On May 8 I wrote:

it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together.

On July 2, the W3C wrote:

Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.

The real test is whether the single HTML Working Group can be held to the standard of other Working Groups, and be able to recruit some much-needed editorial help from some of the displaced XHTML 2 gang.  -m

Roger Ebert review (”a horrible experience of unbearable length”)

Fake Shia LaBeouf blog (”no no no no!”)

Smashing box office records (200 mil in 5 days, “The per theater average, by the way, was astonishing: $26,453.”)

-m

The Steorn 300 program is underway, and yes, I am one of the 300 looking at their information which is coming out in once-a-week bursts in the form of educational modules. So far, nothing interesting. Some basic physics lessons, and somewhat more interesting forum activity.

But all signs seem to be pointing in the wrong direction for a miraculous breakthrough. A jury of members selected by Steorn recently unanimously stated:

The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn’s attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.

Even this announcement raises more questions, and at this point in the game, more questions is not a good thing. Of the 22 original jury members, apparently only 16 were left at the end. Those 16 were unanimous, but what did the other 6 think? Were they booted as dissenters? Also allegedly the jury was never presented with actual hardware, which seems completely crazy and counterproductive from the standpoint of the company that convened the jury.

This kind of story has unfolded many times before, and it doesn’t end well. I’ve spent many hours debunking energy claims and perpetual motion devices. But hey, the company says they are proceeding with plans to commercialize the technology by the end of 2009. No matter what happens, it will be interesting to watch. -m

Previously: How Orbo works, When the experimenter wants to believe, and The downside of free energy.

I’m thrilled to announce MarkLogic 4.1 and with it my project App Services, is here. Top-of-the-post props go out to Colleen, David, and Ryan who made it happen.

You might already know that MarkLogic Server is a super-powerful database slash search engine powering projects like MarkMail. (But did you know there’s a free-as-in-beer edition?) The next step is to make it easier to use and build your own apps on top of the server.

The first big piece is the Search API, which lets you do “Google-style” searches over your content like this:

search:search(”MP3 OR iPod AND color:black -Zune”)

The built-in grammar includes AND, OR, parens for grouping, - for negation, quotations for phrases, and easy ways to define facets like date:today or author:”Bill Shakespeare” or GPA:3.95. By passing in additional options, you can redefine the grammar and control all aspects of the search and how the results are returned. Numerous grass-roots efforts at doing someting like this had begun to spring up, so the time was right to come out with an officially-sanctioned API. For those developers who haven’t seen the light yet and don’t fancy XQuery, an API like this is a huge benefit.

The next piece builds on the Search API to offer a graphical App Builder tool that produces a simplified MarkMail-type app around your content. It looks like this:

The App Builder itself is based on XForms via the excellent XSLTForms library and REST, making it a full-blown XRX application.

Lots more info, videos, screencasts, articles, and more are coming soon.

You can start playing with this now by visiting the download page. Under the Community License, you can put 10 gigs of content into it for noncommercial production free-as-in-beer.

Enjoy! I’ll be catching my breath for the next two months*. -m

* Not really

When I get time, I want to watch all of this program on fora.tv from Dave McLean in SF who talks about how to make beer, why it tastes like it does, and why some people prefer various styles of beer.

It’s a good follow-up to the NHC reception I made it to last week, with a 3 course dinner (each made with and served with a different beer), a lecture by the highly entertaining Brewing Scientist Charlie Bamforth, and a tasting panel of 20 different additives as palate training.

Even if you’re busy, take some time to appreciate the things you might otherwise enjoy without thinking. -m

A great introduction article. Maybe it’s just the crowd I hang with, but RDFa looks like it’s moving from trendy to serious tooling. -m

I spent 2 days at the Yahoo! campus at a VoCamp event, my first. Initially, I was dismayed at the schedule. Spend all the time the first day figuring out why everybody came? It seemed inefficient. But having gone through it, the process seems productive, exactly the way that completely decentralized groups need to get things done. Peter Mika did a great job moderating.

Attendees numbered about 35, and came from widely varying backgrounds from librarian to linguist to professor to student to CTO, though uniformly geeky. With SemTech this week, the timing was right, and the number of international attendees was impressive.

In community development, nothing gets completely decided just because a few people met. But progress happens. The first day was largely exploratory, but also covered plenary topics that nearly everyone was interested in. Namely:

• Finding, choosing, and knowing when to create vocabularies
• Mapping from one vocabulary to another
• RDBMS to RDF mapping

Much of the shared understanding of these discussions is captured on various wiki pages connected to the one at the top of this article.

