Wow for the first time ever (I've been on the net since
1990) I received my FIRST Nigerian e-mail scam.
The mail was sent to saarch@pannsoft.com which I only created a
couple of weeks ago and which has only been mentioned in one post on SA Architect and in one (now two) post on
dotnet.org.za.
At least it shows even the crawlers are interested in software dev ;)
A reminder to all in Cape Town. SA Architect will be
having a meeting on the 31st of March 2005 at the Microsoft Offices. Please see
here for more details.
PS. Please rsvp saarch@pannsoft.com so we can have an idea of the
numbers
I just read this article which tries
to help explain which issues needs to be address where (in which ring) of the
enterprise. Although the author punts his advisory in the article, it is still a
good read.
Well, it's not so much that I hate XML, but rather that
people think that using XML allows them to take shortcuts.
The problem I'm talking about normally rears it's head in XML configuration
files. People/Developers/Companies think that because XML is human readable,
it's also human understandable, and that is definately not the case. In the
pre-XML days, configuration information would either be stored in a custom file
format or in a windows properites file. If a custom file format was used, the
application would also be supplied with a configuration management tool that has
a nice presentable GUI that maintained this custom file format.
With the advent of XML, the configuration management tool has gone the way of
the Dodo. Companies think that because it is human readable, anyone should be
able to open the XML config file in his/her favourite editor and be able to
modify the configuration file to suit their purposes....Without any
errors...
This is sad because although XML is a great tool, it can make life extremely
difficult as anyone who has tried to maintain an IBF configuration can attest
to.