The big buzz today is news that Terry Semel has stepped down as CEO of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang has stepped up. Believe it or not, Y is the first place I’ve worked at that’s large enough that I’m not on a first name basis with the CEO, so this kind of thing is much less personal. I can’t remember even shaking his hand.

In reflection, Terry’s management style seems to be based largely on the Dale Carnegie How-to-win-friends-and-influence-people style that’s been influential in my life and career. I have more respect for him than for most of the armchair CEO’s out there. I never understood some of the venom hurled at Semel, but then again I’m happy to see the change–I think Yahoo needs a little less Hollywood right now.
In short, there’s lots of change happening at Yahoo, both at the management level and in my personal role to play. But each change so far has been good, and the changes are adding up to something even bigger. After some recent personal tough times, I’m glad I decided to stay with Yahoo. What’s even better, there will probably be no more Tom Cruise visits. :-) -m

I have an older iPod. I don’t go G numbers, but it’s 40 gigs and a black and white screen. The battery life is measured in minutes. Hmm, 40 gigs, same as the original Apple TV.

We don’t have a TV in the place, but we do watch movies on the computer screen. As long as you’re willing to plug in what’s essentially a portable hard drive, you can watch movies on any screen with a nearby FireWire port. Battery life isn’t an issue because the only time you use the iPod, it’s plugged in.

What do you do with your old iPod? -m

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just after installing Thunderbird 2, deleting emails started taking 5 seconds, then 15, then 30, then a full minute. Then it quit working alltogether. Also 14,000 old mailing list messages materialized in my Junk folder. My inbox has hundreds of unread, and drastic measures might be needed to get things working again… -m

Here’s a NYT article on Yahoo! Mobile, including a picture of the “warroom” where I spend a few hours on a typical day. The sign on the back wall says “platform team”, and on top of that “Maru” in Kanji and roman characters. -m

I can’t talk on the phone right now. Can you follow up on email?
Consider it placed on my todo list.
Let me give you my new address.
Hmm, I don’t have it.
What are you talking about?

(If you get the pattern, post below…) -m

Last week I did something pretty foolish: I placed an order with Amazon. A few days later six new books arrived–two on math, two on brewing, Dreaming in Code, and one on guitar playing. All of these went directly to my toread list, a huge library of books that probably wouldn’t remain standing if I put them in one pile.

If you look at the sidebar on my site, you can see my “What I’m Reading” list. It hasn’t been updated in a while,  but sadly it’s mostly accurate. And not because I’ve stopped reading–I still read small amounts every day. It’s just that I haven’t been finishing many.

The author of the music book likes to use the phrase “Personal Everest” to refer to a goal set too high. But this isn’t an Everest situation. More like a personal peanut butter manefesto. -m

I’ve always had a thing for text analysis.

• the 352
• and 250
• to 225
• of 188
• in 118
• a 108
• we 100
• is 76
• our 75
• that 72

Source. -m

O’Reilly sent me a copy of the new 1000 page volume from David Flanagan. (Apparently, being an O’Reilly author gets you on their list for freebies.) A bunch of business ensued, and the book sat around unread for a while.

I’m not using JavaScript day-to-day anymore, but I used to during the Cardiff LiquidOffice days. I was responsible for an Ajax version of the forms engine (except nobody had thought to call it Ajax back then; the best we had was the clunky name ‘DHTML’). The 3rd edition of this book from 1998 was instrumental in my development as a JavaScript programmer. Because of that book, I stopped treating JavaScript like a scripting language, and started treating it like a programming language. I filled the margins with various notes.

When the 4th Ed. came out in 2002, I gladly picked up a copy. The most heavily-annotated section in my 3rd Ed. was gone! So over time, I kept coming back to the 3rd Ed. The new volume wasn’t enough of an improvement to overcome my intertia found scribbled in the margins.

The 5th Ed., I’m happy to say, is all I’ll be needing from here on. The language section is thoroughly updated, including contemporary coverage of closures and classes. The browser reference section is also massively improved and presented as a unified whole rather than fragmented sections. There’s a ton of new material, including all the XMLHttpRequest stuff that got me started, and about working with Flash.

Summary: this is a good one to have on your shelf, even if you have an earlier Edition. -m

You are Superman

Superman 80% Spider-Man 75% Green Lantern 60% The Flash 60% Batman 60% Robin 55% Iron Man 55% Supergirl 45% Wonder Woman 35% Hulk 35% Catwoman 25%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Too cool to resist posting. Try the quiz yourself -m

Site at http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/h.html. How are folks supposed to discover this? -m

This Wednesday, I’m visiting Berkeley to speak with visiting professor Erik Wilde and his School of Information students. It’s an open-ended discussion, but will almost certainly center on XForms, the intentional web, and related information flow technologies. If you’re in Berkeley this Wednesday, drop me a line. -m

The new Flickr Mobile site is up, joining the recently-launched m.upcoming.org. Notice a trend in mobile URL design here? Expect to see more of this from Yahoo! and other places.

