Write IE extensions in XForms
The indefatigable Mark Birbeck pointed me to this-- a toolkit to write IE sidebars in pure XForms. Included are Amazon and Google search. This is a sign of changes to come in the development of Internet Apps. -m
Micah Dubinko - from an XML and XForms geek
Archives
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Friday, April 30, 2004
Then Again..
On the other hand, if your day job deadlines leave you completely exhausted at the end of the day, electronic notes or not, you'll tend to blog less (or at least blog in the morning, when you're still semi-conscious). -m
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Posting Frequency
Notice I've been posting more lately? I have. At the day job, I've switched to an online note format (plain text + jEdit is an amazing combination).
It's probably not a coincidence that getting into the habit of posting your thoughts online carries over to the off hours. -m
SCO Humor
Courtesy of "pinko-rat-bastard" on slashdot...
Somewhere on the path to Mordor....
"We hates them, the nasty Linuxies!", hissed Darllum. "They STOLE the precious from us. Evil Linuxies! We hates them!"
"But Linuxies helps us!", he wimpered. "They gives us nice IPO...they gives us Kernel Personality. SAMBA is our friend!"
"We don't have any friends!", he spat, eyes glowing with hatred and fury. "Evil, tricksie Linuxies! They STOLE it! We HATES them!"
"OK, Sam", sighed Frodo, "I've changed my mind. You can kill him now."
-m
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Newsflash
I've been nominated for an InfoWorld Innovators Award. More details here later. The results will be announced here on May 24. -m
Is enterprise search heating up?
Uh, yes. Link: John Batelle's searchblog
"It made me think, and I realized that in fact, enterprise search will probably rise again, and end up being one of the coolest things in search in the next few years. Why? Because it sucks so badly now, fixing it will be the kind of 10X revelation we had when we moved from Yahoo to Google in 1998-99."
-m
Monday, April 26, 2004
Unipain
Interestingly, Jon Udell's latest column at InfoWorld has the following title: "InfoWorld: E-mailâs many hats: April 23, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATIONS". (because this will likely get mangled further in the publishing stream, that's a-circumflex, then two of what looks like an A-in-a-box instead of the apostrophe in "E-mail's".
Unicode is hard. Even if your content is fine, chances are good that your content management or publishing system will come in and muck things up. Actually, Unicode isn't what's hard--if the whole world used it exclusively we'd be sailing smooth--what's hard is transitions between encodings. Throw in a few unhelpful substitutions by Microsoft Office's aggravating, so-called "smart quotes" features, and you've got a mess on your hands.
A straight-quotes-are-your-friends production. -m
Update: More related discussion. But not directly related. The web page is still titled oddly, as above. Also, interestingly, RSS readers and Atom readers see the above differently. Which just goes to show...
Seeing XForms Inside Out
At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, come see my presentation Seeing XForms Inside Out:: Inside an XForms Validator (Thurs July 29). Whether you're just learning about XForms, or been working with it already, you will find some interesting insights by looking at XForms from the perspective of a validation tool.
If you can make it for the full week, I also have a half-day tutorial on Monday (July 26). Check it out! -m
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Superfast Search
Has anyone written a search engine that, by virtue of blinding speed, plus using a few tricks like client-side XMLHTTP, can provide preliminary results in the browser *before* the search query is submitted? -m
Microsoft Innovation
OK, knock off the jokes about oxymorons. Today, on my daughter's 1998-vintage computer, I installed Windows 98. I had completely forgotten the pain involved with that particular task. IBM hardware, as ordinary off-the-shelf as it could be, and the install doesn't recognize the onboard video card. No Internet, and hardly any other machines in the house have a floppy. Ungh. Several hours later, I'm finished.
Today, we basically take it for granted that you just pop in an OS CD and install away. Not terribly long ago, care and feeding of a computer was an intensely geeky proposition. Only recently has it become mainstream. For Desktop Linux, the bar has been raised much, much higher. This is a good thing. -m
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Search
I've been particularly inspired lately by the problem of Search. Between the new employer, and reports of one-man search companies and reports of completely new technologies, this is getting to be quite an interesting space.
Which happens to mesh with my gradual project the last few months--converting all my stored information into good old UTF-8 plain text. The nexus of all these things is David Mertz's book Text Processing in Python, which references his excellent public domain text indexer code.
It wouldn't take much to convert my whole blog over to this system. Hmm. -m
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Is writing like electronics?
TV sets, inside, used to include a full schematic diagram. You'd unfold it, then again, and again, and again. There were huge, tablecloth-sized sheets. Back 'in the day', I used to go through these. You could point to any random symbol representing a component somewhere in the thing, and determine exactly what the purpose of that component was. What would happen if you suddenly yanked it out of a running TV?
That's how writing works. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph has to be active doing something for the piece.
To design a big circuit, you wouldn't start with a blank sheet and just start drawing components hooked together. You'd start with a general block diagram, then reduce that into smaller blocks, then figure out how everything interconnects, THEN start arranging individual components to make each block.
That's how writing works. You don't start with a blank page and write a story A to Z. You start with the big picture, flesh it out more, then finally down the the level of words. -m
Monday, April 12, 2004
Sharing vs. Sales
Record Industry Execs: File sharers are a bunch of freeloaders. Sharing hurts sales.
Geeks, etc.: File sharers are samplers. Sharing helps sales.
Ed Felten: Yes.
This seems dead on. The same dynamics apply to books available under an open content license as well as for sale. -m
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Errata the Night Away
All the formerly scattered errata for _XForms Essentials_ are now collected at the official publisher's page. If you spot more report away! -m
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
What would you do?
..if someone handed you a piece of code that could solve NP-hard problems in a reasonably short time? All ideas welcome. Be creative! email me. -m
Thursday, April 01, 2004
X-CP
Here's an interesting new Internet specification. Actually, I haven't looked at it in the slightest, but it has an 'X' in the name, so it must be good. -m
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