For day 2, we split into smaller working groups with more focused topics. I sat in on a discussion of Common Tag (which still feels too complex to me, but does fulfill a richer use case than rel-tag). Next, some vocabulary design, planning a microformat (and eventual RDF vocab) to represent code documentation: classes, functions, parameters, and the like. Tantek Çelik espoused the “scientific method” of vocab design: would a separate group, in similar circumstances, come up with the same design? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you probably designed it right. The way to make that happen is to focus on the basics, keeping everything as simple as possible. If any important features are missed, you will find out quickly. The experience of getting the simple thing out the door will provide the education needed to make the more complicated follow-on version a success.

From the wrap-up: if you are designing a vocabulary, the most useful thing you can do is NOT to unleash a fully-formed proposal on the world, but rather to capture the discussion around it. What were the initial use cases? What are people currently doing? What design goals were explicitly left off the table, or deferred to a future verson, or immediately shot down? It’s better to capture multiple proposals, even if fragmentary, and let lots of people look them over and gravitate toward the best design.

Lastly, some cool things overheard:

“Relational databases? We call those ‘legacy’.”

“The socially-accepted schema is fairly consistent.”

“It’s just a map, it’s not the territory.”

-m

I’m sticking around Sunnyvale, but am selling my house. It’s a smaller “starter home”place good for a small family. It’s close to Yahoo!, Google, Ebay, Cisco, and lots of other South Bay companies. In a great neighborhood with lots of parks, restaurants (Giovanni’s Pizza just down the street is fantastic), and a nearby movie theater. If you know anyone moving into the area and looking for a place, here’s a chance to short-circuit a lot of the hassle and get straight into well-cared-for place from a reputable seller.

I’m hesitant to post my address and pictures of my house, etc. here. Email me if you want to see more. -m

Since all these childhood media properties (just recently Transformers, G.I. Joe, Land of the Lost) are getting the movie treatment, why not a few more?

Pez, the movie (directed by Michael Bay)

A band of interdimensional travelers with rectangular bodies and grotesquely large heads arrive on earth to plant monitoring probes, with sprout out of their necks. Unfortunately for them, the probes turn out to be made of nearly pure sucrose. Will the children of Earth be able to stop the invasion in time, while dodging whole-screen explosions every 15 seconds?

Lego my Eggo (directed by George Lucas)

A rare double tie-in flick. The special edition will be out a few years later. Jar Jar guest-stars.

Pop Rocks (starring The Rock)

A thoughtful commentary on the futility of life, the meaninglessness of existence, and exploding candy.

The Night of the EZ Bake Oven (directed by George Romero)

Scores of digits horribly burned. Rated PG-13.

When Lawn Darts Attack (based on a true story)

Errol Morris and Ralph Nader join forces at last.

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

The central thesis of The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is dead on: engineers get too wrapped up in their own worlds, and left entirely to their own whims can easily make a product incomprehensible to ordinary folks. For this reason alone, it’s worth reading.

But I do question parts of his thesis. He (with tongue in cheek) posits the existence of another species of human, called Homo Logicus. Stepping on to an airplane, Homo Logicus turns left into the cockpit with a million buttons but ultimate control over every aspect of the plane. Regular Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, turn right and tuck themselves into a chair–no control but at least they can relax.

But if there was only one “species” of Homo Logicus, members (like me) would never experience usability issues in software created by fellow Logicians. But ordinary fax machines give me fits. The touch-screen copier at work instills dread in my heart. And the software I need to use to file expense reports–written by enterprise software geeks probably very similar to me–is a usability nightmare. Words fail me in expressing my disdain for this steaming heap of fail.

The book is sub-titled “Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy”, but one doesn’t have to look very far to find similar usability bugs in the low-tech world. Seth Godin, for example, likes to talk about different things in life that Just Don’t Work, along with reasons why. Some examples:

• airport cab stand (75 cabs, 75 people, and it takes an hour)
• “don’t operate heavy machinery” warning on dog’s prescription medicine
• excessive fine print on liability agreements–intentionally hard to read and figure out
• official “Vote for Pedro” shirts that look nothing like the ones in the movie
• more examples on the web site

If anything, I think Cooper’s work doesn’t go far enough. It is relatively short on good examples, stretching out only four examples over four chapters. If properly-designed software is so hard to come up with examples of, then there are bigger problems in play (that would need to be dealt with by something more manifesto than book).

The book now 5 years old. Perhaps it’s time for an update. Particularly in the world of web software, lots has happend in 5 years. Flickr. Gmail. Yahoo Pipes. Google Docs. Even SearchMonkey. Instead of focusing on pointing at crappy software, I’d like to see more emphasis on properly-done interfaces. More delving into nuance, and common factors behind why both high-tech and low-tech products miss the mark.

But maybe that’s just me. -m

I was shocked today to find out that one of my old friends from the Yahoo Search days was let go in the last round. He’s simply brilliant and would have been one of the last people I would have expected that the managers-in-purple could do without.

At the same time, I’m getting hounded by recruiters–five so far just this week.

