In my interview last week with John Shewchuk, one of the Indigo architects at Microsoft, I asked whether XML disciplines can or should model data, as well as exchange it. I like the answer John gives in this audio clip. There really isn't a primary data model, he suggests. (Note to self: Get over it!) Relational, object, and XML disciplines are just aspects of a relativistic universe of data. Very postmodern!
I edited this clip with Audacity, by the way. I've been using it on the Mac for a while, but only just recently noticed that it's a wxWindows-based app that runs on Windows and Linux too. Like other sound editors, it offers a bunch of effects filters. I rarely use them. I just want to capture, crop, and post. Audacity makes it pretty straightforward to find a segment in an audio track, zoom in to precisely mark its boundaries, and save the result to MP3.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/05/10.html#a993