivers come with the worst utilities I've seen yet.

ATI apparently doesn't care for actually supporting their users. They try to be fancy and so in tests maybe. But requiring users to have .NET installed is a bad thing to do. Because by default, people will not have it. And will likely not want to jump Microsofts' latest "thing".

I mean, there is nothing my mother could gain by having .NIET installed, apart from maybe some more security issues. And wasted diskspace.

But it's even worse: the drivers will just install - and not even tell you that they need .NET - they ask you to reboot, and after the next login they'll just slam some cryptic error number into your face. At each login (the error message of course doesn't say that you need .NET, and the only way to get rid of it was to edit the registry!)

But thats not all: ATI also introduces a new entry at the top of the desktop context menu (which probably is the most annoying place to add it), which, well, again doesn't work either. I mean, my mother is not going to switch her desktop resolution every hour, is she?

Fortunately, I was able to google for a shell command to get rid of it.

I guess the next computer I buy for my mother will not include an ATI graphics board, if they only care for "skinable" fancy drivers that won't even work out of the box, won't detect the most obvious error and require "expert work" (i.e. registry, command line) to make the system reasonable to use for WORK. Yes, there are people like my mother trying to work with Windows. Not only Linux users do work...

ATI, get some usability experts, please!

Oh, and please provide more documents for the brave people writing good opensource drivers for your products, because as you might guess I'll never ever install your Linux drivers. I mean, they have 3D working on most boards, why don't you just tell them what they need to modify to support the rest of your chips as well?

I'm currently having fun with the Debian Quiz:

Question 24: How often did run Branden Robinson for DPL?
1:2 times
2:3 times
3:4 times
4:5 times

Well, he is current DPL, so he ran at least once, and 4:5 (aka four fifths = 0.80) is the closest value to 1 available... ;-)

Whoever started these memes, die! ;-) Okay... first try - my name:

May I run around screaming "Booooooring"?

Next try: and old handle I used ten years ago:

better. I like the "youth for sabotage and troubleshooting" thing.

Now for the final showdown:

Wait. "Electronic Mechanical Android"?

I was pointed to cfengine, but it doesn't fit my needs IMHO. The machines I have are probably too different. And the most common case will be that I need to change something on exactly one machine. And then log this change. Maybe import it to others later.

Martin F. Krafft also replied, but his suggestion doesn't fit my usage szenario either.

I never want or would want my machines to change their configuration automatically. It's always me who does the changes. It often will be just a "svn diff; svn up", but thats okay. But no automatically *executions*.

Let me pick a real example: I have two load-balancing, fail-over DHCP servers. Their configuration is 99% shared. They even have each others configuration, since I've put them into dhcpserver1.conf and dhcpserver2.conf. The only file they don't share is the file which includes dhcpserver1.conf on one host and dhcpserver2.conf on the other. It's a one-line diff, easy to merge, and likely to not change too often. Well, there is pool.conf, which is shared between both hosts. And then there is static.conf, with the static DHCP assignments. When I need to change something, I'm going to log into one of them, do the changes there, maybe syntax check them, run diff, to see I didn't break anything etc. - then I commit the changes (not committing the "includes.conf"), log into the other box, do an "svn up", and then I reload the config on both.

It's working fine so far - except that I have not commited changes here, namely my includes.conf file. In case something breaks with the box, and I need to set it up again, I'd like to be able to just pull my "dhcpserver2" branch into /etc to get it running as it was before. But either I can't change the shared files on both (or I have to merge them all the time) or I can't have a branch reflecting 1:1 the configuration I want to have on the box.

Another issue I havn't found a solution for yet...

A small network, consisting of a couple of servers and a couple of clients. The clients are to be masqueraded, the servers have real IPs.

The network of real IPs isn't a proper subnet, since it's shared with others. The uplink connection is switched, the old setup was to have all the servers directly on the switched network.

The new setup we have is one firewall, a DMZ network and an internal network. The firewall is connected to all three of them, and has arp_proxy enabled for the DMZ and external networks. That way, no configuration changes were necessary when moving the machines into the DMZ (except for a host route on the firewall). Note that the firewall box also is responsible for both the access of the internal network to the external and the DMZ network. Oh, and I'm talking of a stateful firewall.

