We’re halfway through the regular season and as a Rangers fan who didn’t think we’d do much of anything I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. I’m still not convinced on a number of rules changes, (and its not just the bad officials), the goalie trapezoid is odd, the automatic penalty for delay of game when a puck goes over the boards has no brains, and I can’t say I’m upset about not seeing a shootout in a few weeks.

But enough about me, here are some stories worth checking out:

• Some fan hopped on the ice during a Canadians practice and took a few shots on Jose Theodore. The Toronto Star wonders who is this fan?.
• Former Devil Petr Sykora is now a Ranger and Joe McDonald of NY Sports Day tells us why its a good deal.
• And the Rangers rookies keep burning things up and making a name for themselves in the league. Newsday on Lundquist’s last shutout. Hopefully that trend continues tonight.

Hot off of Atom becoming an official standard Tim Bray has posted two great pieces over at Ongoing, both worth your time. Don't Invent XML Languages a Why Not To on creating new standards, and a followup, in cases where you really have to, On XML Language Design which hints on a few technical and non-technical gotchas with the process.

To the Managers Out There · The next time one of your technical superstars comes into the room and says “We gotta design an XML vocabulary for X”, make them prove they can't do it with one of the Big Five. And if they can prove it, sigh deeply and budget a couple of years' delay, and a few thousand more engineering hours.

Informed last night that I was one of the invitees to the closed beta for the new news site Newsvine I signed up for my account and have been poking around in my free time today.

Its clean, its nice, its easy to use, but I’m not sure I’m sold on it being an indispensable news source just yet. Like everything else in the “web 2.0” genre it requires participation and a critical mass of users for it to hit its stride, and I’m just not seeing that yet. Once it gets going I’m sure it will offer more—but that begs the question more of what? There’s a danger I see of it becoming too close to other offerings out there be it technorati, de.li.cio.us, digg, fark or even a yahoo news most popular.

There’s a lot there to work with, so I’m not going to write it off yet, and if the participation and discussion grows—if if they add a few features like pages built on the fly based on all the items that get brought in with your various watch lists it’ll be able to make its mark.

For more info, including screen shots, Solution Watch has a good rundown up.

With a simple FAQ, Glazblog introduces us to a fledgling XML editor based on the Mozilla framework called Etna.

What is Etna ?
Etna is a Wysiwyg XML Relax-NG-based document editor. It requires almost no XML knowledge from the user and we focused on user-friendlyness. We built Etna with the same spirit we built Nvu.

Sounds great, and from a quick spin on my Windows box with the Tinydoc schema extention installed it looks like there’s some real potential here, and its making my Powerbook a bit jealous. (Where are the Mac binaries?)

The Chris that picked up where I left off has done it again with his release of the Web Developer Extension v1.0. Though I’m a huge Camino fan and user for my daily surfing I still use my Firefox install, with this toolbar, and the DOM Inspector as one of my main development tools.

Check it out if you haven’t, and if you have, go ahead and upgrade.