Steve Silberman’s article on the Perl cruise is the reason I bought this month’s Wired magazine. The article on skinnable applications was also good.
General disgruntlement: the differences between Emacs and XEmacs really are a pain. If you’re keeping score at home, XEmacs is a much nicer application to use than regular old Emacs out of the box. The GUI looks better and has a few design features that make it really nice to use. Unfortunately, its API differs from the standard GNU Emacs API enough that most of the add-ons written for Emacs are broken in XEmacs to varying degrees. Even though I want to use XEmacs, I can’t, because it doesn’t work worth a crap with JDE. I think that the onus is on XEmacs to iron out the incompatabilities, but apparently the maintainers have little interest in doing so. You’d think that the Emacs developers would try to get Emacs to look as good as XEmacs, but Emacs development appears to be on the slow boat. When you spend many hours every day in your text editor, these kind of problems really begin to grate.
Congratulations to Karl Auerbach on winning the at-large ICANN board seat for the North American region. Auerbach wants to bring more accountability to ICANN and make their processes as open as possible. I definitely think that he was the best candidate, although some of the other ones would have done a good job, too. Larry Lessig would have been a decent choice, too, but I think that Auerbach brings pretty much the same point of view as Lessig, along with a deep understanding of the technical issues involved. I imagine he’ll have more time to devote to this stuff than Lessig, as well.
Reuters has issued a DTD for marking up news stories called NewsML. Unfortunately, the person who wrote the story doesn’t understand that NewsML is just a specific application of XML, and not something different than XML. The official specification from the IPTC is available as well.