The article title refers to the third volume in Neal Stephenson’s trilogy “The Baroque Cycle”. As previously reported, I have been meaning to get around to buying and reading this for ages. It has taken me almost an entire year to get through the three books, each of which runs to around 900 pages. I’ve… (read more)

It became widespread news yesterday, April 1st, although it was only formally published today: Microsoft’s “Office Open XML” (OOXML) document format has, unfortunately, been certified as an ISO standard. There are many reasons why this is a Bad Thing. There is already an existing ISO-approved standard, namely Open Document Format (ODF). But obviously Microsoft doesn’t… (read more)