Computers: Contents

Bablex - The Text Markup Language

I developed Bablex because I needed to write some documents to be read as plain text, while being convertible to web pages. Though excellent markup languages such as Creole and Markdown already allowed this, they seem designed primarily to be used as an intermediate form during the generation of HTML: their focus was on supporting web features. Bablex shifts this focus towards intuitively annotating plain text to make it more readable as a format in its own right, whether or not it is later translated into a web page. It is offered here free and open source.

No-Spin Web-Spinning

The World Wide Web was designed to be an open, public, democratic space, without central control or bars to entry. In that spirit, HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language in which web pages are written, was made simple. The marketing of expensive software such as Dreamweaver and hosted services such as Facebook both encouraged the myth that, to get on the web, you needed to buy software, or allow others to make money by pushing advertising at you. It's not true. Anyone can create an independent website under their own control using no more than a text editor. Here's how.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This course was developed during 1999 for the staff of EDS installing the Universe based Globus banking system at the Cape of Good Hope Bank in Cape Town, South Africa. It was designed to introduce the Universe DBMS to developers who had programming experience of other systems, but were new to PICK, and the family of Pick-like or Multivalued database systems to which Universe belongs.