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
Category: commercialism
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…
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
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…
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…
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…
60 Minutes covers it. Disclaminer: haven’t seen it, the video doesn’t even play in my browser. Let me know if you have better success in viewing. -m
Google for RIAA, get this first result: RIAA – Recording Industry Association of America – April 12, 2009 Trade group that claims to represent the US recording industry. Details on services, members, executives profiles, statistics, and contact information. “Claims to” represent the US recording industry? The word “claims”, accurate as it may be, appears nowhere…
I enjoyed this post, from Jeremy Allison as it turns out. It talks about how GPL software is “the new BSD” when it comes to cloud computing, since redistribuion of the software doesn’t happen, and thus doesn’t trigger the relevant clauses of the GPL. Any old company can use, re-use, and modify the software without…
This article states: The analysts determined YouTube’s bandwidth costs by assuming that 375 million unique visitors would visit the site in 2009, with 20 percent of those users consuming 400 kilobits per second of video at any given time. That works out to 30 million megabits being served up per second. That’s a heck of…
The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and…
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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…
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…
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…
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.
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…