If you want to get anything done, give it to a busy person… In my life, I’ve started four novels, completed my goals on three, gotten to “The End” on two, and completely flamed out on one. The first was in 2001. I hadn’t written much since high school. Something clicked in my head that…
Month: November 2007
Well, my plans for a series of postings about details of implementing XPath 2.0 fell rather short, so let’s skip straight to the good stuff. An article by Mike Kay giving the details of the Saxon architecture. On the surface it’s about performance, but it also has an excellent section in internals. Worth a look….
Or, why the Kindle cost $399 at launch. What is Amazon’s most valuable IP? How about a list of registered users who are guaranteed as willing to pay a premium price for a nifty gadget (I mean “service”) along with the exclusive privilege of buying more things from Amazon? Somewhere in Amazon’s database land, alongside…
That was the subject of an email I got this morning. After I headed in to work, I listed to Science Friday, which included the Ig Nobel Prize festivites. One of the winners? CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring…
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…
Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books? There’s…
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…
As one who, in the all-too-near future, will be hammering out the visuals to go with my talk at XML 2007, this made my day. (be sure to check out the deeper pages too) -m
OK, let me take a step back from specific technologies like RDFa, let’s go through a really simple example. On a certain web page, I refer to a book. That book has a price of 21.86 US dollars. The page is intended as primarily human-readable, but I want to include machine-readable data too, for a…
What is the difference between placing instanceof=”prefix:val” vs. rel=”prefix:val” on something? How do I decide between the two? In the example of hEvent data, why is it better/more accurate to use instanceof=”cal:Vevent” instead of a blank node via rel=”cal:Vevent”? -m
“Compact Clark Notation“. (Inspired by reading this) -m