If you wanted to be at the JavaOne JSR-257 (contactless communication API) session but couldn't make it, go to the JavaOne session archive and click "View". You might need to register but I'm almost certain it's free. It's a sort of clever slides + audio system and I start on slide 17 and end on 19. I talk about the JSR API and then give a demo, which you can't see because there's no video. And I didn't say the word "um" as much as my friend Paul would have you believe .

Meanwhile, BBC's "Collective" (some kind of music/culture multimedia site) mentions Semacode and they emailed me to tell me about it. I might not have, but I always find the Beeb interesting. And there's some kind of special connection here even though I haven't quite figured it out.

You see, look at the path there and you see "dna" which stands for Douglas Noel Adams, the author of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy , which can be abbreviated H2G2, which is the name of another site on the BBC called h2g2 . h2g2 started in 1999 and is almost, but not quite, like Wikipedia . In fact, it's a damned shame that DNA didn't live to see Wikipedia, because he might have thought that he (almost) invented the idea of a distributed-edited encyclopedia (the Book inside the book).

Oh yeah, so the question is, why is the "Collective" also under the dna directory?

Also, we have added a new White Paper to the about section . It's called White paper: which is the best 2D code? and it's a technical comparison of the major 2D barcode formats. You might find it interesting to note that for storing normal URLs, Data Matrix is massively more efficient (== smaller) than QR Code.