Everything is working as expected and reliable. Level completed.

Next level: make it high available - add another gateway. And now it gets really nasty... I guess I'll skip the idea of load balancing... That becomes really messy, won't it? HA fail-over should be okay, when the other gateway is down, the new gateway enables proxy-arp. For the internal network, I have to take over the gateway IP.

Maybe I should switch to static NAT... I could then split the hosts onto both firewalls, and migrate rules to one if the other one goes down...

Does anyone have experience with similar setups? Which solution did you choose, which did you try that did not work? Please send me an email at erich AT debian (.) org

I like to keep the configuration files of a set of servers in version control, mostly to be able to document changes, to keep boxes in sync and to be able to undo changes, of course.

I'd like to keep as much of my configuration shared as possible, obviously. And I'd like to be able to modify files in all "branches" at the same time.

If I forget everything I know of revision control systems, I would describe it as: I have a base configuration database I can use the same way as I do it for sourcecode. Then I'd like to have a set of "diversions", of course also in revision control. This is machine specific, and changes I do here only apply to that specific machine.

You could also call this copy-on-write branches - as long as I havn't modified the file in the branch, I'd like it to auto-merge the changes done to the revision I forked from...

Of course I could do that using regular branches and then merging changes to the trunk into my branches. But this means I'd have to merge these into each of my machines branch, then go to each of the machines and checkout... That's kind of annoying... :-(

Well, any expert here with a nice solution for me (and especially one I can explain to others in a few sentences...)

First some software/hardware issue: we got some sponsored (old) Compaq Servers: Compaq ProLiant 1850R mostly, with varying numbers of CPUs, RAM and disks. With some minor tweaks (well, choose Linux as operating system in the BIOS) they are working mostly fine. Except: they don't reboot or poweroff. Which sucks, when you have to actually walk to the server to restart it... I've tried a couple of variants, but no success.

So if anyone knows how to make these older ProLiant server to reboot, tell me!

Second issue: one of the machines - which are the same model, but have minor differences in board revisions of some hardware - has troubles with the timer in SMP mode. Time is running way to fast, you can no longer login, since your login will timeout as soon as the password prompt is displayed. Using the boot parameter "clock=pit notsc" helped (not sure if notsc is needed). But I'd prefer to find out why this happens, and how to make the kernel work with default parameters.

Benjamin Mako Hill introduced the idea of conference backgrounds to me. It's kind of funny, to setup a background image on your laptop that is entirely inoffensive (so noone can bring up a reason why you shouldn't use it) but extremely distracting.

Not as good as his example background are some of these: optical illusions (I guess some people will think these are animated, or can at least explain why they find them distracting)

If you are giving a presentation, you should probably pick something else though... ;-) I can really recommend checking out Pixelgirlpresents, which contains many entirely inoffensive, but interesting and pretty backgrounds. In the featured section, check out the background "Batty". That one is great (I didn't find a way to "permalink" there, unfortunately)

Oh, and never forget that people will judge you by your desktop backgrounds (just like they do by the icon chaos you have there, if any) - putting some art there is generally a good thing. (And if it's cute, chicks will dig it!)

A friend of mine was asked to write a configuration frontend for amavis.

Poor guy: he'll never be able to support it properly. There is just too much sick stuff you can do in amavis' config: it's not a config file, it's a perl program.

Every time I upgrade amavis (to be precise: amavisd-new) on my mail server I'm cursing the developers for their stupid config file. (Note: apparently amavis-ng has a saner configuration file) Even with powerful tools such as Meld it is a PITA to merge my changes into a new version of the config file. Apart from the file being unreadable in general anyway...

Of course there are cases where you can benefit. For example, if you want to get configuration paramters from LDAP, instead of modifying the perl script code of amavis, you can just write your perl script code into the perl script config file... From what I've heart, using LDAP in amavis is really slow, too. (Except maybe if you spend much time on also implementing some caching, of course you can do that in the config file, instead of the script source...)

