"UPDATE: Based on some discussion on IRC I probably should have given some more background to this post. In a nutshell, we are a Firefox extension and we store data in SQLite. For our extension’s user interface we want to generate markup (specifically HTML) from this data using templates that describe the page to generated, with placeholders for dynamic data. Something very similar to PHP, JSP, ASP, etc. in other words, but running on the client inside the Firefox process..."

There are many reasons why you would want to generate bogus data for your database. Perhaps you’d like to know how well your databases will perform when filled with data, or maybe you just need some data so that you can start creating a front end for the database. I recently ran into the problem of not wanting to generate lots of data manually.

"Microformats are open data formats that some Yahoo! sites support. You can't see them (unless you do a "view source" on a web page), but they're there -- bits of HTML that describe things like contact information (hcard), a review (hreview), an event (hcalendar), or a listing (hlisting). Microformats make data in web pages reuseable since the data is in a standard, canonical, format instead of just a jumble of HTML. Thousands of sites expose their data in Microformats, and that data is available for developers to use. One of the best opportunities for developers to make use of Microformats is in the forthcoming Firefox 3 web browser which features a new global Microformats object and API. The new API makes finding and parsing Microformats trivial and efficient..."

At first sight, the Read It Later (RIL) extension looks redundant -- after all, you can use Firefox's own bookmarking functionality to save Web pages for later reading. But dig deeper, and you'll discover that it offers enough nifty features to make it a must-have tool for most users.

I spend an enormous amount of time browsing the web looking for new ideas to write about, so one of the biggest problems for me is tagging articles for more careful reading later.The solution to this problem is to have a good mechanism for tagging a page as "to be read", and then be able to easily retrieve them at a later date.

The problem of so-called ‘dirty data’ – data that contains duplications, omissions or other errors – has been a serious issue in corporate IT for many a year. Analyst firm Gartner said in March last year that three-quarters of large enterprises will make little to no progress towards improving data quality until 2010, potentially costing large firms millions of dollars.

If you're using TiddlyWiki as your note-taking tool, you ought to give TiddlySnip a try. The idea behind this Firefox extension is simple: it allows you to add the currently viewed Web page or selected text snippet to your TiddlyWiki as a new tiddler. But TiddlySnip adds a few clever twists to this basic idea, which turn the Firefox/TiddlyWiki combo into a powerful and extremely useful tool.

Mostly, it comes down to the tools you employ to navigate this interconnected universe of ours. The most popular tools are owned by major technology companies, the same outfits that give government agencies free, warrantless access to your data.

Data Visualization is a free cross data base and cross platform reporting tool. Its target is very simple: whatever operating system you use, whatever data base you keep data in and whatever report you want to have, you can create it for free in few a minutes using simple GUI.