Check out this post at its new home on Writing Through The Fog.
Author: mdubinko
Lots of people are using Fitbit to get into better shape. But I haven’t heard of anyone using trackers to better measure what happens when you get sick. As it turns out, I’ve had a nasty case of bronchitis over the last week. This is the sickest I’ve been in a while, and I find…
In the previous article I described how antennae work in terms of EM waves. But EM isn’t exactly a wave. Quantum aspects require modeling as particles. Photons. But I can’t really figure out how a photon traveling through space gets converted into an electron current in a wire. There are some cases where treating EM as…
A layman’s description of how antennas work, plus some related experiments. Physics is strange when you think about it. I’ve been working with electronics since I was about five. (Not an exaggeration. I “fixed†one of my two-battery-requiring cars with one good battery and some wire.) I sailed through high school electronics, and went on…
Pop quiz. Why is the following Java 8 code unsafe? UPDATE: this code is fine, see comments. Still good to think about, though. Entity e = new Entity(); e.setName(“my new entity”); persistanceLayer.put(e); To provide some context, Entity is a POJO representing something we want to store in a database. And persistanceLayer is an instance of a…
According to Newtonian gravitation, the attraction between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Einstein refined this somewhat, but as long as there aren’t crazy speeds or non-flattish spacetime involved, Newton’s formulation is accurate. As far as we know. I read this…
(From the archives: I wrote this over 2 years ago, but never hit publish. At last, the tale can be told!) If you haven’t seen it, the keynote at MarkLogic World 2013 is worth a look. I was on stage demonstrating new Semantics features built into MarkLogic server. Two of the three demos were based on…
I am trying something new with the GeekThoughts domain. Instead of pointing to my blog, it’s pointing at some cool geeky things on a CMS that’s easier to update. Won’t you check it out? geekthoughts.info
I did a thing. I am experimenting with machine learning and neural networks. To do so, I need a real-world dataset to play with. For starters, I am using a 5×7 pixel array, as common in many DIY projects, representing digits 0-9. Please help me my drawing a picture of the randomly-selected digit below. All…
I’ve talked about this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever written it down. As more of my day-to-day involves leadership, I think about this stuff. To run an effective team, you need to think in vector sums. As the great poet A. Yankovic once said, “Do vector calculus just for fun.” But this isn’t…
I’m running a Scrum project, and doing things a little differently than the classic method. I’ve done this at two different companies now, and it seems to work out well. Before a traditional standup meeting with The Three Questions, I schedule 15 minutes of intentional downtime. Since this happens at the start of the day,…
Quick update here: if you are reading this, you’d probably like this short story, named in honor of Dennis Ritchie, FREE and currently burning up the charts for 30 minute reads in Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense. Doing pretty well in Science Fiction and Cyberpunk as well. (link fixed) Do a solid for readers everywhere and…
Filed under need-to-try this: A homebrew version of a popular hacker drink called Club Mate. I already have a carbonator cap and CO2 setup, as part of my beer brewing hardware. One variation I would experiment with is cutting down on the sugar. Even though Club Mate isn’t very sweet, it still has a fair…
There are a number of sieve algorithms that can be used to list prime numbers up to a certain value.  I came up with this implementation in Scala. I rather like it, as it makes no use of division, modulus, and only one (explicit) multiplication. Despite being in Scala, it’s not in a functional style. It uses…
Based on the huge number of mail bounces I’ve been getting today, it looks like an unscrupulous somebody forged my return address on a bunch of mail. Perhaps you even sought out this blog based on the distinctive domain name. Some subject lines in use: it’s so nice to write to u maybe your lady…
I can’t blog about secret projects I’m working on, so how about something completely different? I’ve improved my fitness level substantially over the last five years. (On index cards, I have my daily weight and body fat percentage, according to the bathroom scale, back to November 2009). Here’s some things I’ve learned: Moving counts. A…
Alex Milowski asks on Twitter about my thoughts on Skunklink, now a decade old. Linking has long been thought one of the cornerstones of the web, and thereby a key part of XML and related syntaxes. It’s also been frustratingly difficult to get right. XLink in particular once showed great promise, but when it came…
If you’ve come here because of something you noticed in your HTTP access logs, read on. Who is doing this? This is a personal project of Micah Dubinko. It is completely separate from anything related to any employer. What is ASLbot? In the immediate future, ASLbot is no more than a personal research project. It…
This year’s Balisage conference was preceded by the international symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, which naturally enough centered around XForms. As someone who’s written multiple articles surveying XForms implementations, I have to say that it’s fantastic to finally see one break out of the pack. Nearly every demo I saw in Montreal used XSLTForms if…
This past weekend marked my five-year anniversary at MarkLogic. It’s been a fun ride, and I’m proud of how much I’ve accomplished. It was the technology that originally caught my interest: I saw the MarkMail demo at an XML conference, and one thing led to another. The company was looking to expand the product beyond…
This week marked the MarkLogic World conference and with it some exciting news. Without formally “announcing” a new release, the company showed off a great deal of semantic technology in-progress. Part of that came from me, on stage during the Wednesday technical keynote. I’ve been at MarkLogic five years next month, and the first piece…
Naming is hard to do well, almost as hard as designing good software in the first place. Take for instance the term ‘node’ which depending on the context can mean A fundamental unit of the DOM (Document Object Model) used in creating rich HTML5 applications. A basic unit of the Semantic Web–a thing you can say stuff…
The valley is buzzing about Marissa’s edict putting the kibosh on Yahoos working from home. I don’t have any first-hand information, but apparently this applies somewhat even to one-day-a-week telecommuters. Some are saying Marissa’s making a mistake, but I don’t think so. She’s too smart for that. There’s no better way to get extra hours…
So I did it. I stood up on a platform in front of a room of native signers, and delivered a (pre-prepared) five minute presentation without making a sound. In front of cameras, with my ugly face beamed out to multiple large screens. That was stressful, though less so then many different public speaking engagements…
My journey into ASL continues. I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks _Seeing Voices_ and Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan’s _A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD_. In short, learning a language in your thirties is a whole different ballgame than learning as a toddler. There are a few different brain plasticity cliffs you drop off especially…
I’ve been learning a new language lately: American Sign Language aka ASL. Along with the language, I’ve picked up lots of new friends as part of a thriving culture. A big part of learning is through mistakes, and a big part of said culture is helpful bluntness. The combination of these can be a little…
In Nate Sliver’s new book, he mentions a classification system for experts, originally from Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock, along a spectrum of Fox <—> Hedgehog. (The nomenclature comes from an essay about Tolstoy.) Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas. The are ideologues and go “all-in” on whatever they’re espousing. A great…
I’ve mentioned Virgil Matheson in these pages a few times, but never made a full accounting. When I had my O’Reilly book published, I submitted a simple dedication in the manuscript: for Virgil But for whatever reason, it didn’t make it into the printed edition. This post is a small step toward letting the world…
MarkLogic 6 launched today, and it’s full of new and updated goodies. I spent some time designing the new Application Builder including the new Visualization Widgets. If you’ve used Application Builder in the past, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the changes. It’s leaner and faster under the hood. I’d love to hear what people think…