How To Use XML And Save £32.01

I think I’ve been brainwashed over the years that books which cover anything even vaguely IT-related have to be at least 900 pages thick, weigh 400 pounds and cost the wrong side of £40. Anything less than that, and there’s a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that It’s Not A Real Manual Because Real Manuals Are At Least 900 Pages Thick And Weigh 400 Pounds And Cost The Wrong Side Of £40.

Then yesterday I was looking for something on XML, and was gnashing my teeth about how all the available books on the subject were At Least 900 Pages etc etc etc, when I came across How To Use XML by John Shelley. It’s published by Bernard Babani, which means it’s the size of a normal paperback novel and printed on recycled toilet paper - but at £7.99 you can’t really expect it to be a hand-finished vellum-bound volume with a slipcase, can you? However, I can report that the content is Really Really Good - it’s one of the most clearly-written technical manuals I think I’ve ever found. It could possibly be that XML is actually not all that difficult and I’m slightly slow when it comes to everything else, but assuming that’s not the case then I’d vote this a Very Good Book Indeed.

The Exorcist in 30 secs, acted by bunnies

Via viralmarketingblog, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks.

Ok, that’s me…

Weekend Bloggers

Jay-Z Constructor Kit

I thought EMI would end up with egg on their faces over the efforts to put the Grey Album genie back into the bottle. Now it turns out that they’ve really stirred something up - the Jay-Z Constructor Kit provides all you need to create your very own Grey Album. I wasn’t much taken with the original version, so now I’ve got no excuse…

(via p2pnet)

Girlie Dubya

I find the picture top row, right hand side particularly disturbing…

Habeus corpus corpsed

I can’t decide whether this article is tinfoil-hat territory or not, but if it isn’t, it’s something to be worried about. I don’t follow the more detailed parts of the legal argument, but the basic point is that the US government has effectively suspended habeus corpus - or put more simply, they can throw whoever they want into jail for as long as they want with none of the normal judicial oversight.

I keep telling myself that it couldn’t happen here, but then I read stories about Tony Blair deciding that actually, this whole innocent-until-proven-guilty business is making it a bit difficult to bang up the people we want to bang up. Add to that a Home Secretary that appears to be getting his orders direct from the Daily Mail, and I begin to wonder.

I vaguely remember a long, long time ago someone describing the Tories as the “natural party of government”, as if they were blessed with some kind of universal mandate to hold office, and losing the election to Labour was just the uppity proles getting above their station. But don’t worry ourselves too much, chaps, we’ll soon be back in once the natural order of things reasserts itself.

I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the way of things in the US at the moment. Add to this the fact that there’s an awful lot of people getting rich on the back of the Bush administration, and it seems like there’s a lot of people in influential places (login details here) with a lot to lose by a change of administration.

And in the interests of political neutrality…

…the next stop was the Labour Party website. A rather scary front page - for some reason Ian McCartney always reminds me of one of the banking goblins in the last Harry Potter film - with a link to Young Labour next to a photo of someone who looks suspiciously like Keanu Reaves.

Clicking on the link takes you to Young Labour.org, which is quite frankly terrifying - the picture with pride of place at the top of the page is a man with a beard with an Embarassing Dad expression.

LocataTory

For reasons best kept to myself (OK, uncontrolled left-clicking on the wrong link) I ended up on the Conservative Party website a few minutes ago. Pride of place at the top right hand corner of the page is the “Find Your Local Conservatives” tool, which will allow you to “find your local Conservatives by name, postcode or location.”

Does this mean that your Tory Party membership card now includes a GPS tracking device? The next page was a bit of a disappointment - I was expecting the map of the UK to have little blinking blue dots showing where each Conservative is - presumably lots of blue dots down round the south-east corner, a slightly smaller but denser cluster in the region of Harrogate, and a few isolated running-late dots making their way up the M1.

Plugging my postcode in didn’t work, either. “Sorry, we can’t find your constituency from the Post Code (sic) that you supplied”. Of course you bloody well can’t, it’s in the North…

Hits from Microsoft

My access logs are showing up a huge number of hits from an IP address belonging to Microsoft. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or paranoid.

Sumantra Ghoshal dies

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I went to a lecture by Sumantra Ghoshal at Leeds. This morning the news came through that he’d died in London, aged 55. A real loss.