When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · August
· · · · 02 (3 entries)

Blogging Surfing Lawyer · And not just any lawyer, either. Mike Dillon, our Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, has joined the blogosphere. I’ve talked to some of our attorneys and it turns out there are practical reasons why it’s tough for a corporate lawyer to blog about their work; so it’s really terrific that Mike’s taking the plunge. I suspect he won’t be sharing any juicy litigation details, but a fresh voice in the conversation is an unambiguously good thing; I’ll be listening.
 
Granddaughter and Snake · Here’s a remarkable photograph from Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.
 
On Names · The W3C Technical Architecture Group, on which I had the honour to serve for a couple of years, is working on a document called URNs, Namespaces, and Registries. Norm Walsh, longtime TAG member, has written a human-readable version, and I recommend it. The question of how to name things is persistently one of the hardest in Computer Science, and one of the reasons the Web succeeds is that it does a pretty good job, using URIs. If you’re thinking “Doesn’t he really mean URL?”, check out The Universal Republic of Love). However, every so often a group of people says “Hey, URIs beginning with http: are addresses, not names, and we need names, persistent names, so we’ll invent a new URI scheme.” They are nearly always wrong; it takes a whole lot of thinking about the notions of names and addresses to achieve clarity, and wanting a new URI scheme is usually evidence that you haven’t. I’ve tried to explain this dozens of times, but I think Norm does a better job than I ever have.
 
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