"I've been playing the guitar much longer than I've been playing with Linux, so it was only a matter of time before I'd take a closer look at the software available to the Linux guitarist. I was happily surprised by what I found, and I'll share some of my discoveries in the course of this article."

"So this is what happened: my wife and I are lucky enough to have a little boy. He is not a normal boy. I can add quotes: he is not a "normal" boy. Or perhaps I should say he is not an ordinary boy. Or: he is not common. It's easy enough to play with the language. But it's damn near impossible to see past everything to the child. Behind the thicket of words, behind the jargon, the diagnoses, programs, forms, appointments, doctors, therapists, and speech pathologists, behind the adjustment to new realities, behind it all there is a boy, a little man, two years four months old. He is not a cute drooling toddler. He is Jay. He is not a darling angelic lost little boy. He is not autistic or developmentally disabled. He is Jay. Then again, he is not Jay. He is the one we mean when we say "Jay". He is himself. He is... well, there he is. He is the one I love. He is my son."

"The following sections explore using PHP to integrate two web applications into one interface. The first section demonstrates how to create a complete PHP XML-RPC server application, in this case a discussion server. The web application to which this server will be connected is a database called Meerkat, the brainchild of Rael Dornfest and O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. (who also happen to be the publishers of this book). Meerkat is a storehouse of news about technological developments. After a subsequent section that gives an overview of Meerkat, the chapter demonstrates how to integrate the database with the custom XML-RPC discussion server."

"So someone asked me an obvious but hard to answer question today: What are the best examples of web services currently running?"

"In this article, the authors describe a generalized pricing model for commercial Web services that can be implemented by service providers for service requesters. The solution they propose shows how the use of Web services can be metered, and the resulting data used for subsequent accounting and billing processes. By way of example, the solution presented in the article is itself implemented as a Web service."

"This is a chart showing the number of installed seats of the Lotus Notes workgroup software, from the time it was introduced in 1989 through 2000. In fact when Notes 1.0 finally shipped it had been under development for five years. Notice just how dang long it took before Notes was really good enough that people started buying it. Indeed, from the first line of code written in 1984 until the hockey-stick part of the curve where things really started to turn up, about 11 years passed. During this time Ray Ozzie and his crew weren't drinking piña coladas in St Barts. They were writing code."

"So, it takes a long time to write a good program, but when it's done, it's done . Oh sure, you can crank out a new version every year or two, trying to get the upgrade revenues, but eventually people will ask: "why fix what ain't broken?""

"The problem here isn't that Hailstorm cuts out competitors, or intermediaries, or anybody else. It's that it cuts out markets. It bypasses the bazaar. It embraces and extends what producerism has succeeded in doing ever since John Wanamaker invented the price tag in the late 1800s.

"The challenge for the rest of us is to do with markets what we did with the Net in the first place: create ubiquitous conditions that make matrix-building impossible. That requires something many of us are not accustomed to doing: thinking about commerce. Specifically, thinking about markets as places, as environments, rather than as targets for stuff shoved down through the industrial distribution matrix."

"One is, how long does it take the current user base to get to free software, and the other is how long does it take the current user base to be replaced by another user base. It's a transitional issue. In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple's first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology's primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it's a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there's some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity."

"Annotea's concept itself is not new. A commercial application called Third Voice attracted attention two years ago with a similar but proprietary technology. With no clear revenue plan, Third Voice became yet another dot-com casualty in April.

The W3C hopes that by pushing the technology as an open-source solution, Annotea will take root as a useful "metadata" application--a way to provide information about online information online."

"The exciting Topic Maps (TMs) are an ideal catalyst for mutual learning experiences for proponents from the partially overlapping communities of Knowledge Organization (KO), Knowledge Management (KM) and Information Technology (IT). A long-term goal would be a tutorial white paper on the relationship between KO, KM and TMs, together with free reference software. KO is interested in optimizing the organization (the conceptual access structure) of knowledge repositories to support easier retrieval, creation and sharing of knowledge for user communities. TMs can indeed play an important role within KO: Together with related technologies, they have made it easier to provide innovative KO services. With TMs you can define arbitrarily complex knowledge structures and attribute them as metadata to information resources. Decentrally creating, maintaining and exchanging even more heterogeneous metadata is a powerful basic service of high interest for a broad range of applications. However, sooner or later you have to cope with the new semantic heterogeneity and come up with strategies to achieve better semantic interoperability. How could TM-based services alleviate the pressing KO problem of how to reorganize, enhance and semantically integrate heterogeneous subject data? Dedicated to this question, this talk takes a KO perspective: By sketching three typical scenarios in which heterogeneous metadata occur, it shows how classical KO challenges reappear with TMs, but also that TMs may be of value. Because the authors of the TM standard were right in not prescribing the application semantics of the structured link network, the widespread use of large-scale TMs will aggravate the well-known problem of the comparability and compatibility of KO schemata. A closer co-operation between the communities could aid the potential of TMs for KO/KM. Fortunately, the TM community has already started the fruitful exchange by discussing KO-relevant topics. Because of the flexible orientation of TMs towards usage contexts, especially user-oriented indexing should benefit from TMs. Approaches for achieving semantic interoperability within a layered model of decentral information provision are briefly presented as background against which further directions of KO with TMs can be discussed. One consequence for KO is that its methodology must be partially redesigned to take collaborative knowledge building activities on distributed resources more into consideration. This article also asks about the relationship between TMs and other means to computationally handle semantics in next-generation ontology- and agent-based knowledge services. In the end, possible further research towards this vision is suggested."

"This article examines the use of XML to configure custom applications for Groove, a peer-to-peer groupware platform."

"Programmers with a solid understanding of XML will have less trouble than others making the transition to building Groove tools. XML plays is a significant part of the Groove architecture. Though most of the work required to develop Groove tools involves writing code in JavaScript, VB, or C++ to control the tool application logic, there are four XML files that developers have to configure to allow users access to their custom tools. The rest of this article will examine these files and their roles."