So please, whenever you write a program, design the configfile in a way such that other programs will be able to read and write it, too! (e.g. by using an XML format)

Steinar H. Gunderson wonders about how to do proper HTML templating nowerdays.

First of all, I stick to XHTML 1.0, not 1.1 for now. Compatibility appears to be better with that version (or at least the output enginge of libxslt is better tuned for this doctype, make sure to set the doctype!)

One way to do templating for HTML is to generate an XML file, and write a stylesheet to transform it. While this allows full flexibility, and you can do really nice things in XSLT especially when using e.g. document() (and thus use a template that is plain XHTML) or the document extension, I do not recommend using XSLT for templates in real-world projects. Too few people understand XSLT, I've blogged about the problems of xslt before.

Using XML attributes in XHTML files is a great way to do templates. I've discovered this technique when investigating Zope:

Zope Template Attribution Language looks convincing to me, but is still somewhat a work in progress (i.e. there are proposed changes)

There is also an extended version of it, called Macro Expansion for TAL.

Why is this solution superior to most others? These templates usually are valid XHTML, and often can be edited by "designers" with their favourite broken windows tools such as WeamDreaver. In many cases, these tools will just leave the attributes alone. So fixing the templates after the designed decided for a design changes becomes easy.

Whenever I need to do some templates, I try to do something similar. usually I don't have high requirements, and I'm too lazy to investigate available librarys for it, so usually I just annotate the template with either some custom attributes or by using the id and name attributes of XHTML, and then replace the contents of these tags with DOM calls. Works fine in most cases, and you can even do simple loop constructs.

But I, too, am lacking a convincing templating system I can feed with my data sources (preferably with some pull API) and have it do all the work.

Btw, it should be possible to do an TAL processor in XSLT... ;-)

[Update: Yeah, I somehow mixed up document() and the document exslt tag. fixed I also noted that there is a Python SimpleTal package in Debian I havn't tried yet.]

Today I went to the local supermarket to check out their offer of Linux magazines. I found two, "Linux Magazin" and "Easylinux".

To find out if there might be articles of interest in there for me (after all they don't target linux freaks like me), I saw an interesting remark in the "letter to the editor" part of easylinux.

Basically, a reader wrote to the editors along the lines "I've tried Redhat, SuSE [...] before, and now that I have used Ubuntu, there is so much in Ubuntu I will not want to miss again." (Probably referring to apt-get and other benefits of Debian. ;-) e.g. many people like our alternatives management and such things we take for granted...)

What was scary was the reply by the editors, which was basically: "Yeah, we're gonna list them on our distributions list, but we won't go into details on them, since they don't include KDE by default, and we only deal with KDE" (there was also a Gnumeric article in there).

This strikes me as just plain wrong, and somewhat arrogant.

The other magazine, "Linux Magazin" had more technical articles, some of which might have been worth reading. But I prefer electronic stuff for Linux topics, not paper.

Scott James Remnant bothers to write a technical reply why "autopackage" isn't any better than the existing package manager.

Why do you actually bother? I mean, I've never seen any autopackage package, and the only times I've heard about it are on LWN and your blog posts.

Autopackage, in my opinion, is a pointless effort. I actually have the impression that they (still) havn't encountered all the kinds of conflicts and dependencies we can see in Debian, and where the dependency handling of dpkg and apt comes in.

They also probably aren't aware of the smartness in the Debian build-package tools, that basically take all the work away from the average package builder to actually write library dependencies. (And for the library package maintainer it's also very convenient if he only has to specify which package versions are compatible...)

I also do not agree that their install process is in any way convenient.

I'm not the average stupid windows user, who wants to download another bad freeware application (or some warez copy) and install it. I also don't need the latest upstream version usually: I've seen to many new issues arise in the newest, so I'm fine with the one that has recieved enough regression testing...

But why don't we just ignore autopackage? Noone uses it, noone needs it - it will just go away.

