Well, today is a sad day. The Caribou Coffee store where I met the coffee-wench who'd become my wife closed its doors for good today. It had great coffee, a lovely porch, and was within Wifi range of the T-Mobile at the Starbucks across the street.

I mourn its passing. Good thing a new coffeeshop with gratis Wifi has opened nearby.

Akmal Chaudhri has announced the XML Database Symposium (XSym'03) in Berlin.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. The database community is interested in XML because it can be used to represent data that originates in repositories by providing structure and the possibility of adding type information.

The symposium theme is the combination of Database and XML Technologies. Today, we see growing interest in using these technologies together for many web-based and database-centric applications. XML is being used to publish data from database systems to the Web by providing input to content generators for Web pages, and database systems are increasingly used to store and query XML data, often by handling queries issued over the Internet. As database systems increasingly start talking to each other over the Web, there is a fast growing interest in using XML as the standard exchange format for distributed query processing. As a result, many relational database systems export data as XML documents and import data from XML documents and provide query and update capabilities for XML data. In addition, so called native XML database and integration systems are appearing on the database market, whose claim is to be especially tailored to store, maintain and easily access XML-documents.

There's some notes and such from the ANTLR Cabal 2003.

We met in Medford, Oregon for 3 days July 12-14, 2003 to discuss the future of ANTLR. Specifically, we wanted to discuss what a future version of ANTLR (3.0) would look like. We made a list of what we didn't like about the current system and made a wishlist for ANTLR 3. There are four raw, stream-of-consciousness documents that resulted from the cabal. The documents are summarized and linked to below. Feel free to comment on the documents to the antlr-interest list, but the real "request for comments" will occur once a real whitepaper has been flessed out.

Anthem by Ayn Rand is simply a darn good read, especially considering recent activity regarding community and Marxism and other politico-economic discussions floating around out there.

Ayn Rand's Anthem is a short dystopic novel about a man who escapes a society from which all individuality has been squeezed. Its allegory is crudely transparent, and the ideas have lost their political urgency. (The book was published in 1938, a decade before Orwell's 1984.) But Anthem provides a good introduction to Rand's philosophy of "objectivism," which is built on individuality, freedom, and reason.

Declan McCullagh writes about Mike Wendy and the Initiative for Software Choice. ISC is apparently fighting against legislation that attempts to give open-source preferential treatment by the government. While I'm certainly a big open-source advocate, I'm also a big fan of free markets. So, I'd agree that giving open-source preferntial treatment is not what we need. If open-source can't compete with "the big boys", even when factoring in license costs, so be it.

ARLINGTON, Va.--Mike Wendy says he doesn't hate open-source software.

Wendy, spokesman and policy counsel for the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), says he just wants to make sure government agencies don't unduly favor open-source or free programs over proprietary software.

"We want a process that is not based on automatic preferences," Wendy said.

CNN has an article about proposed legislation to allow public access to publically-funded research papers. Only makes sense to me, since it's our tax dollars being spent. I've got my receipt around here somewhere...

BERKELEY, California (AP) -- A number of prominent scientists got some support from a congressman in challenging the way their publicly funded research papers are handled by for-profit journals. Congressman Martin Sabo, a Minnesota Democrat, has introduced legislation that would give immediate public access to all research papers created mostly with federal money, regardless of which journal publishes them.

Thomas rolled 2.0-beta-11 of drools out the door.

The latest official build is 2.0-beta-11 .

This is mainly a checkpoint for folks before heading down the path to 2.0 beta-12 on the way to 2.0-final. The roadmap will give you an idea of where we're heading.

So, it looks like Rebecca (see wife) and I will probably be jumping the pond towards EuroLand around September/October. Current stops include Munich and probably Amsterdam. It's partially a business trip for me, so if you're in the vicinity (or within a few hours train/plane time), want to chat business, and more importantly, care to put us up for a night or two, drop me a line.

PapersInvited claims to be (and I have no reason to doubt it) the largest listing of call for papers in all areas of specialization.

PapersINVITED.com was conceived and developed to assist those numerous scientists, professors and student researchers who have had a difficult time in tracking Calls for Papers from professional bodies, universities, journal editors and other conference organizers.

PapersINVITED.com brings an exhaustive list of Calls for Papers in all areas of specialization to your fingertips.

Morphon XML Editor is now free-as-in-beer.

Morphon XML-Editor now available under a free software license

The Morphon XML-Editor is now being offered under a free license, there are no strings attached. Morphon Technologies would like to increase the user base of the Morphon XML-Editor. Having a larger and varied user base will help us understand better the future needs of our users.

To use the free XML editor, you will no longer need a license key. You simply have to register (optional) and then download Morphon. The software is fully functional with no crippling features, no time limit to usage.

The people behind the languages we all use...

Saxon 7.6 introduces support for XQuery alongside XSLT.

Release 7.6 is the latest installment of my experimental implementation of the new XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 specifications. For the first time, this release also includes support for XQuery 1.0. In all cases, the product is aligned with the working drafts published on 2 May 2003, though of course not all features are implemented.

James Taylor pointed me towards FreeCache.

FreeCache is a system of

* cooperating caches to move
* large files of
* free content
* closer to users.