Are you coming? Link. It starts on May 4 (Star Wars day!) at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco. Guest speakers include Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and Michelle Manafy, Editor-in-Chief of EContent magazine. Early bird registration ends Feb 28. -m
Author: mdubinko
As heard from my friend and Mark Logic contractor Ryan Grimm. -m
Dora: Oh no! Lawrence Fawusu, 52, Operational Manager of the International Commercial Bank Ghana Limited is in trouble! He needs to move the sum of US$22, 000.000 (TWENTY TWO MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLAR) outside the country, but doesn’t know where to turn. Dora: Who do we call when we don’t know the way to go?…
Let’s say you have a box that (completely legally) spits out 1 dollar per day. I’m using “box” in an abstract sense here: maybe it’s an investment or a business opportunity. How much would you pay for this box? In other words, what’s its fair market value? What if it spit out one dollar per…
Some thoughts worth considering on state of HTML development today. -m
I was lured in by a slick promotion, and decided to give a new writing tool a try. WhiteSmoke seems like it’s primarily aimed at folks for whom English is not a first language, but quotes like “Innovative technology for native and non–native English speakers” make it seem like it could help. When I wrote…
I asked this on the XSLTForms list, but it’s worth casting a wider net. Say I have an XML instance like this: <root> <format>xml</format> </root> Possible values for the format element are “xml”, “text”, “binary”, or a default setting, indicated by a complete absence of the <format> element. I’d like this to attach to a…
May all in your life be an optimization problem to solve. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
I got a personal email pitch from recruiters at both Facebook and Google, oddly enough both messages within a 3-minute window on a Monday morning. Hiring is on the uptick again, it seems. My team is still looking for the right front end engineer–someone who knows the JavaScript language in depth, how to use semantic…
MZFinance.NoPasswordToken_message is the apparently Google-unique error message my iPhone gave me today whilst purchasing a free app. Always one happy to leave a new mark on the web, I’m recording it here. If you’ve seen it too (and you come here within the 30-day window) please post a comment on your experience. -m
Games like Farmville and the iPhone knock-off iFarm throw in a unique twist in the realm of strategy gaming: crops that get planted mature in “real time”. If a crop takes 24 hours to grow, then you need to literally wait the full 24 hours. Great for making an app “sticky” and getting users to…
Chocolate is reasonably healthy in small quantities, as long as you get the good stuff without too much sugar or dairy added. I’ve been tasting around for a few months now. I claim zero credentials in chocolate tasting, so what I say here might seem amusing to experts. Scores are purely subjective: how much did…
Hands down, the stupidest Science Friday segment evar. I want my 11 minutes back. -m
Excellent article in Wired, perhaps a good explanation of my career. :-) Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. Which sounds like a fairly typical spec review at Mark Logic. Hint: we’re hiring–email me….
Check out the updated careers page, including a quote from YT. If you’re looking for an amazing place to work, get in touch with me. In particular I’m looking for top-notch JavaScript/FE/UI people. -m
I just ordered a beer appreciation kit from tasteyourbeer.com. I’m all for less swilling, more appreciating. This one includes little vials of 13 different kinds of hops to compare. Train your palate, but be warned: once you start down this road, forever will it dominate your soul. You’ll be picking out different flavors in everything…
So Steorn’s Orbo technology is on display in Dublin. They have multiple live video streams, but at the #3 view at this hour shows “Offline” and “The channel owner has prohibited viewing from this web page”. Public viewing hours run from 10a to 7p six days a week. What is it? There’s a detailed exploded…
At first glance, this seems to be the Snow Leopard of Tinderbox releases–lots of behind-the-scenes technology updates and largely the same core features. If you’re looking for a way to get more organized, it’s worth a look. Link. -m
Celebrating 500 posts since I went to WordPress in May 2006. Prior to that, an additional 730 posts as I floated through a typical evolution of blogging platforms: Easy start: blogger (299 posts in 24 months) Succumbing to the desire to roll your own (259 posts in 12 months) Realizing that rolling your own is…
The best thing a user can do to advance the Web is to help move people off IE 6 — Ryan Servatius, senior product manager for Internet Explorer. Source. -m
One of the lead bullets describing why XForms is cool always mentions that it is based on a Model View Controller framework. When building a full XRX app, though, MVC might not be the best choice to organize things overall. Why not? Consider a typical XRX app, like MarkLogic Application Builder. (You can download a…
Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic is available to watch instantly on Netflix, but only until November 30. Recommended viewing for the weekend. -m
One particular conversation I’ve overheard several times, often in the context of web and standards development, has always intrigued me. It goes something like this: You know, Ted Nelson’s hypertext system from the 60’s had unbreakable, two-way links. It was elegant. But then came along Tim Berners-Lee and HTML, with its crappy, one-way, breakable links,…
MarkLogic fans should check out Norm Walsh’s posting about his talk at the NY User Group. If you follow the right Twitter feeds, this is probably not too much of a surprise, but now the cat is officially disjoint with the volume inside the bag. Disclaimer: be sure to read the disclaimer there. -m
If Moore’s law applies to flash (and flash-like) memory storage, and it certainly seems like it does, in another decade we will all be carrying around a terabyte on our phones. What happens then? More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
If this site is accurate, it’s now possible to have superconducting material at household freezer temperatures: 254k, or a tiny bit below 0F. From power lines to maglevs to supercolliders to energy storage, the potential applications boggle the mind. -m Note: I’m having trouble finding independent verification of this, other than what appears to be…
Link credit goes to Joho. This looks pretty significant. The AZ Supreme Court ruled that document metadata must be disclosed under existing public records law. This may start a chain reaction with other states following suit. With the movement toward open data including data.gov and the Federal Register, this fits in well. Quite often metadata…
Tractors are to dogs as rocking chairs are to cats. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
At the risk of sounding fanboy, are Windows 7 reviewers logic challenged? Not to pick on any one in particular, but here’s the most recent one I bumped into–I’ve seen similar qualities in other reviews. Under the reasons to get it: 1. Your computer can probably run it. Unlike Vista, which proved a giant slop-feeding…
I’ll be speaking next Tuesday (Oct 27) at the Northern Virginia MarkLogic User Group (NOVAMUG). Here’s what I’ll be talking about. Application Builder consists of two main parts: Search API to enable Google-style search string processing, and the actual UI wizard that steps users through building a complete search app. It uses a number of…