Day: July 26, 2002

  • Reuters:

    “RABAT (Reuters) – Surgeons have managed to stitch back a Moroccan boy’s penis after it was bitten off by a donkey, the official MAP news agency reported Thursday.

    “MAP did not say how the donkey managed to bite off the boy’s penis.”

  • XML is wonderful, but it’s a bloated beast.  I was curious what efforts have gone into XML compression, and here are some sites I found:

      • XMLPPM: XML-Conscious PPM Compression
      • XMill: An Efficient Compressor for XML
      • Millau: An encoding format for efficient representation and exchange of XML over the Web

    I know there are more tools and sites out there, but several of the top google returns redirected to porn sites or companies that had been gobbled up by a company that was then gobbled up.

    There are also mod_gzip, an apache module that compresses documents using gzip and decompresses them on the fly.

  • DMCA Violation: Dan Gillmor reports that Bruce Perens decides not to violate the DMCA after some suggestion from his employer.  That was probably a smart idea, too.

  • Western Digital announced a 200 gig hard drive the other day.  Now I just have to finish filling up the 40’s I picked up a little while ago…

  • The shipping gods have smiled upon me.  I recieved Web Services Essentials and Using Samba from Amazon a day before they were supposed to show up.  I am about 30 pages into the web services book, and it is an extremely informative read.

  • Jikes, the zippyfast Java compiler was released today. New features include a version number of 1.16.