I love toying around with google. In case you haven't known, Google offers Alerts, which includes new hits for a search query. I use this for example to monitor links to my ssddiff project (my xmldiff variant, which supposedly is better at preserving structure). This works well because noone else uses this abbreviation (which, btw, is for semi-structured-data-diff, since the algorithms should work fine with any semistructured data, including rdf or arbitrary labeled graphs).

Since Googlism still only claims that I'm "responsible for this debian package" (apparently taken from the enigma package), I of course have to teach google otherwise:

Erich Schubert is messing with google.

Finally! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

No more PITA whenever I come across a filename with utf8-chars.

The eXtreme Markup Languages conference got me thinking about the upsides and downsides of XML, XSLT, CSS and related standards.

When I try to take a step back and get an "outside" view, these standards all have bigger and smaller problems in their widespread adoption.

Let's start with XML. XML is widely adopted, but still many compatibility problems arise that XML was actually designed to prevent. Let me give you an example: I was writing a java application for a mobile phone. To transmit data to the phone I decided to use XML, hoping that I run into less problems than by using own data formats. Still this was rather painful: the J2ME on the phones I tested on had very different capabilities - and most were lacking character set support. So I actually had to remove the charset specification from the XML file to get it working on all phones: one didn't read the file when the encoding was UTF-8, the other failed when I used latin1.

Other problems with XML "support" I frequently run into are Java and PHP programmers not using a proper XML writer to generate the output (but println() statements, and of course not paying attention to proper character escaping...) and similar issues on the reader side. Buffers not capable to store the long strings in some XML attribute of a special case etc. - the list goes on and on.

One of the problems with XML is that almost no user of it has ever read the full specs, because they are just way too much for them. Neither do they bother to learn the XML writer APIs, since they've always been writing XML with their text editor, too...

XSLT (since very few people use XSL-FO, and XPath is somewhat "omnipresent" I rip out the transformations) has very different problems: very few people understand it. And even less are comfortable with writing it.

While in theory XSLT is a nice and easy language - and a very clean, declarative and functional language - why do the "users" have so many problems with it? My guess is, that the language is very clumsy. Compare writing XSLT code with code in other languages, either Java, Python, or to have a fairer comparision: Haskell. In any of these languages, the code written by the average programmer is a lot easier to understand than in XSLT. I'm not bitching about not being able to modify variables (it's functional, and I've learned how to write code in functional languages as well as the benefits) but I blame much to the syntax of XSLT - and XML. I don't want to give full examples here, but just look at the way you pass variables into templates. This really doesn't increase readability.

Some of the issues with XSLT could be remedied by having a free, widely adopted editor (testware or shareware won't do, you need to achieve an eclipse-like community status, so OpenSource is the way to go!) which somehow hides the syntax from the average programmer and doesn't force you to either learn new shortcuts or use the mouse (which would make me continue using vim, since I'm way faster with it). Also, no user of XML should have to write XML with a normal text editor if we want to get rid of broken XML files... But maybe it would be easier to just make a new transformation language designed for the person writing the code, not for the parser...

My complaints about CSS (apart from Microsoft having serious bugs in their CSS support) are mostly that it's like an alien language here. While it's syntax is nice, compact and easy to read (in contrast to XSLT), it doesn't fit together with the rest of the puzzle. What especially bites me are constructs such as

  a:before { content:"<b>"; }
  a:after  { content:"</b>"; }

Ouch! How is anyone expected to verify the resulting document?

Of course there are cases where you can use this very nicely, but you can also do very ugly things... :-(

(If you want to see a nice thing you can do with that, add the following line to your mozilla profiles chrome/userContent.css: a[href$=".pdf"]:after {font-size: 10px; color: red; content: " [PDF]";} which will add a red [PDF] after any link to a pdf file. Very handy.)

Well, enough rant for today. Especially since I don't have a clear proposal on what to do. I'm not trying to say "you are doing it all wrong", I'm only trying to point out what I see as the biggest issues.

Let the flamewars begin! (Sorry, my blog doesn't allow comments or trackbacks by design - it's intentionally read-only for the web server.)

[Update 08/17/05: Seo Sanghyeon pointed me to NiceXSL, a simplified syntax for XSLT, but he also says that it isn't just the syntax that makes XSLT difficult for most users.]

