"You sass that hoopy Douglas Adams? Now there's a frood who knew where his towel was. You are invited to join your fellow hitchhikers in mourning the loss of the late great one. Join in on towel day to show your appreciation for the humor and insight that Douglas Adams brought to all our lives."

"Given SOAP's role as the underlying specification for Web services, the work being done on the SOAPBuilders discussion list regarding the state of XML, and particularly, SOAP interop has attracted a lot of attention on Web news sites, weblogs, and trade publications. XML Magazine Editor in Chief Steve Gillmor and Editorial Director Sean Gallagher hosted a roundtable discussion with a number of key players from the SOAPBuilders and W3C communities."

"Two years, and numerous grants later, we have an entire cage full of computers running thousands of complex versions of the original Eliza scripts. We started out using USENET as a data source, recording nightly dumps of over 20,000 newsgroups. They were the source for the natural sounding sentences, the range of personalities, the political spectrum, and the various shades of anger, happiness, and delight."

"Bernard Korzeniewski of the Institute of Molecular Biology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, says that definitions of life usually list the attributes an organism must have, such as genes, a certain level of complexity, the ability to reproduce and evolve, and so on. But this, he says, merely describes life rather than providing a useful way of deciding what's alive and what's not.

So Korzeniewski set out to formulate a fundamental definition of life, "which would apply not only to life presently existing on our planet but also to the first living organisms on Earth, as well as to life-like phenomena existing presumably on other planets in the Universe", as he puts it.

His definition is this: "A network of inferior negative feedbacks subordinated to a superior positive feedback." In other words, it's a system that tries to regulate itself to preserve its identity."

You should remember

The philosophy that academic information is for all, and it is our duty to make information available.

WWW...

• does not disturb existing data management: simply provides access to the data. No extra work for infomation suppliers.
• adds a possibility of creating hypertext links to enhance information access.
• allows data to be ONLY STORED ONCE.
• is available for most machines at CERN now.

Note: The effort of producing good quality data outweighs the effort of making the tools to access it.

"Media reports said that the collective hysteria claimed a second life early on Tuesday after a pregnant woman sleeping on her terrace was woken by neighbors shouting: ``The monkey has come!.'' The woman fell down a staircase and died in hospital."

" jtunnel is a program designed to "tunnel" a standard input/output stream over Jabber. It does this by intercepting data that appears on standard input and output streams from a program, and sends them as Jabber packets instead. Another jtunnel instance somewhere else picks these messages and places them back onto standard input / output."

"jtunnel comes into its own when used with another program that communicates via standard IO. The original reason I wrote the program was as an exercise to see if I could play GNU Chess over Jabber."

"In this article, we share our experiences with a strategy and technology so simple in design, that it could present the next wave of grassroots KM implementations. We are talking of the "storytelling" as the killer strategy, and "blogs" as the killer technology. Both of them share one common ground: grassroots interaction — a concept voiced by the likes of John Seely Brown, Larry Prusak, Steve Dennings, Dave Snowden, David Weinberger, among other prominent KM personalities."

"Waits is cool like saffron -- exotic and rare. He keeps himself in relative seclusion north of San Francisco, which only adds to the allure. Any time Waits plays a gig it becomes an event. He rarely tours anymore, though he did hit the road for a few dates in support of 1999's "Mule Variations." Those shows were his first since he emerged from a self-imposed exile in 1995 to play a single benefit concert at Oakland's Paramount Theater. The show was expensive -- $75 a ticket -- and sold out in less than an hour.

But Waits didn't miss a beat. When a woman sitting near the front yelled out, "Hey, Tom, where you been?" Waits had a reply at the ready, as if it were rehearsed.

"I been around. Where you been? You still living out by the airport?""

"This article presents a simple, hands-on exercise that demonstrates the principles of the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). It takes about an hour to complete the concept exercises and about 15 minutes at a computer to try out the results with a real XSLT processor."

"We look at how RSS has evolved from its humble beginnings through present day and beyond. We survey all versions of RSS, including a feature comparison, a new RSS usage survey, plus format and validation information. Learn how the newest versions of RSS will move us towards a more Semantic Web."

"Most web pages are just pieces of the puzzle. Without the "Big Picture", it is hard to find the right piece at the right time. zKnowMan captures the temporal relationship between web pages surfed. Using user feedback and sophisticated algorithms, zKnowMan can analyze which documents are closer to what the user wants to find. zKnowMan also provides sophisticated analysis using Knowledge Management techniques such as standard taxonomies based on XML, such as OASIS."

"There has been plenty of talk about the range of wireless LANs, so we decided to find out how far we could stretch it. This series of articles tracks our progress in trying to use the 802.11b protocol to create a link from Sebastopol to a hilltop tower 20.9 miles north, and from there on to some homes 5 miles across a valley. In this first installment, we try out the 5-mile link and create an experiment to test the loss we would encounter on the 20.9-mile link."

"XML-RPC. SOAP. CORBA. Buzzwords galore, but possibly useful ones: this is, essentially, technology that allows you to use web sites as a big API. Below we have an article about XML-RPC; you might also want to check out an article by Paul Kulchenko on www.perl.com, "Quick Start with SOAP"."

"This document describes the current RPC interface to the Speller application. This interface will allow any Internet-connected application to connect to a Speller server and check the spelling of any arbitrary text."