With apologies to a real news site. (02-27) 16:14 PST SEATTLE, (AP)

Amazon.com Inc. changed course Friday and said it would allow copyright holders to decide whether they will permit their works to be read aloud by the latest laryngeal apparatus, a feature that has been under development for several thousand years.

The move comes nearly two weeks after a group representing authors expressed concern that the feature, which was intended to be able to read every book, blog, magazine and newspaper out loud, would undercut separate audiobook sales. The average American can use their larynx to read text in a somewhat stilted voice.

Amazon said in a statement that it, too, has a stake in the success of the audiobook market, and pointed to its Brilliance Audio and Audible subsidiaries, which publish and sell professionally recorded readings.

“Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat,” the company said.

Amazon is working on the technical changes needed for authors and publishers to turn text-to-speech off for individual titles.

The Web retailer also said the text-to-speech feature is legal — and wouldn’t require Amazon to pay out additional royalties — because a book read aloud doesn’t constitute a copy, a derivative work or a performance.

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

Dear Amazon, Speaking as an author myself, you not only made a bad choice, you set a precedent in the wrong direction. The Author’s Guild doesn’t speak for me, nor do I want them to. TTS is only going to get better. The last thing we need is another backward industry fighting progress. -m

I’m (just barely) enough of a writer that I can spend cycles on Steorn‘s claims without being branded a crackpot. After all, the novel I’m working on involves a similar device being invented 4,000 years ago. It’s all research.

Imagine if Earth’s gravitational field, instead of being a constant 1.0G, rocked back and forth between 0.99G and 1.01G at some fixed interval. That’d be perhaps not enough to feel, but enough to extract “free energy”. Arrange a heavy weight on a wheel, and time it so that it moves downward (doing work) during the heavier phase and returns to the top during the lighter phase. You’d have more than perpetual motion, you would be able to extract real work out of the device on a continuous basis.

Steorn’s claims are similar, but with permanent magnets instead of gravity.

Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.

I get the feeling that they are being very, very careful about what they write. In particular, the word “efficiency” is very odd in this sentence. In my earlier example, it would sound unnatural to talk about the “efficiency of the gravitational interaction”. Unless one talks about the kinds of efficiency that go above 100%…. So let’s roll with it.

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

So some hitherto unknown process temporarily nudges a magnetic interaction in one direction, only for it to bounce back in the opposite direction, like in the gravity example. Get the timing right and presto, free energy. I don’t understand why they are so cavalier about “contravening” the principle of conservation of energy though. It seems to me that more observations would be in order. As in “the device produced 100 watts for 6 months straight, with no input power sources”–which could be true in various ways that don’t contravene conservation of energy. It’s almost as if they are deliberately being provocative in their statements. Go figure. -m

From the company home page, reknown XSLT trainer and friend G. Ken Holman has expanded his offerings to include XQuery training. The first such session is March 16-20, alongside XML Prague.

I’ve always thought there is great power in having both XSLT and XQuery tools at one’s disposal. I’ve seen people tend to polarize into one camp or the other, but in truth there is a lot of common ground, as well as cases where the right technology makes for a much more elegant solution. So learning both is easier than it seems, and more useful than it seems.

If you will be around the conference, take a look at the syllabus. I’m curious to see others’ reactions toward the combined XSLT + XQuery toolset. -m

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

This year’s Mark Logic User Conference is May 12-14, in beautiful San Francisco. Attend the conference at no charge as a speaker! Submit a proposal for a breakout session on business applications, technical implementation, or best practices. Deadline is February 13th. Thanks! -m

If you’ve seen MarkMail before, you may be pleased to know that a new version launched last week, including new features (like saved search sets) for power users. If you haven’t seen MarkMail before, what are you waiting for? -m

P.S. If you could use something like this behind your firewall, ping me.

Busy week ahead. Minimal posting. -m

After a delay, the code to my RDFa parser in XQuery is now available under an Apache license. Go get it. This is some of the earliest XQuery code I ever wrote, so go easy on me. It follows the earlier work on a functional definition of RDFa. And feel free to send in patches. -m

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 click the ‘Spam’ button on their emails… -m

Overheard at XML 2008: “Wow, it’s a good thing Mark Logic sponosred, otherwise nobody would be here.” (there were only five tables in the expo area.)

Overseen on the XML 2008 schedule: only one mention of XQuery, and that’s in relation to eXist, not the aforementioned sponsor.

This conference does have a different feel to it. Is XML at the ASCII-tipping-point, where it becomes so obvious that conferences aren’t needed? -m

First the bee colonies start to disappear. Next, acorns. Does anyone have a map of the acorn-devoid areas? -m

Lately I’ve been playing with some more advanced XQuery. One thing nearly every XQuery engine supports is some kind of eval() function. MarkLogic has several, but my favorite is xdmp:eval. It’s lightweight because it reuses the entire calling context, so for instance you can write let $v := 5 return xdmp:value("$v"). Not too useful, but if the expression passed in comes from a variable, it gets interesting.