I successfully did my talk at the Extreme Markup Languages 2005 conference, about "structure preserving difference search for XML". Aka my xmldiff approach.

If you are interested, you can find details about it at the SSDDiff Homepage - including todays slides, and the article in the proceedings.

Die Firma "Nutzwerk", bekannt (?) für das umstritten hilfreiche Produkt SaferSurf, bekriegt anerkannte Medien- und Verbrauchervertreter im Internet.

Dem gemeinnützigen Verein FFII wurde so beispielsweise der DNS-Dienst abgeschaltet, nachdem dessen Betreiber anscheinend von den Anwälten Nutzwerks unter Druck gesetzt wurde (und da dieser nur ein paar Euro im Jahr am FFII verdient sich da natürlich als einfacher Angriffspunkt anbietet...).

Vorwürfe gegen Nutzwerk finden sich bei den umfangreichen Materiallien des FFII zu Softwarepatenten. Der letztlich für den "Internetverbraucherschutz" tätige Verein FFII beobachtet - und beurteilt - Nutzwerk vor allem Kritisch wegen seinem Versuch, ein triviales Patent gegen Konkurrenten einzusetzen (was in einer Löschung des Patentes endete), aber auch wegen deren gezieltem "Spammen" auf Google.

Auch geht Nutzwerk mit sehr zweifelhaften Methoden gegen den bekannten Heise-Verlag - Herausgeber der bekannten Computerzeitschrift c't, die als das "beste" Computermagazin Deutschlands gilt - vor: wenn eine Firma statt mit überzeugenden technischen Lösungen mit Anwälten gegen jeden Kritiker (und wenn dieser nur über den FFII berichtet) vorgeht, stimmt doch etwas nicht...

Folgenden Telepolis-Artikel finde ich schon geradezu beängstigend. Vielleicht ist der Begriff "Abzocker" - an dem Nutzwerk verständlicherweise Anstoß genommen hat - doch nicht ganz unpassend?

Ich würde daher eher von der Verwendung von SaferSurf abraten.

I'm proud to have my blog syndicated on Planet XMLhack now, too.

If you are interested in following the edge of XML technology, that definitely is a feed to subscribe to. Oh, and of course I can promote open source there, too... ;-)

I've made a poster about some ideas to speed up XSLT evaluation (and get rid of some "misuse" of includes that is quite common apparently...) for use in websites like portal pages that are "filled" with data from different sources - and that may get updated independently.

The typical approach is to write own stylesheets for these parts and have a very simple include system compose the final website out of these blocks. But this means you don't have a single stylesheet responsible for your site, which I don't really like (well, in an ideal world you could give the template to some artist with almost no technical knowledge to do the design...)

Well, anyway, get the PDF of the poster. I'm not sure if I'm going to have it printed and put up - I'm not entirely happy, and I don't know how much of this is already implemented in processors such as saxon... actually I'm more interested in whether this can improve speed much (think of having akamai run the xslt job for you, and you just supplying the xml data?) - and especially if this can help improving XML and XSLT acceptance (which IMHO seriously suffers by XSLT complexity - people just want to use what-you-see-is-what-you-broke).

Jorge and Stephan Hermann have blogged about a software called plaxo.

While I don't agree with Stephan completely - I'm not that paranoid - I do not like this software. It sucks. Please do never use it on me.

Actually, a well-known and respected freemail provider in germany, web.de, has been offering similar annoyance before... It's like sending out email of the type "I don't bother to fill the entry in my address book, please go to a freaking web site and do that for me"

I hate that, and I'm just going to delete these emails. So please don't bother to annoy me with that.

I'm enjoying the city and the conference, which is my first major conference. My talk - structure-preserving difference search for XML - is scheduled for Thursday 11:00, and it will be around 45 minutes.

I think I managed to make nice slides, taking out all the mind-stretching things from the article (anyone who wants to bend his mind is still welcome to verify my improved cost functions. Each time I have to verify them or my implementation I get seasick from them. ;-) )

Well, the current talk, by Ann M. Wrightson is the best so far. I gotta pay attention to it!