So let me put these two forces against each other and see if they cancel out. To any former Yahoos: get in touch with me and I’ll do what I can to hook you up with a cool opportunity. This offer is good for June and July–after that I can’t reasonably say I’ll have time for matchmaking. Send me your CV via email and I’ll get started. No promises on results, but I’ll do what I can. :-)

-m

Balisage, formerly Extreme Markup, is the kind of conference I’ve always wanted to attend.

Historically my employers have been not quite enough involved in the deep kinds of topics at this conference (or too cash-strapped, but let’s not go there) to justify spending a week on the road. So I’m glad that’s no longer the case: Mark Logic is sponsoring the conference this year. I’m looking forward to the show, and since I’m not speaking, I might be able to relax a little and soak in some of the knowledge.

See you there! -m

Google Android Will Be on 18-20 Phones by End of 2009

source. Let’s see, Larry, Sergey and Eric Schmidt, there’s three phones…

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

About a week ago I moved XForms Institute over to Subversion. Now the entire site is under version control, with a local copy I can edit. Publishing is as easy as logging in and running the command ’svn up’. Honestly, I should have done this long ago. And any future sites I work on will use this approach too–it’s fantastic.

If you notice any glitches, let me know. -m

From Brewster Kahle. Good read, so to speak. -m

Another anniversary this week, one year at Mark Logic. Much of it in stealth mode, but more details of what I’ve been up to are forthcoming. -m

Take something that’s done, no matter how crappy, and submit it. Right now, I’ll wait…

Next time you have something ready, by comparison it will be ever so much better, and you’ll have no excuse to avoid submitting that as well.

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

This brilliant bit is almost a throwaway paragraph on page 304, near the end.

[Two men in a satirical dialog] managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable  when the ’something doubted’ is still a preceding statement ‘unknowability’ of something doubted,” that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased ans an infinite series of negations of certainty.

It’s not like the whole book is like this…far from it. But it is chock full of little gems.

-m

My plan is to start unsubstantiated rumors about the SUV Flu, and by association cause people to distance themselves from said implicated devices. You can help.

Despite denials from the CDC (you know they’re in the pockets of the auto industry), SUV flu is serious and spreading fast. You might already have it and not realize it. The SUV flu spreads primarily through close contact with gas-guzzling vehicles, such as so-called Sport Utility Vehicles. California has been hit the hardest, with sources reporting that in a small hamlet outside of Oxnard over 3000 drivers have been seen staggering away from their parked vehicles, and further reports indicate that up to 80 top epidemiologists nationwide are stranded and unable to commute to work.

Transmission occurs primarily via exhaust emission and requires close contact between source and recipient because contaminants do not remain suspended in the air and generally rise directly to the ozone layer. Contact with contaminated surfaces (including bucket seats and 4-wheel-drive shifters) is another possible source of transmission.

The estimated incubation period is unknown and could range from 1-7 days, but more likely 3 years or 36,000 miles.

Patients with uncomplicated disease due to confirmed (or unconfirmed) SUV flu virus infection have experienced inflated ego, increased road rage, chronic lack of consideration for others, decreased awareness of nearby traffic, fatigue, vomiting, or diarrhea. In West Palm Beach, 95% of patients with SUV flu met the case definition of opprobrism.

Anyone showing signs–however faint–of possible SUV flu should pull over, immediately self-diagnose, and proclaim the results on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or a nearby blog. If you are somehow still disease-free, carefully avoid contamination vectors mentioned above. Please help spread the warning about this dangerous disease, using the hashtag #suvflu.

Be careful out there.

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

The new feature called rich snippets shows that SearchMonkey has caught the eye of the 800 pound gorilla. Many of the same microformats and RDF vocabularies are supported. It seems increasingly inevitable that RDFa will catch on, no matter what the HTML5 group thinks. -m

As of today, I have been out of Yahoo! for a full year. And what a year it’s been… I guess that means I’m now free to recruit…any good XML people still wearing purple? -m

If you haven’t already, check out HTML: The Markup Langauge. Besides being a cool new recursive acronym for HTML, it is a reasonably-sane document. Also worth a look: Differences between HTML4 and HTML5. Many of the ideas from XHTML 2 (of which I was an editor at one point) are there.

I think it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together.

A while ago, I argued that the existence of both Flickr and Yahoo! Photos as an effective two-pronged strategy. Look how that worked out–Y! Photos is permanently shuttered. While there were benefits including a broader potential reach, in aggregate the benefits didn’t amount to more than the immense cost of having two parallel efforts. Same here. -m

The universe is deeply, fundamentally weird. At the quantum level, all kinds of non-intuitive effects are the building blocks of, well everything. So what if not just observing, but believing in a particular outcome could influence the actual outcome of an experiment?

