I’m running a Scrum project, and doing things a little differently than the classic method. I’ve done this at two different companies now, and it seems to work out well. Before a traditional standup meeting with The Three Questions, I schedule 15 minutes of intentional downtime. Since this happens at the start of the day,…
Quick update here: if you are reading this, you’d probably like this short story, named in honor of Dennis Ritchie, FREE and currently burning up the charts for 30 minute reads in Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense. Doing pretty well in Science Fiction and Cyberpunk as well. (link fixed) Do a solid for readers everywhere and…
Filed under need-to-try this: A homebrew version of a popular hacker drink called Club Mate. I already have a carbonator cap and CO2 setup, as part of my beer brewing hardware. One variation I would experiment with is cutting down on the sugar. Even though Club Mate isn’t very sweet, it still has a fair…
There are a number of sieve algorithms that can be used to list prime numbers up to a certain value. I came up with this implementation in Scala. I rather like it, as it makes no use of division, modulus, and only one (explicit) multiplication. Despite being in Scala, it’s not in a functional style. It uses…
Based on the huge number of mail bounces I’ve been getting today, it looks like an unscrupulous somebody forged my return address on a bunch of mail. Perhaps you even sought out this blog based on the distinctive domain name. Some subject lines in use: it’s so nice to write to u maybe your lady…
I can’t blog about secret projects I’m working on, so how about something completely different? I’ve improved my fitness level substantially over the last five years. (On index cards, I have my daily weight and body fat percentage, according to the bathroom scale, back to November 2009). Here’s some things I’ve learned: Moving counts. A…
Alex Milowski asks on Twitter about my thoughts on Skunklink, now a decade old. Linking has long been thought one of the cornerstones of the web, and thereby a key part of XML and related syntaxes. It’s also been frustratingly difficult to get right. XLink in particular once showed great promise, but when it came…
If you’ve come here because of something you noticed in your HTTP access logs, read on. Who is doing this? This is a personal project of Micah Dubinko. It is completely separate from anything related to any employer. What is ASLbot? In the immediate future, ASLbot is no more than a personal research project. It…
This year’s Balisage conference was preceded by the international symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, which naturally enough centered around XForms. As someone who’s written multiple articles surveying XForms implementations, I have to say that it’s fantastic to finally see one break out of the pack. Nearly every demo I saw in Montreal used XSLTForms if…
This past weekend marked my five-year anniversary at MarkLogic. It’s been a fun ride, and I’m proud of how much I’ve accomplished. It was the technology that originally caught my interest: I saw the MarkMail demo at an XML conference, and one thing led to another. The company was looking to expand the product beyond…
This week marked the MarkLogic World conference and with it some exciting news. Without formally “announcing” a new release, the company showed off a great deal of semantic technology in-progress. Part of that came from me, on stage during the Wednesday technical keynote. I’ve been at MarkLogic five years next month, and the first piece…
Naming is hard to do well, almost as hard as designing good software in the first place. Take for instance the term ‘node’ which depending on the context can mean A fundamental unit of the DOM (Document Object Model) used in creating rich HTML5 applications. A basic unit of the Semantic Web–a thing you can say stuff…
The valley is buzzing about Marissa’s edict putting the kibosh on Yahoos working from home. I don’t have any first-hand information, but apparently this applies somewhat even to one-day-a-week telecommuters. Some are saying Marissa’s making a mistake, but I don’t think so. She’s too smart for that. There’s no better way to get extra hours…
So I did it. I stood up on a platform in front of a room of native signers, and delivered a (pre-prepared) five minute presentation without making a sound. In front of cameras, with my ugly face beamed out to multiple large screens. That was stressful, though less so then many different public speaking engagements…
My journey into ASL continues. I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks _Seeing Voices_ and Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan’s _A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD_. In short, learning a language in your thirties is a whole different ballgame than learning as a toddler. There are a few different brain plasticity cliffs you drop off especially…
I’ve been learning a new language lately: American Sign Language aka ASL. Along with the language, I’ve picked up lots of new friends as part of a thriving culture. A big part of learning is through mistakes, and a big part of said culture is helpful bluntness. The combination of these can be a little…
In Nate Sliver’s new book, he mentions a classification system for experts, originally from Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock, along a spectrum of Fox <—> Hedgehog. (The nomenclature comes from an essay about Tolstoy.) Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas. The are ideologues and go “all-in” on whatever they’re espousing. A great…
I’ve mentioned Virgil Matheson in these pages a few times, but never made a full accounting. When I had my O’Reilly book published, I submitted a simple dedication in the manuscript: for Virgil But for whatever reason, it didn’t make it into the printed edition. This post is a small step toward letting the world…
MarkLogic 6 launched today, and it’s full of new and updated goodies. I spent some time designing the new Application Builder including the new Visualization Widgets. If you’ve used Application Builder in the past, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the changes. It’s leaner and faster under the hood. I’d love to hear what people think…
A lexer might seem like one of the boringest pieces of code to write, but every language brings it’s own little wrinkles to the problem. Elegant solutions are more work, but also more rewarding. There is, of course, a large body of work on table-driven approaches, several of them listed here (and bigger list), though…
I’m en route to Balisage 2012, though beset by multiple delays. The first leg of my flight was more than two hours delayed, which made the 90 minute transfer window…problematic. My rebooked flight, the next day (today, that is) is also delayed. Then through customs. Maybe all I’ll get out of Tuesday is Demo Jam….
Today is the 10-year anniversary of this epic message from James Clark on the relative merits of Relax NG vs. XML Schema, and whether the latter should receive preferential treatment. Still relevant today–the discussion is still going, although an increasing number of human-readable web specifications have adopted RelaxNG in some form. -m
I’m getting ready to leave for MarkLogic World, May 1-3 in Washington, DC, and it’s shaping up to be one fabulous conference. I’ve always enjoyed the vibe at these events–it has a, well, cool-in-a-data-geeky-way thing going on (like the XML conference in the early 2000’s where I got to have lunch with James Clark, but that’s…
I’ve been thinking a lot about big data, and two recent items nicely capture a slice of the discussion. 1) Alex Milowski recounting working with Big Weather Data. He concludes that ‘naive’ (as-is) data loading is a “doomed” approach. Even small amounts of friction add up at scale, so you should plan on doing som…
I’m sure this is old news by now, but here’s one more data point. As it turns out, XForms Institute uses an old skool XForms engine written in Flash, dating approximately back to the era when Flash was necessary to do XForms-ey things in the browser. The feedback form for the site is, quite naturally,…
I’ve used this same recipe for three things: weight loss, after-exercise protein, and sore-teeth liquid diet. It’s great. 1 cup 2% milk 1 cup Dannon Fit & Light vanilla yogurt 1 scoop Syntha-6 protein powder (banana is great) Mix. This yields 450 calories with a whopping 39g of protein, 48g of carb (but only 30g of…
Check out these tips. The article talks about iPad, but they work on iPhone too, even an old 3G. One one hand, it shows the intense amount of careful thought Apple puts into the user experience. But on the other hand, it highlights the discovery problem. I know people who have been using iOS since…
A cautionary tale of language from Ted Nelson: We might call a common or garden spade– A personalized earth-moving equipment module A mineralogical mini-transport A personalized strategic tellurian command and control module An air-to-ground interface contour adjustment probe A leveraged tactile-feedback geomass delivery system A man-machine energy-to-structure converter A one-to-one individualized geophysical restructurizer A portable…
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…