A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Austin Cline: “What atheists are saying is more important than how they are saying it, and forceful critiques of religion would be condemned no matter how they were phrased… People use complaints about atheists’ “incivility” and “intolerance” as substitutes for addressing the substance of atheists’ criticisms of religion.”
Microsoft’s XML Team have released some screen casts showing off new features of the XML tools. It looks cool, and if I was a Windows/Visual Studio type I’d probably use it - but Oxygen and RELAX NG really fit like a glove for the sorts of things I do. The schema-based ‘tabbing’ feature in the XML Editor component looks really amazing though - you just type in an element name, hit ‘tab’ and it’ll fill in all the required elements and attributes and just tab through the fields. Because it’s validating against a schema, it knows what should go where. That’s really, utterly cool. Apparently, this is available in Oxygen, but I’ve no idea how to get it to work.
Other things that are cool? For XSLT, the fact that you can use breakpoints in source documents, and you can check values of variables at breakpoints. In the XSLT mode, it also uses Internet Explorer to render HTML (oh, the irony - IE doesn’t actually support XHTML properly, but you can use Visual Studio to do transforms to it!).
In the XSD demo, the ‘find most likely root elements’ function is very cool too. It looks like desktop tools in the XML space are finally reaching a very mature level.
Rob McKie has one of the best reviews of Dawkins’ The God Delusion as it points out how much the religious types have gotten their knickers in a twist about it.
I’ve just installed Google Gears. It’s a superb piece of technology. It means you can read your RSS feeds on the Tube using an online aggregator. I can’t wait until all web apps work like this!