The interesting thing about these URLs is that they don’t end in .mobi. There are technical advantages (cookies) to staying with an established domain name. What are your plans, if any, for dot-mobi domains? -m

On a PHP 4 project, I need to use XSLT, but the interfaces seem far more complicated than they should be. Check out this declaration for the function to run an XSLT:

mixed xslt_process ( resource xh, string xmlcontainer, string xslcontainer [, string resultcontainer [, array arguments [, array parameters]]] )

Wow, it returns a “mixed”, that’s some helpful documentation worth looking up. And all I have to do is pass in an “xmlcontainer” and “xslcontainer”. In practice, you end up with hard-to-read code like this:

$arguments = array('/_xml' => $xml, '/_xsl' => $xsl);
$xslproc = $xslt_create();
$result = xslt_process($xslproc, 'arg:/_xml', 'arg:/_xsl', NULL, $arguments);

Too bad I have already-parsed objects. And then there’s this:

Warning: As of PHP 4.0.6, this function no longer takes XML strings in xmlcontainer or xslcontainer. Passing a string containing XML to either of these parameters will result in a segmentation fault in Sablotron versions up to and including version 0.95.

Whatever. In fairness, this falls mainly to the XSLT engine and not the language and the PHP 5 interfaces are much different and much improved. But still.. -m

Just a little FYI. Anyone use uses the word “pretexting” in a conversation with me is likely to get on my bad side. At least have the decency to call it identity fraud or even good old fashioned “lying”. -m

The little one just turned a month old. Since I have a spare moment, time for some blog catch-up. A C|Net puff piece survey reports

More than two-thirds of respondents said that their data was most vulnerable on laptop PCs, while 40% chose “other mobile devices” (i.e. PDAs, mobile phones, wireless devices)

Mind you, this is just a survey of how repondents felt, not reporting any specific security issues.

Is data accessible through mobile devices at risk? Absolutely. What are you doing to secure your data? -m

Spotted via Weinberger. Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe writes about Yahoo’s continuing foray against DRM, led by David Goldberg. -m

I got this link from Eve, and to think, I never even knew there was a consortiuminfo.org. The Microsoft Open Specifications Promise irrevocably lets any interested parties implement and use a list of technologies without fear of getting sued (at least sued by Microsoft). It is similar in tone and scope to earlier declarations about the Office XML formats, and the declaration from Sun about UBL. I’m not a lawyer, so if I’ve described this badly, get a real lawyer to explain it. :-P
This is a smart move; since obviously a great deal of work went into producing these standards, I’m sure Microsoft plans to benefit more by growing the “whole market” (in the language of _Crossing the Chasm_) then they would by nickle-and-dime asserting patent rights. They also come out far, far better in public opinion, especially among those most affected by these standards.
There’s another angle worth considering–the defensive. Giving away patent rights carte blanche might at first seem like a funny kind of defense, but here’s how it works: after today, what would happen if BigWebServicesCo started shaking down implementers of WS-Whatever? The attacker would be savagely torn apart in the court of public opinion, that’s what. Submarine patents are dirty business, so for a bigger target, creating an environment more hostile to such bad behavior is a powerful strategy.

Of course, smallish parasitic patent troll companies won’t be deterred much, but then again nothing seems to.

I’m optimistic that this is part of a positive trend. I’ll even refrain from further opinions on the WS-* technologies. :-) -m

I’ve written before about the xslt2xforms project by Sébastien Cramatte. The project is not only still alive, but expanded into an entire utility kit including a PHP5 framework and forming “a complete xforms/xml toolbox based only on w3c standards”. Check it out on sourceforge. -m

Hey Podcasters out there…post a picture of your mixer on your blog or favorite photo sharing site. As a bonus, you’ll have a “backup” of your settings for future reference. Give it the tag “mixerpic” so we can all find it later. -m

Check ‘em out on Flickr. -m

I’m safely back home, but my main blogging/email/web machine is seriously hosed. Good thing I have tomorrow off from work. :-( Expect light posting here until further notice. -m

I’m heading out shortly to Edinburgh. How much will I be blogging from Scotland? Good question! Depends greatly on connectivity, fatigue, and opportunity. In that order (I think). -m

At WWW I have a short presentation on Yahoo! Go on Friday. It’s one-fourth of a 90 minute slot, so don’t expect any huge revelations.

You might also see my name on another paper, Visualizing Tags over Time on Wednesday (nominated for Best Paper) (!). I won’t be presenting, though I did help a bit with the project.

Anyway, if you’re making it to Edinburgh this year, look me up next week. -m

Since switching to WordPress, I’ve gotten some gentle reminders along the lines of changing the default theme. Well, I’ve done it.

I still don’t understand why so many themes have a huge image taking up half the space ‘above the fold’, but nevertheless, Tony Greer‘s excellent theme I’m using here was easy to customize, is squeaky-clean for validation, and has a few other nice features. Comments? You know the drill. -m

I need to remodel my blog. Pretty easy, if you want to blow away all your previous content and start fresh. A bit trickier if you want to preserve all your old content and the URLs at which each page resides.

Aside: for some reason, every single change to my blog (including first starting out) has happened in May. Kind of weird:

• May 2002 – begin (Blogger)
• May 2004 – I wanted centralized control of my own data, so switched to a home-grown system
• May 2005 – I switched to the awesome PyBloxsom, which had much better developer support
• May 2006 – I switched to WordPress, for reasons outlined here.

Each of these had a slightly different way of laying out the URL space, which I’ve preserved. Why go to the trouble? The main limit with my particular PyBlosxom setup was that my “golden” copies of postings were synced between my ISP and home laptop. In short, it was very inconvenient to post from anywhere but @ home. I want to be able to post more, including from work and on the road, and WordPress fits the bill nicely. Since I’m not consulting anymore, all the fiddly bits in PyBlosxom aren’t as appealing anymore.

Also, it’s a good opportunity to rework the comments policy, and hopefully get some good discussions going here.

With some apache mod_rewrite magic, I’m nearly done. Any comments on the new setup can go, well, right below here. Thanks! -m