Game On. Expect light posting this month. -m
Author: mdubinko
Many things in life are simpler when you only need to be within 5%: Pi is pretty much 3 Water weighs pretty much 8 pounds a gallon A quart is pretty much a liter (and a gallon, 4 liters) A year has pretty much 360 days, and pretty much 31 million seconds The speed of…
I see from the system requirements that Leopard requires an “866” Mhz processor. Is this a hard limit, or just an advisory? My first Mac–the one I wrote the book on–is a lowly 800 Mhz. box. Is it worth trying to upgrade it? -m
The more I look at RDFa, the more I like it. But still it doesn’t help with the pain-point of namespaces, specifically of unmemorable URLs all over the place and qnames (or CURIEs) in content. Does GRDDL offer a way out? Could, for instance, the namespace name for Dublin Core metadata be assigned to the…
In researching for an XPath 2.0 implementation, I ran across this curious document from the W3C. Despite being labeled a Working Draft (as opposed to a Note), it appears to be a one-shot document with no future hope for updates or enhancements. In short, it outlines several options for the first stage or two of…
If you’re in the South Bay and like mead, you need to check this out. -m
Depending on who’s asking and who’s answering, W3C technologies take 5 to 10 years to get a strong foothold. Well, we’re now in the home stretch for the 5th anniversary of XForms Essentials, which was published in 2003. In past conferences, XForms coverage has been maybe a low-key tutorial, a few day sessions, and hallway…
I didn’t get to do much for Yahoo Hack Day, but I did get to help a coworker a teeny bit with an implementation of Y! Search for social web sites, including Facebook. There could be some interesting repercussions from that, so I won’t say more now. But what did surprise me is how many…
As widely reported by now, the final schedule for XML 2007 this December in Boston is up. All I have to add is the suggestion of careful attention to the Tuesday program at 4:00. :) If you can’t wait, some technical details are forthcoming in this space. That is all. -m
I’ll be doing some experimenting around here over maybe the next week or two. Specifically, setting up hAtom within these pages. Watch for falling debris and report any unusual observations. -m
Let’s see how many downstream pieces of software trip over this post… Do greater-than and less-than signs need to be escaped in XML? Conventional wisdom has it that less-than signs always do, since that character starts a fresh “tag”, but greater-than signs are safe. Wrong. There is a particular sequence, namely ]]> , not allowed…
It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “….
Speaking of podcasts, last week I unsubbed from Rocketboom, the show having officially become unbearably advertising-swamped. It feels good (but not as good as getting that hour-per-week of my life back from Diggnation). Possibly coming soon: unsub from Security Now, instead of fast-forwarding through half of it at present. -m
A strange note at the top of the web site that appeared in the last couple of days: Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007 It’s underlined to look like a link, but in fact is just styled that way. Some further observations and questions: The…
What are some good tools, with a strong preference for open source, for editing XForms these days? Comment below… -m
In the last few weeks, I’ve been getting more recruitment pitches, including from the well known person ________ who is now at _______, for a think-tank position with _______, multiple LinkedIn requests from Web 2.0 company ________ and even ________. So, is this a sign that the general industry is picking up? -m P.S. I’m…
EXSLT support coming to Firefox 3.0. Python Flyweights. Timeline of MSFT engagement on document standards. RDFa Primer. And not that this is a conspiracy blog or anything, but strange things are afoot at Minot AFB, hours from where I grew up. -m
Watch this space for details. I’ll be speaking about something related to Python and XPath 2.0. Watch this blog for tidbits on the subject. :) -m
My Copious Free Time(tm) has been filled lately by two different evaluation projects. One is the 2nd Annual Writing Show Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest, for which the first round of judging is just winding up. The main benefit for contest entrants is that every submission gets a professional critique of at least…
Video from XTech, worth a look. -m
In the last couple of days, I’ve had three completely separate instances of people freshly interested in XForms coming to ask me about Stuff. A declarative model is pretty much irresistible compared to the alternatives. But nobody can directly use an abstract declarative sculpture–sombody needs to put some solid vocabulary and processing meat on the…
Today is my 2nd anniversary at Yahoo!. Looking back, it’s been a great time. Since I don’t know how long ago, I’ve fantasized about being involved in research. Check. Since sitting across from the mobile guys for 5 years in W3C meetings, I’ve fantasized about working in mobile. Check. And since I wrote Web search,…
It’s too easy to get absorbed in all the terrible things happening on the news. But not everything is like that. Take 7 minutes and watch this. -m
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Jean Bottéro Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn Yeah, they’re related. -m
Yeah, it’s for real. You save 27%! Sure, it’s powered by Amazon, but it’s still a little weird to see this come up in search results… -m
There’s a tram that goes by Yahoo, very convenient. Here’s a simple, step-by-step guide to finding schedule information through the official website. Navigate to http://www.vta.org Click on “Schedules, Maps and Fares” in the left sidebar. Click on “Route Schedules and Route Maps”. Scan down to the bottom third of the page. Click “Light Rail Schedules”….
Go check it out. It even has a Tidy option to clean up the markup. But they missed an important feature: it should include an option to run Tidy on the markup first then validate. This is becoming the defacto bar for web page validity anyway… -m
If a free energy device (like this one) were really possible, simple economics would dictate that (as soon as patents expired, etc.) one or several would be found in every cell phone, iPod, notebook computer, desktop computer, appliance, automobile, airplane, house, building, and factory. That’s a lot of waste heat that would get dumped onto…