Riothero attempts to write a blog entry without the letter e, and fails miserably. This calls to mind A Void, an English translation of Georges Perec's French-language novel La Disparition. Neither the original French version nor the translated English version use the letter e.
A small sampling of words that could not be used: the, he, she, them, there, be, yes, some, other, get, are, they, have, were, their, when, we, each, then, these, more, her, like, see, time, make, been, people, made, over, under, water, little, very, after, before, called, where, get, write, used, me, another,came, come, three, because, even, place, well, etc.
Supposedly the book is an enjoyable read. Most of the reviews were positive, if I remember correctly (a few reviewers even failed to notice the omission). Here's a review from Time magazine that avoids the letter e. Sadly the book is now out of print; I had intended to buy it back in 1995 when it came out, but I kept putting it off.
Xml.com is going gaga over XML Schemas. Schemas are meant to replace dtds as the mechanism for defining XML document structure requirements. To be sure, they are a huge improvement over dtds... schemas are well-formed XML documents (so you can use your XML tools to manipulate them), and schemas are infinitely more readable than dtds. In Microsoft's XML Parser 3.0, they built in an object for caching schemas, which should help performance a good bit.
Unfortunately, there's at least one thing that dtds can do but schemas can't: reference external XML documents/fragments for importing. This is a big gap in XML, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sad to report that herbal tea is not nearly as invigorating as coffee.
Opera Software has released a free (ad supported) version of their browser. It's got some nifty new features, like OperaShow (the first implementation of the CSS2 @media projection rule) and the ability to read WAP/WML. Their CTO is Håkon Wium Lie, the originator and author of the CSS standard, so naturally their standards support is very good. The GUI is in the tradition of ICQ. I tried to install with Java support, but that didn't go so hot; without Java, the install worked fine. I like having it around as a second browser, but it still isn't as good as IE.
