"Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.

"Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

"This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions."

"A number of programmers have described their class hierarchies as being "brittle". Class hierarchies are often used to represent taxonomies. In the "real world", the term "taxonomy" refers to the system of biological classification into phyla, genus, species and so forth. In the software domain, the term is sometimes used to refer to a hierarchical categorization of a diverse set of objects. An example would be the various flavors of widgets in a moden GUI environment.

However, real object collections aren't always hierarchical."

"Where do we insert humans into this process?

A Weblog. Gasp! A Weblog in a corporation? You've gotta be kidding, right? No, I'm not."

"That CEO is gonna be awfully confused in the morning looking at all those HTTP services. Even if your programmers did a killer job of making those charts look pretty (and useful!) and they made the numbers the right color, and all that stuff, the CEO is still gonna need context. Human context."

"The process of categorizing data need not be either expensive or overly complex. In recent correspondence on the email list xml-dev, Carol Ellerbeck, a taxonomy expert with Harvard Business School's Baker Library and formerly of Lycos, made this very point. Responding to a writer who suggested that one needed to be "king of the world" and have "an unlimited budget" to create effective taxonomies, Ellerbeck wrote, "If you 'were king of the world'...you would not need 'an unlimited budget'...just a modest one, to have experts build your taxonomy/domain vocabularies. I say this as a taxonomist who has been in the vocabulary trenches with electronic information for years. Automation is wonderful (and I would say, even essential), but start with not just humans (albeit smart humans), start with humans who have some expertise, and you will accomplish your goal faster, with fewer people, more efficiently, and have a more solid foundation to build on.""

"Joogle is a simple Java API for querying and parsing the XML response that Google gives. It does not have any multi-threading support."

"Joogle Agent is a Jabber agent written in Java. By using the Joogle library, Joogle Agent can act as a front end to Google for search requests sent via an instant message. It uses the JabberBeans library in order to communicate with the Jabber server."

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"Britta Frey, from Berlin, had been kept awake by a scratching noise, but couldn't work out from where it came.

Doctors washed out her ear and the live earwig appeared. Her hearing hasn't been damaged."

"She said: "Every time I turned round it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. It was really creepy. I went back to bed but could not sleep a wink because of the scratching."

"To summarize, then, it seems that XSLT may be a victim of its own success and could be in danger of being pressed into service in areas where it simply isn't a good fit. Luckily there is a rapidly growing body of experience which is beginning to show exactly where XSLT should and shouldn't be used. Developers are wise to draw on this experience, particularly if they want to avoid the 'large scale rewrites' forecasted by Sean McGrath. The message about using the right tool for the job may be an old one, but it's obviously one that can't be stressed too often."

"Linksys has come out with a firmware upgrade for its WAP 11 Wireless Access point that allows two of them to function as Ethernet-to-Ethernet bridges. The firmware is free on the Linksys Website . The firmware also allows use of Ethernet MAC address access lists to restrict connections to a list that is uploaded into flash ROM. That way it is much harder for people to just cruise down your street with a notebook computer, surfing on your bandwidth and stealing your files.

"The street price of these Linksys boxes is now down around $250, which is half the price of the next cheapest bridge, from SMC."

"I have two 4-mile paths using WAP11's and they are both running flawlessly. Throughput is at least 2 Mbps.

I am using Andrew 24 dBi parabolic antennas on one path and Cal-Amp 21 dBi parabolic antennas on the other. Performance seems to be about the same."

"The Andrew antennas are available from Tessco, Inc. ph: 800-508-5444 Andrew 2.4 GHz parabolic antennas SKU# 40735. Cost about $85 each."

"I've just used the Linksys firmware to upgrade my netgear me102 access point and used the Linksys SMNP utility to configure it.

In fact I think it should work on any PRISIM chip based 802.11b access point.

One thing I noticed though. After upgrading the firmware I had to unplug the ME102 and plug it back in brfore I could access it again."