A lexer might seem like one of the boringest pieces of code to write, but every language brings it’s own little wrinkles to the problem. Elegant solutions are more work, but also more rewarding. There is, of course, a large body of work on table-driven approaches, several of them listed here (and bigger list), though…
Author: mdubinko
I’m en route to Balisage 2012, though beset by multiple delays. The first leg of my flight was more than two hours delayed, which made the 90 minute transfer window…problematic. My rebooked flight, the next day (today, that is) is also delayed. Then through customs. Maybe all I’ll get out of Tuesday is Demo Jam….
Today is the 10-year anniversary of this epic message from James Clark on the relative merits of Relax NG vs. XML Schema, and whether the latter should receive preferential treatment. Still relevant today–the discussion is still going, although an increasing number of human-readable web specifications have adopted RelaxNG in some form. -m
I’m getting ready to leave for MarkLogic World, May 1-3 in Washington, DC, and it’s shaping up to be one fabulous conference. I’ve always enjoyed the vibe at these events–it has a, well, cool-in-a-data-geeky-way thing going on (like the XML conference in the early 2000’s where I got to have lunch with James Clark, but that’s…
I’ve been thinking a lot about big data, and two recent items nicely capture a slice of the discussion. 1) Alex Milowski recounting working with Big Weather Data. He concludes that ‘naive’ (as-is) data loading is a “doomed” approach. Even small amounts of friction add up at scale, so you should plan on doing som…
I’m sure this is old news by now, but here’s one more data point. As it turns out, XForms Institute uses an old skool XForms engine written in Flash, dating approximately back to the era when Flash was necessary to do XForms-ey things in the browser. The feedback form for the site is, quite naturally,…
I’ve used this same recipe for three things: weight loss, after-exercise protein, and sore-teeth liquid diet. It’s great. 1 cup 2% milk 1 cup Dannon Fit & Light vanilla yogurt 1 scoop Syntha-6 protein powder (banana is great) Mix. This yields 450 calories with a whopping 39g of protein, 48g of carb (but only 30g of…
Check out these tips. The article talks about iPad, but they work on iPhone too, even an old 3G. One one hand, it shows the intense amount of careful thought Apple puts into the user experience. But on the other hand, it highlights the discovery problem. I know people who have been using iOS since…
A cautionary tale of language from Ted Nelson: We might call a common or garden spade– A personalized earth-moving equipment module A mineralogical mini-transport A personalized strategic tellurian command and control module An air-to-ground interface contour adjustment probe A leveraged tactile-feedback geomass delivery system A man-machine energy-to-structure converter A one-to-one individualized geophysical restructurizer A portable…
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…
MarkLogic 5 is out today. Here’s five things beyond the official announcement that developers should know about it: If you found the CQ sample useful, you’ll love Query Console, which does everything CQ does and more (syntax highlighting!) Better Search API support for metadata: MarkLogic has always had support for storing metadata separately from documents….
Andromeda took the facebook Challenge, and found 52 separate requests in 24 hours that would have gone to the facebook mothership. Watch her blog for more updates. How about you? If you look through these logs, pay particular attention to the referer field. This tells you on which site you were browsing when the data…
Worried about how much data facebook is collecting on you, even on 3rd party sites, even if you’re signed out? Try this for 24 hours: Find a file named ‘hosts’ on your computer. On Mac/Linux systems, it’s under /etc/. On Windows, it used to be under System32 somewhere, but who knows now. Stash a backup…
Having been recently accused of “vile” habits in regard to tea-drinking, I feel that I need to clear the air. :) I’ve never been officially tested, but I am almost certainly a supertaster. (This explains, among other things, my aversion to most vegetables and my status as a nationally ranked beer judge). I’ve never been…
The awesome thing about the internet is that you never know who’s reading your stuff. Case in point: during the depths of the hypertext linking standards discussions, after folks realized that XLink wasn’t going to work with HTML (not even with XML-flavored XHTML), all kinds of proposals flew around about what to do about it….
One book that Ken Bado, the MarkLogic President and CEO, likes to talk about is Good to Great, (subtitled why some companies make the leap… and others don’t), a result of many man-years of meticulous research. There’s plenty to think about in this book. It talks about the qualities of a “level 5” executive: the…
Running commentary on Twitter, but hurry, Twitter’s search infrastructure has the long-term memory of a fruit fly. Posts tagged with MLUC11 will soon be dropping off the search event horizon. -m
Not an April Fools joke. I’m now tweeting in professional capacity. I’ll talk about XML technologies, the web, and various and sundry geeky topics. -m
What’s that on your TV screen? Why, it’s MarkLogic, again. Why President Obama Picked the Bay Area And it’s true, we’re hiring big time. Maybe your resume should be in that pile… -m
Today I exchanged electrons with a major airline, which will ultimately result in them removing a certain amount of abstract currency units from my account. In other words, see you all at XML Prauge 2011. I’ve never been to this conference before, and each year I hear better and better things. Looking forward to it….
Some great data from my one-time colleague Peter Mika. Based on data culled from 12 billion web pages, RDFa is on 3.5 percent of them, even after discounting “trivial” uses of it. Just look at how much that dark blue bar shot up since the last measurement, some 18 months earlier. Also of note: eRDF…
I found this article interesting. The author posits: “A good programmer will spend most of his time doing work that he hates, using tools and technologies that he also hates.†While I disagree with many of his supporting arguments, I think the overall theme is pretty accurate. Working with software, the good parts seem to…
The remarkable C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is offering XForms training in Maryland (at Mulberry Technologies), Feb 14 & 15, 2011. This is a two-day hands-on introduction to XForms. Check it out. This is a great opportunity to learn more about XForms. -m
This is a non-technical description of why Yahoo! Mail is unsafe to use in a public setting, and indeed at all. I will be pointing people at this page as I go through the long process of changing an address I’ve had for more than a decade. What’s wrong with Yahoo Mail? A lot of…
Dear Yahoo, What’s the deal? Shortly after FireSheep was announced on Oct 24, 2010, you should have had an emergency security all-hands meeting. You should have had an edict passed down from the “Paranoids” group to get secure or else. Maybe these things happened–I have no way of knowing. But it is clear that it’s…
I’ve seen lots of discussion for and against link shorteners, but not specifically this line of argument: Let me grab a random shortened link from Twitter. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back. http://bit.ly/b1fYi1 OK, that’s six characters in the domain, a slash, and six more characters. 50 years from now, if bit.ly is still…
I want to write a program that uses TurKit to pass the Turing Test. Cheating, sure, but should be doable (other than time lag issues), right? -m
Whenever I undertake something big and challenging enough to be worthwhile, whether editing a W3C specification, running a more demanding distance, a new software project, or something else, I notice a similar trajectory of progress: Ready to start: Full of adrenaline and excitement. Audacious goals seem readily reachable. 5-10% through: Whoa, this is difficult! And…
Good news for big data fans. The FCC has released APIs to several large databases involving broadband statistics, spectrum licenses, and some related topics. I haven’t had a chance for a close look yet, perhaps we can do that together. Link. -m
This epic posting on MVC helped me better understand the pattern, and all the variants that have flowed outward from the original design. One interesting observation is that the earlier designs used Views primarily as output-only, and Controllers primarily as input-only, and as a consequence the Controller was the one true path for getting data…