1440×900, up from last year. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
Month: December 2008
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….
Have you checked out Opera lately? You should. Their briliant strategy it to include a JavaScript debugger so excellent that you’d be willing to test on that browser just to use the tool. If you’ve been having the same kinds of troubles that I have with Firebug lately (not to demean the thousands who use…
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…
It is not the size of the codebase which makes it hard to grok, but the poorness of the design. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
I’ve heard not a peep about this before, but here it is: XForms for HTML. Let’s read this together. Feel free to drop any comments or observations below. -m
Implementing client-side forms libraries is, and has been, all the rage. I’ve seen Mozquito Factory do amazing things in Netscape 4, Technical Pursuits TIBET on the perpetual verge of release, UGO, and others. In a more recent time scale, Ubiquity XForms impresses me and many others, and it has the right combination of funding and…
This month’s electric bill is brought to you by GE: “We bring good things to light.” ™ (c) Usage by GE appliances: $0.18 per KW/h totaling $23.48 Usage by Kenmore appliances (see note 1): $0.53 per KW/h totaling $50.23 Usage by unlisted appliances: $0.26 per KW/h totaling $39.32 Total Due: $113.03 Note 1: PG&E is…
This article calls itself “Beer 101” but it leaves me pretty flat. I grew up in a place that had “both kinds of beer”, Bud and Bud Light, and thus thought I hated beer. But there’s way more out there. Ask for some of these: Lagers: Oktoberfest, Bock, Doppelbock, Eisbock. Hybrids (having characteristics of both…
Greg Watson, IT Specialist, Defense Intelligence Agency Missile and Space Intelligence Center (apparently it IS rocket science). I installed eXist last night to follow along with the talk. “If you have a larger dataset, eXist may not be the best choice.” Recommended reading: XQuery by Priscilla Walmsley, XQuery wikibook. Download and install. Needs a full…
Wendell Piez, Mulberry Technologies Assertion-based schema language. A way to test XML documents. Rule-based validation language. Cool report generator. Good for capturing edge cases. Same architecture as XSLT. (Schematron specifies, does not perform) <schema xmlns=”http://purl.cclc.org/dsdl/schematron”> <title>Check sections 12/07</title> <pattern id=”section-check”> <rule context=”section”> <assert test=”title”>This section has no title</assert> <report test=”p”>This section has paragraphs</report> … Demo….
Bob DuCharme, Innodata Isogen Content analysis: why? You’ve “inherited” content. Need to save time or effort. Handy tool 1: “sort”. As in the Unix command line tool. (Even Windows) Handy tool 2: “uniq -c” (flag -c means include counts) Elsevier contest: interface for reading journals. Download a bunch of articles, and see what’s all in…
Mark Birbeck, Web Backplane. Problem statement: You shouldn’t have to “scrape” government sites. Solution: RDFa <div typeof=”arg:Vacancy”> Job title: <span property=”dc:title”>Assistant Officer</span> Description: <span property=”dc:description”>To analyse… </span> </div> This resolves to two full RDF triples. No separate feeds, uses existing publishing systems. Two of the most ambitious RDFa projects are taking place in the UK….
Ronald Reck, SAP; Kenneth Sall, SAIC “I wish I knew when people were saying bad things about me.” Sentiment analysis. Kapow used initially. From 800k news articles (from 1996 and 1997), extracted 450M RDF assertions. The 13 Reuters standard metadata elements not used in this case. Used Redland for heavy RDF lifting. Inxight ThingFinder (commercial)…
Priscilla Walmsley, Datypic. “I feel like crying every time I have to go back to 1.0.” Normally this is a full-day course. Familiarity with XSLT 1.0 assumed here. Venn diagram… Much of what people think of as “XQuery” is actually XPath 2.0. XPath differences: root node -> “document node”. Namespace nodes, axis are deprecated. More…
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…
I was on the panel with Bob DuCharme, Frank Miller, and Evan Lenz discussing content authoring, from DITA to DocBook with some WordML sprinkled in for good measure. It was a good discussion, nothing earth-shaking. This session was laptopless, so I don’t have any significant notes. -m
Roy Amodeo, Stilo. Only 4 people in attendance when the talk starts. Quick overview of DITA. Transclusion (conref), topic-level maps, specialization, metadata-based filtering. XML and SGML flavors available. Open Toolkit has been a big part of DITA’s success. Replacable components (XSLT and FO). Many editing environments and CMS’s include this. Topic-based publishing. Works best with…
Delivered by Pradeep Jain, Ictect Inc. He has a handout available: “Intelligent Content Plug-In for Microsoft Word”, though it’s not obvious from the program that Word is involved. What is content modeling? “Getting inside of” content, semantics, from there syntax and XML tagging. Challenges: art vs. science, tacit vs. written documentation, future-proofing, technical vs. business…
I will talk about one or more sessions from XML 2008 here. Mark Birbeck of Web Backplane talking about Ubiquity XForms. Browsers are slow to adopt new standards. Ajax libraries have attempted to work around this. Lots of experimentation which is both good and bad, but at least has legitimzed extensions to browsers. JavaScript is…
I’m off to XML 2008 in Arlington, VA. One thing I’ll be seeking is a top-tier QA candidate for XML technologies. If you are that person, look me up. :-) -m
The long-awaited Python 3.0 is out. It fixes almost every annoyance I have with the language, particularly around Unicode handling, which is important in the kinds of projects I work on. Now, to revisit some of my Open Source projects… -m
Pi, an irrational number, cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction of integers (and all real-world length units are ultimately based on integers). So either pi is not a circle’s ratio of circumference to diameter, or circles don’t exist (or both!) More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
First the bee colonies start to disappear. Next, acorns. Does anyone have a map of the acorn-devoid areas? -m