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I'll be heading to Montréal for Balisage: The Markup Conference in a little over a week. As usual it will feature some of the most traveled folks in XML and related technologies.

The data chef discusses translation of data from SPSS format, for those who don't have a licensed copy at hand.

Database field-length silliness has haunted me throughout my career as an data/information architect, and I've never liked it. "VARCHAR(255)? What? Because in the lifetime of that data, which by the way you'd better be planning to exceed the lifetime of this miserable application, you're never going to need more than 255 characters?" ... So here comes Twitter with it's damned 140 characters.

I've always loved the MoinMoin wiki, and lately I've been using it for more and more, at work and at home. I've pined for a REST wrapper for a while, and I finally bit the bullet and wrote one, as part of the open-source Akara project, which among other things provides RESTful access to the XML processing capabilities of Amara 2.x.

A small Python utility to extract saved text area content from Firefox session files.

Spring Python is an offshoot of the Java-based Spring Framework and Spring Security for Python. Version 0.8.0 is out and, and it builds on my favorite FLOSS project, Amara.