Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there….
Author: mdubinko
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is now shipping from Amazon and other stores. I reviewed a pre-release copy of it and liked it. But the best part is–like Cory’s other books–it’s downloadable right now, for free, under an open content license. I can attest that this is an effective strategy for getting your name and your…
In the new-to-me department, here’s a library and description of useful XQuery functions from my friend Priscilla Walmsley. XSLT 2, also. -m P.S. Mark my words, more news is coming…
When making hash browns xkcd style, there are at least 14 ways it could go badly. That’s not a potato, it’s a misshapen rock. Unexpectedly flammable tennis racket. Sparks landing on gas can. Food poisoning via undercooked hash browns due to limited flame contact time. Broken plate fragments. Dripping, flaming gasoline. Swing and a miss;…
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them… The prescient Vannevar Bush, who foresaw (among other things) the importance of hyperlinks. -m
The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick. This volume has all of Dick’s earliest short and medium-length fiction. It’s PKD so you know it’s good, but this one really gives insight into how he developed some of the themes that came to dominate his later work. Even these early stories are…
Up on Flickr. Anita and I had a blast. We spent about 8 hours and saw maybe half of everything. -m
New gear, an Ooma VOIP box. I plan to post more technical details soon, but the short story is that you get a sleek little box that goes between your dsl or cable modem and your router, and you get unlimited local and long distance calling. For free. For life (or 3 years, according to…
If you have webdev skillz, you might be interested in the SearchMonkey launch party on May 15. Good food, good drink, good coding. Space is limited, but I have a few invites to share. Comment here or contact me offline if interested. -m
Today happens to mark the 6th anniversary of my blog. To celebrate going into year seven I’m refocusing it, including a new name: Micahpedia. Blogging is an important skill, a subset of the overall skill of managing your online persona, so it’s worth devoting some attention to. The ego-burst doesn’t hurt either. My concrete goal…
“Rails is a lot of fun, and lets me do cool new things – but it’s hard to eat it.” Simon St. Laurent -m
Tips from Leo Reilly in How to Outnegotiate Anyone (Even a Car Dealer!). Be patient. If you insist on having something today, know what you want and be prepared to pay for it. Never disclose your deadline. Cultivate a positive relationship with the other party. Don’t make the other side look stupid (for a prolonged…
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but SearchMonkey (now an official name, not just a project name) is in external limited beta. Keep an eye on ysearchblog, lots more technical content is on the way. -m
Roughly speaking, the innovator’s dilemma happens when a product progressively gets more and more advanced features, to the point that it misses out (by listening to customers) on an entire new opportunity. At that point, a simpler, competing product can come into play and make large gains. But what happens when a company is generally…
I’m not involved in the the corporate wrangling about Microsoft and Yahoo! talks. Which leaves me relatively free to comment on it. [Disclosure: I am, not too surprisingly, a Yahoo! shareholder.] Lots of things have been happening lately. A deadline of, well, today. Talks of Google adsense trials. And all kinds of merger speculation involving…
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, herself rowling in gazillions of dollars, is along with her publisher suing Steven Vander Ark, a poor librarian who produced a lexicon of the Harry Potter universe. Rowling says it’s not about the money, it’s about control. Poppycock. If that was the case, she would have objected to the web…
Some books you forget immediately, but some stick with you. Some affect you so profoundly that years later you still think about them. They get under your skin and shape your future. Here’s my list: How to Win Friends and Influence People This got me through years of W3C work, and still affects every human…
Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden, largest app clusters of this particular platform can: Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day. However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m
Never let anyone say that forms are easy. What seems like a boring, tedious topic on the surface is surprisingly deep and challenging. As evidence, the multi-billion-dollar plan to modernize the US census in 2010 has fallen back to paper technology. Sadly their plans didn’t involve XForms. Highly-critical applications, like say voting, are even more…
(sick again…at least I get to catch up on my reading) Something has always puzzled me: I’ve never solidly connected with a Cory Doctorow story. It’s baffling; we’re practically brothers-in-geekdom. Most every nonfiction thing I read from Cory leaves me nodding in agreement. If we met, we’d have no trouble talking for hours about metacrap,…
Evernote looks like a cool application, and for at least a few more hours, you can get it for free via the Giveaway of the Day site. At first glance, this seems like the closest software I’ve seen to the original “Brain Attic” concept I’ve held for years. My most pressing questions are (big surprise)…
I have here a pre-release copy of Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother. With permission. In plain text. Being read with the UNIX command less. On an XO laptop. And so far it’s awesome. -m
So today Yahoo! announced a major facet of what I’ve been working on lately: making the web more meaningful. Lots of fantastic coverage, including TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (and others, please link in the comments), and supportive responses and blog posts across the board. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this good about being a…
Some time ago, Doug Crockford’s excellent blog pointed me to this page on “excessive DTD traffic” at the W3C. Go ahead and follow that link, I’ll wait… All the standard templates that show how to construct a basic XHTML page include a public identifier of http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd and often a namespace name of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. As the…
Somehow I missed this posting and the underlying news that a Y Research project has a nice public demo of semantic search, driven by RDF, RDFa, and microformats. Still a rough sketch of a full solution, with multiple-second access times. But I particularly like the query for renaissance faire. -m
The WebPath bug reports continue to roll in. For one, queries against *.wikipedia.* don’t seem to work. You get something back, but it has no resemblance to the page you were looking for. The problem comes from the W3C tidy service that I use, specifically that the (understandably overworked and understaffed) admins at the Wikimedia…
As spotted on TechCrunch, full article. This is a game-changer folks. Check out the comments attached to the article. -m
Amazon hosted a networking event tonight. They had me at free beer and a chance to look at a Kindle. Now that I’ve actually played with one, I can comment on some of its features for better or worse. It’s heavier and more solid than it looks. With the little padded cover, it could pass…
It’s been an exhausting past couple of weeks, but life goes on. WebPath made front page at next.yahoo. I’m starting to get feedback from developers who are actually using it, filing bugs, suggesting features, and it’s gratifying. The community is still building up. Won’t you join too? -m