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BoKlok - Ikea Houses? - Looks like Ikea is building low-cost homes, now. Brighter LED Lights Could Replace Household Light Bulbs Within Three Years Voltaic Generator Solar Bag - Solar-powered lap-top bag Banks banned in 'Second Life' How to Avoid the 10 Worst Energy Zappers - aka Peppiness Pouncers CES: Laptop Back(pack) Shell Saves Shoulders CES: Belgian Plushie Webcam Is Watching You - If you don't like the one we featured last year. Personal Mini Microwave – It Will Be Mine Grabit Pack - Another Alternative To Overstuffed Pockets Eva Funderburgh's Pixel cookies! - A Flickr how-to on making them CES: FyreTV Brings the Porn for Ten Bucks a Month - Like Tivo but streaming and all porn (unless all you Tivo is porn, then in that way they're still similar.) Billboard alterations by "The Decapitator" - This guy (or girl) alters street ads to make the people appear as though their heads have been removed.

XML Goes Binary with EXI

A new standard from the W3C promises to allow web servers to talk to each other super-fast.

When it comes to bandwidth usage, binary beats text any day. The same is true when it comes to CPU processing of data. That's why programs are compiled and why most databases don't simply store data in giant text files. So, it doesn't make much sense for XML, a metalanguage who's primary purpose is the interchange of data on the Web, to take the form of plain text.

To address this issue the W3C has recently been developing a standard called EXI (Efficient XML Interchange) that represents XML data in a binary form. This should mark a significant improvement over both data compression and commercial XML hardware-accelerators available on the market today. "It is unlike data compression, which has overhead associated with it", explained John Schneider, co-editor of the EXI working draft, "There are people out there that are buying XML accelerators and hardware to speed up XML processing... but it doesn't do anything for bandwidth."

Representing XML as binary will help solve both issues because it will not only be the most minimal possible size representation of the XML (which is good for bandwidth), but the data can be stored and processed directly in its EXI form. So not only will you not have the added overhead associated with data compressors, but processing will actually be significantly faster in this new binary form than in it's plain-text XML representation. According to Schneider, "on average, 12 to 14 times faster than processing normal XML." The way I see it, even if EXI in the real world doesn't even come close to their estimates, it'll still be hella-fast.

The best part about this whole thing is that, chances are, us programmers won't have to do a thing to take advantage of EXI. John says it will be embedded at the lowest level of the XML stack, in the parser or serializer, so your Web server will do all the work for you.

Read: W3C
Read: XML Developer

Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us

If you're reading this blog entry you probably don't know what Web 2.0 means. Perhaps you've never even heard of it. Well, I stumbled across an interesting article by a gentleman by the name of Paul Hernacki the other day that does a pretty good job of explaining why you should care. I think he doesn't give SaaS the credit it deserves (perhaps only because his firm isn't yet able to produce "fully matured" SaaS apps), but the article should give you a good idea of what Web 2.0 can do for Your Business 2.0.

Read: TechLINKS.