Something like that could explain a lot: many of the claims of perpetual motion machines, cold fusion a la Stanley and Pons, the placebo effect, Steorn Orbo technology (previous discussion), and numerous similar endeavors. Who’s to say that some aspect of what we call consciousness doesn’t involve some kind of probability manipulation?

The conventional scientific method would be at a loss to deal with such a situation. True Believers would proclaim miraculous results from their experiments, but Skeptics would be unable to reproduce the results. Strong skeptics would set up million dollar rewards to prove crackpottish claims under “controlled conditions”, and nobody would ever collect.

Such a conceit is the basis for a story I’m working on. The first drafts were written 18 months ago, as part of NaNoWriMo 2007. I may be ready for some early reviewers by the summer. Interested? -m

I’ve been experimenting with the preview version of Wolfram Alpha. It’s not like any current search engine because it’s not a search engine at all. Others have already written more eloquent things about it.

The key feature of it is that it doesn’t just find information, it infers it on the fly. Take for exmple the query

next solar eclipse in Sunnyvale

AFAIK, nobody has ever written a regular web page describing this important (to me) topic. Try it in Yahoo! or Google and see for yourself. There are a few potentially interesting links based on the abstracts, but they turn out to be spammy. Wolfram Alpha figures out that I’m talking about the combination of a concept (”solar eclipse”) and a place (”Sunnyvale, CA”, but with an offer to switch to Sunnyvale, TX) and combines the two. The result is a simple answer–4:52 pm PDT | Sunday, May 20, 2012 (3.049 years from now). Hey, that’s sooner than I thought! Besides the date, there’s many related facts and a cool map.

This is in contrast to SearchMonkey, which I helped create, in two main areas:

1. Wolfram Alpha uses metadata to produce the result, then renders it through a set of pre-arranged renderers. The response is facts, not web pages.
2. SearchMonkey focuses on sites providing their own metadata, while Wolfram Alpha focuses on hand-curation.

Search engines have been striving to do a better job at fact-queries. Wolfram’s approach shows that an approach disjoint from finding web pages from an index can be hugely useful.

The engineers working on this have a sense of humor too. The query

1.21GW

returns a page that includes the text “power required to operate the flux capacitor in the DeLorean DMC-12 time machine” as well as a useful comparison (~ 0.1 x the power of space shuttle at launch).

Yahoo! and Google do various kinds of internal “query rewriting”, but usually don’t let you know other than in the broadest terms (”did you mean …”). Wolfram Alpha shows a diagram of what it understood the query to be. The diagrams make it evident that something like the RDF model is in use, but without peeking under the hood, it’s hard to say something definitive.

One thing I wonder about is whether Wolfram Alpha creates dynamic (as was a major goal of SearchMonkey) of giving web authors a reason to put more metadata in their sites–a killer app if you will. It’s not clear at this early date how much web crawling or site metadata extraction (say RDFa) plays into the curation process.

In any case Wolfram Alpha is something to watch. It’s set to launch publicly this month. -m

I found this explanation the most readable I’ve seen yet. She has slides too.  The settlement itself has been recently delayed, which seems like a good idea for something of this magnitude. -m

1. Don’t panic. Panic == not thinking clearly.
2. Avoid Twitter until symptoms subside. Probably HuffPost and Drudge too.
3. Think ahead. If you don’t already have an Emergency Preparedness Kit assembled, well, that was kind of dumb. Over your next few trips to the grocery store, gradually get stuff for one.
4. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. If in doubt, ask a doctor.
5. The Time.com article is pretty even-handed, worth a read.

-m

Thanks to those who wrote in with bug reports about the XForms Validator: something changed recently and made the inserted Google Ads script confuse browsers, resulting in a blank page where you’d expect results. I’ve turned off the response-page ads, which were only getting in the way, and the problem seems to have vanished. Carry on. :-) -m

Lots of news reports about Geocities claim it was purchaed for “4 billion” dollars. But not really–that’s a pretty hefty rounding from 3.57 B. Also, that wasn’t cash, but magic boom time inflated stock. Yahoo was at $335.875 on announcement, so the deal amounted to about 10.6 million shares. Or at today’s values, a little over $150 million. Your call on whether they got their money’s worth. -m

I’ve always thought that the EXSLT model of developing community specifications worked well. Now a critical mass of folks has come together on a similar effort, aimed at providing extensions usable in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery, and other XPath-based languages like XProc. Maybe even XForms.

Check it out, subscribe to the mailing list, and help out if you can. -m

Hey readers, all seven of you, can you help me out?

I’m perhaps finally switching to a Mac-native text editor, TextWrangler, or if I really like it, BBEdit. Within that app, what’s the easiest way to enter unusual characters not found on a keyboard, say š (Latin s with háček) or ḫ (h-breve below)? In jEdit, one can set up longer strings that get automatically converted into harder-to-type ones. What’s the equivalent in TextWrangler or BBEdit? -m