Stylus Studio

I discovered Stylus Studio, a great XML editor from Sonic.  It does all the usual XML, Schema, DTD stuff, but also edits XSLT and XQuery -- with interactive debugging.  I found out about it from a comment by Michael Kay on the Saxon mailing list.

Font Identification

I need to identify a font used on a web page and went looking for online tools for this purpose.  I ran into IdentiFont.  It uses a series of skill-testing questions to identify a font that you are looking at.

WhatTheFont, on the other hand, uses an uploaded image to identify a font.

Linotype's FONTIDENTIFIER is similar to IdentifFont... very similar.  Is it the same?

ADO and JScript

I had trouble trying to use a date parameter in a SQL statement using JScript and ADO.  Here is the answer:

var connection = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection");
connection.ConnectionString = "Provider=...";
connection.Open();
var command = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Command");
command.ActiveConnection = connection;
command.CommandText = "INSERT INTO ... VALUES (..., ?, ...)";
command.Parameters.Item(0).value = messageTime.getVarDate();

Content Management Systems

Yesterday, a colleague spoke of an initiative at his wife's company to put some automated workflow processes in place.  The company had already talked to a consultant who proposed using Zope to meet their needs.  This led me into an investigation of Zope, and many other open source content management systems:

• Plone - provides substantial access control and workflow features.  Layered on the Zope web application server using Zope CMF (content management framework).  One-step installation using a conventional installer.
• TikiWiki - a wiki on steroids.  It claims to have pretty well every collaboration feature I can think of, including workflow support.  Requires a web server, PHP, and MySQL.
• Magnolia - a Java-based (JSR-170) system.  Fairly light in the feature department.  Ease-of-use is its main claim.
• OpenCms - Needs Java 1.4, Tomcat 4, and MySQL.  Page editing uses ActiveX controls in IE (with a fallback to a simple type-in box for non-IE browsers).
• Typo3 - Needs PHP4 and MySQL.

CMS Watch is a good site for monitoring CMS developments.  cms matrix is another.