As the third part of my series on writing about software, I’m writing about overly used words to avoid because they’re nearly meaningless. For a start, read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. The problem he speaks of, in which people use bigger words than they need to because they think that it makes them sound well-informed and important, is particularly endemic to the tech world, and especially acute among the marketing and sales people in all but the…

I recently wrote about Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s book “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” and its insights into the idea of measuring information. I had planned to describe this book as an introduction to a review of a more recent, more easily digestible book, Information: The New Language of Science by Hans Christian von Baeyer, but decided to write separate entries on the two books.

Did you ever see something on eBay that would be a good deal if it wasn’t for the shipping costs? Last summer I created a saved eBay search for “nordic track virginia”, hoping to find a local one that I could pick up myself. I wanted it to exercise when it’s too hot or too cold out to go jogging, and I hoped to find someone local who had bought one, didn’t use it, and wanted to make some quick cash from it. The shipping on something that big wouldn’t be…

I finally got around to working my way through a Ruby on Rails tutorial, and was very, very impressed. If you don’t have time to install Rails and follow along with the steps in the tutorial, at least do a quick read through Curt Hibbs’ Rolling with Ruby on Rails article in O’Reilly’s onlamp.com to get an idea of how easy it is to set up a useful application.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of information as something quantifiable. When William Strunk (of Strunk and White fame) wrote omit needless words, and when George Orwell wrote “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out” in Politics and the English Language, they affirmed that good writing packs more information into fewer words (or syllables, or even letters—in the same essay, Orwell wrote " Never use a long word where a short one will do") than…

The XML Summer School, a week of seminars on a wide range of XML-related topics sponsored by the CSW Group at a college of Oxford University, is being held for the sixth year. Peter Flynn and I hold the distinction of being the only people to have taught every year, but the list of people who have taught for most of those years the roster of new people each year are both very distinguished lists.

While discussing RDF/A, Shelley Powers recently wrote: