A few days ago, a carrier update arrived for my iPhone. Since then, my battery life has suffered a significant decline. Anyone else seen this? -m
Category: annoyance
With tough times comes a rise in semi-spam. What’s that? There’s a grey area between solicited and unsolicted email. Take a company you’ve done business once in the past. These guys are dredging up their old databases and really searching for business. Since these are companies I actually like, I don’t have the heart to…
First the bee colonies start to disappear. Next, acorns. Does anyone have a map of the acorn-devoid areas? -m
I got a call today from a pushy recruiter. That’s nothing new. What’s different is that she was not looking for the usual resume, but rather desperately trying to place candidates. (Or maybe it was just social engineering…) Is anyone else seeing a reversal in recruiter cold-call strategies? How flooded is the tech job market…
I haven’t seen this anywhere else: jEdit doesn’t start up under the recent Mac Java 1.6. It bounces in the dock a few times then goes away. The solution: manually run the main jar with java -jar path-to/jedit.jar, which will work. Go to the plugin manager and delete the MacOSX plugin. Java integration is good…
A determined spambot has been submitting the XForms contact form on XForms Institute. OK, so it’s probably more Flash-aware than XForms-aware, but still. -m
And Microsoft still unhip. I’m not even bothering to click through the second ad… -m
Or maybe a certain wireless carrier is getting more incompetent. Sigh. It’s going to be a long two years. I hope the iPhone is worth it. -m
From the observing-the-human-condition department. Seems I have a hard to pronounce name. For the record my first name has a long I; it’s MY-ka, not MEE-ka. When someone gets it wrong, I don’t hold anything against them. Afterall, how to pronounce any given name is pretty arbitrary. But there are a few names that are…
The old rule: only even-numbered Star Trek movies are any good. The new rule: only odd-numbered Indiana Jones movies are any good. -m
I hoped for something fresh, but this from Len Merson is only warmed-over GTD. Avoid–go for the original. -m
For instance, The Business Value of Windows Vista. Seriously, Vista for “speed and security”? Or mobile? The comments on this post alone are worth the click. -m
Rumor is that the .Mac service is being renamed to “Mobile Me”. Great, in it’s present state, it’s always been the kind of thing that’s completely useless to me, even aside from the annoying name. But watch out: everyone’s favorite gang of bankrupt litigious weasels, the SCO group, in a desperate effort to prove they…
If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element….
The WebPath bug reports continue to roll in. For one, queries against *.wikipedia.* don’t seem to work. You get something back, but it has no resemblance to the page you were looking for. The problem comes from the W3C tidy service that I use, specifically that the (understandably overworked and understaffed) admins at the Wikimedia…
Holding steady at 1280 x 854 but due for an upgrade soon. Seriously, if you find yourself setting various goals just because something on the calendar changed, you probably don’t have the long-term motivation needed to see it through, which is why so many new years’ resolutions lie in broken heaps by mid February. If…
This blog page at the W3C discusses the TAG finding that a data format specification SHOULD provide for version information, specifically reconsidering that suggestion. As a few data points, XML 1.1 (with explicit version identifiers) is something of a non-starter, while Atom (without explicit version identifiers) is doing OK so far–though a significant revision to…
Thanks to all the folks who showed interest in this little XPath puzzler published here a few weeks ago. Some asked to see the dataset, but I’m not able to release it at this time (but ask me again in 3 months). Turns out it was a combination of two bugs, one mine, one somebody…
Surely somebody has implemented this in at least one tool. In a text editor, I come across a misspelled close tag like </xsl:stylsheet>. My editor highlights the line as an error, which is is, not matching the start tag and all. Why can’t it go the extra step and give me the same kind of…
Due to some unauthorized activities on my webspace, I’m trimming my online profile, notably the Brain Attic sites. These were my home base for consulting, which I haven’t been doing for 2+ years. Less surface area exposed means less exposure to the bad guys. This site, and XForms Institute are staying up for now, as…
Amazon announced their ebook reader today, Kindle. Some of the earlier hype I’d read about it suggested that it would be not only a reading tool, but a writing tool as well. Nope. The obvious thing is the keyboard, an immediate non-starter for typing more than a few words. But if an external keyboard is…
“Compact Clark Notation“. (Inspired by reading this) -m
The more I look at RDFa, the more I like it. But still it doesn’t help with the pain-point of namespaces, specifically of unmemorable URLs all over the place and qnames (or CURIEs) in content. Does GRDDL offer a way out? Could, for instance, the namespace name for Dublin Core metadata be assigned to the…
Let’s see how many downstream pieces of software trip over this post… Do greater-than and less-than signs need to be escaped in XML? Conventional wisdom has it that less-than signs always do, since that character starts a fresh “tag”, but greater-than signs are safe. Wrong. There is a particular sequence, namely ]]> , not allowed…