Now, quite a few standards based on XPath depend on the context node being set to some particular node. This turns out to be easy too, using the path operator: $context/xdmp:value($expr). According to the definition of the XPath path operator, the expression to the right is evaluated with the results of the expression on the left setting the context node.

OK, how about setting the context size and position? More difficult, but one could use a sequence on the left-hand side of the path operator, with the desired $context node in somewhere in the middle. Then last() will return the length of the sequence, and position() will return, well, the position of $context in the sequence. But it’s kind of hacky to manufacture a bunch of temporary nodes, only to throw them away in the next step of the path.

I’m curious if anyone else has done something similar. Comments? -m

Kurt Cagle has a thorough review of MarkLogic 4.0, worth a read itself. But check out the comments: one poster says he interviewed with the company and didn’t get reimbursed. The MarkLogic CEO responds personally with an offer to make it right. Why can’t more companies be like this? -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 at this point? -m

I tend to be pretty conservative about new hardware. The day-to-day G4 processor machine I’m writing this on was purchased back in 2004. But with all these new models coming out, I couldn’t resist…buying an older one. After all, we are in a downturn.

On Amazon, previous-generation MacBook Pros are pretty cheap, and have a $150 rebate on top of that. Like this one for $1444 after rebate. Perhaps with a memory upgrade, this should keep me set for another 4 years.

How long has it been since you upgraded? -m

I know what it’s like to be laid off, I’ve been through it twice. If you need help connecting up with a new gig, whether at MarkLogic or a hand-off to one of the zillion headhunters that constantly harry me, let me know. Send me email and I’ll do what I can. -m

Cringely writes that a mandatory ban on incandescent lighting would cut U.S. electricity consumption by 18% within a year. What else could have a big impact?

The Onion Radio News reported on a new eco-friendly Hummer that kills its owners. (aired Aug 7, 2008) That’s not bad, but a tax on SUVs of one dollar per pound per year would be fine too.

On a more serious note, telecommuting could significantly reduce energy usage. Twenty percent of person-days should be doable within a year, averaged across all industries and workers. I wonder what percentage of petroleum usage that would represent?…

-m

I’m working on a piece of software that, while not the answer to world peace, is still pretty neat and approaches a specific problem in a fresh way. The project is at the stage where it needs to get unveiled to early adopters in the target audience. So how does one introduce possibly unfamiliar concepts in the form of a new API?

The approach we ended up using for the initial documentation is essentially a narrative–telling a story. Narrative fills the gap between use case and solution in an engaging way. People are naturally inclined to listen to stories, and to expect certain story structures, such as having a beginning, middle, and end with suitable transitions. Thus, if the listener senses a gap in the story, it’s easy for them to speak up. When the story works, people find it easier to map their personal story on to the narrative, leading to better absorption of new concepts, and a more positive impression of the software.

And it’s working. So far we’ve gotten far more useful feedback than we would have otherwise. Even before showing others, the exercise of writing the narrative has exposed gaps and flaws in our thinking, leading to a better, more cohesive design.

If you think back about how you learned about, say, object oriented programming, or event-driven programming, likely there was a story or detailed use case involved that helped you get on board with a new way of thinking. Software + story: It’s a powerful combination, I recommend it.

BTW, my team is hiring full-time positions. Especially if you’ve got XML skills, you could be part of this team. Send me email if interested. -m

And Microsoft still unhip. I’m not even bothering to click through the second ad… -m

The company is in great need of talented XML professionals, including sales engineers, consultants, support, and technical writing. Let me know if you (or someone you know) is up for the challenge. -m

I prefer the Yahoo! Search iPhone interface. Search Assist and SearchMonkey goodness abound, and make a concrete improvement to the experience.

But why can’t I get Yahoo! Go for iPhone? I’m gobsmacked that such a strategic app isn’t available this far into the game. Yahoo! Go was first announced in 2006. Then 2007. Then 2008. Maybe 2009 will be the year. -m

Mur Lafferty’s new superhero novel is making the rounds. She’s encouraging everyone to buy a printed copy on August 25 (buy it here) to make a nice impression in the bestseller lists. I’m a sucker for these kinds of promotions. The full text also recently appeared on the Escape Pod feed, under a Creative Commons license. It’s a whopping 35 megabytes, including illustrated comic book covers…a nice touch.

It would be really nice to have this with me to read during spare moments without the bulk of the printed book. Hmm.

My question is: how I can read it on an iPhone? Ebook support isn’t that great so far, especially for the PDF format. I know about the data:url trick, but it doesn’t work with 35 megs. Has anyone successfully set up an iPhone to read this book? What software and/or conversions did you use? Comment below. -m

This post will be continuously updated to contain the most recent details about an XQuery 1.0 RDFa parser I wrote for Mark Logic. It follows the Functional RDFa pattern.

At present there is little to say, but eventually code and more will be available. Stay tuned.

-m

By now you’ve likely noticed the Geek Thoughts postings here. This is an experiment on a few different levels.

What makes comics special? To what extent are pictures, often little more than stick figures, a critical part of the web comic experience? Can a web comic still be funny and thought-provoking with only words?

Specifically with regard to yesterday’s posting, an homage to Garfield minus Garfield, and slightly-more-than-homage to xkcd: what does taking away the seeming-essential part reveal? Is it of the same or different nature as before? On the plus side, don’t worry about this blog becoming an xkcd transciption service–that’s not the point. Thinking (and maybe laughing) is.

It’s also an experiment in zero-overhead publishing. Setting up a dedicated blog, separate site, separate comment moderation, all that jazz…would be hard. Lower friction is the difference between a smooth running engine and a smoking heap of metal, and the same goes in life. If Geek Thoughts develops a huge following, maybe some day there will be all of that and T-Shirts too. But for now, it’s easy enough that I can actually do it, which is what matters in the beginning.

If this line of argument seems faintly familiar, it’s because I’ve used it before, with my (still sporadically updated) Patternalia series, inspired by Christopher Alexander’s works.

If you appreciate any of this, the best way to show it is with a link. Thanks! -m

Through the weekend I put most of the final touches on an implementation of RDFa in XQuery. The implementation is based on the functional specification of RDFa, an offshoot of the excellent work coming out of the W3C task force.

The spec contains a procedural description of the parsing algorithm, and several have successfully followed it to arrive at a conforming implementation. But you would have tough times explaining RDFa to someone that way. The functional description sort of fell out of the way I described RDFa to people.

“When you see an element with XXXX, you generate a triple, using SSSS as the subject, PPPP as the predicate, and OOOO as the object.”

Which arguably is the more natural way to express the algorithm for functional languages like XQuery or XSLT. Fill in the right blanks and you pretty much have it. In practice, it’s somewhat more complicated, but not nearly so much as with other W3C specs.

I hope to make the code available soon. You’ll hear about it first here.

I’ll write more when I’m not exhausted. :-) -m

The W3C RDFa specification is now in Candidate Recommendation phase, with an explicit call for implementations (of which there are several). Momentum for RDFa is steadily building. What about eRDF, which favors the existing HTML syntax over new attributes?

There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced by projects like Yahoo! SearchMonkey. And eRDF is still the only game in town when it comes to annotating RDF within HTML-without-the-X.

One thing the RDFa folks did was define src as a subject-bearing node, rather than an object. At first I didn’t like this inversion, but the more I worked with it, the more it made sense. When you have an image, which can’t have children in (X)HTML, it’s very often useful to use the src URL as the subject, with a predicate of perhaps cc:license.

So I propose one single change to eRDF 1.1. Well, actually several changes, since one thing leads to another. The first is to specify that you are using a different version of eRDF. A new profile string of:

"http://purl.org/NET/erdf11/profile"

The next is changing the meaning of a src value to be a subject, not an object. Perhaps swapping the subject and object. Many existing uses of eRDF involving src already involve properties with readily available inverses. For example:

<!-- eRDF 1.0 -->
<img class="foaf.depiction" src="http://example.org/picture" />

<!-- eRDF 1.1 -->
<img src="http://example.org/picture" class="foaf.depicts" />

With the inherent limitations of existing syntax, the use case of having a full image URL and a license URL won’t happen. But XHTML2 as well as a HTML5 proposal suggest that adding href to many attributes might come to pass. In which case this possibility opens:

<img src="http://example.org/picture" class="cc.license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" />

Comments? -m

In C, if you find yourself writing large switch statements (or rafts of if statements), you should consider using pointers to functions instead.

In C++, if you find yourself writing large switch statements (or rafts of if statements), you should consider using objects and polymorphism instead.

In XQuery, If you find yourself writing large typeswitch statements (or rafts of if statements), you should consider using _______________ instead.

Comment here. -m

This one’s internal. If you’re a Mark Logic employee, look me up. If not, well, expect things to be slow around here for a couple of days. -m

Actually, instead of a review, let me quote the opening testimonial from the inside-front cover.

Competing globally with dynamic capabilities is the top priority of multinational executives and managers everywhere. Rethinking strategy in a highly networked world is the big challenge. How can your company navigate successfully in this turbulent, highly networked and socially connected environment? …

If this does it for you, I couldn’t recommend this book more highly. -m