I’ve taken this opportunity to ditch CVS on all my existing Sourceforge projects (pyxmlwiki, xfv) while setting up my newest project. Here’s the browable subversion source. Have at it. Where should you start with this code? Step zero, if you haven’t already, is to look through my XML 2007 slides on my site. First thing…
WebPath, my experimental XPath 2.0 engine in Python is now an open source project with a liberal BSD license. I originally developed this during a Yahoo! Hack Day, and now I get to announce it during another Hack Day. Seems appropriate. The focus of WebPath was rapid development and providing an experimental platform. There remains…
Take a look at this URL, and the page behind it. This is a list of all the Flickr photos with the tag “xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/“. Although these have been around for a while, I hadn’t been aware of this kind of tagging until recently. Why “xml” in the namespace declaration? This doesn’t have much to do…
Admittedly, their marketing folks wouldn’t describe it that way, but essentially that’s what was announced today. (documentation in PDF format, closely related to what-used-to-be Konfabulator tech; here’s the interesting part in HTML) The press release talks about reaching “billions” of mobile consumers; even if you don’t put too much emphasis on press releases (you shouldn’t)…
I discovered this by accident, but my life has been measurably better since. You probably already know that you can switch apps quickly with Cmd+tab. But if you reach your pinky up a bit more and hit Cmd+~ you can rotate through the windows of the current app. This turns out to be most useful…
Holding steady at 1280 x 854 but due for an upgrade soon. Seriously, if you find yourself setting various goals just because something on the calendar changed, you probably don’t have the long-term motivation needed to see it through, which is why so many new years’ resolutions lie in broken heaps by mid February. If…
This blog page at the W3C discusses the TAG finding that a data format specification SHOULD provide for version information, specifically reconsidering that suggestion. As a few data points, XML 1.1 (with explicit version identifiers) is something of a non-starter, while Atom (without explicit version identifiers) is doing OK so far–though a significant revision to…
Thanks to all the folks who showed interest in this little XPath puzzler published here a few weeks ago. Some asked to see the dataset, but I’m not able to release it at this time (but ask me again in 3 months). Turns out it was a combination of two bugs, one mine, one somebody…
The new ticker symbol is SCOXQ.PK, as in “pink sheet”. From the soaring heights of the $20s, it’s now under a dime per share, as bankruptcy proceedings move forward and their attempt to charge fees for all Linux users continues to crumble. Serves ’em right. -m
I visited the Amazon home page today to find this: Thanks, Amazon! Now sit back down, you’re scaring me. -m
I’m taking some time off from work to relax a bit. And just in time for that, my OLPC arrived. Check out the photoset on Flickr. It’s an impressive little machine, and I’m very happy to have got this instead of a Kindle. :) -m
One whole evening of the program was devoted to XForms, focused around the new 1.1 Candidate Recommendation. I admit that some of the early 1.1 drafts gave me pause, but these guys did a good job cleaning up some of the dim corners and adding the right features in the right places. This is worth…
OK, the majority of the buzz came from my talk, where I strongly encouraged folks to take a look at Hadoop. This article seems to be saying much the same things. If you’re curious about the future of distributed computation and storage, it’s worth a look. -m
Here’s the slides from my presentation at XML 2007, dealing with an implementation of XPath 2.0 in Python. I hope to have even more news in this area soon. WebPath (html) WebPath (OpenDocument, 4.7 megs) Did you notice the OpenOffice has nice slide export, that generates both graphically-accurate slides and highly indexable and accessible text…
While I’ve got your attention, here’s an XPath (1.0) puzzler. I have an RDFa dataset compiled from various and sundry sources. It’s all wrapped up in a single XML file. I run this XPath to see how many meta elements are present: //meta and it returns a node-set of size 762. Now, I want to…
Surely somebody has implemented this in at least one tool. In a text editor, I come across a misspelled close tag like </xsl:stylsheet>. My editor highlights the line as an error, which is is, not matching the start tag and all. Why can’t it go the extra step and give me the same kind of…
Here’s the best news I’ve had all day: the creators of MST3K are reuniting under a new effort, called Cinematic Titanic, the firstfruits of which are due out this coming Monday. I’ve been a long time fan of MST3K, watched most of the early episodes on UHF in Minnesota. And for the record, I like…
I came away from the XML 2007 conference with lots of new ideas and inspirations. I’ll write some postings about individual technologies in the coming days. But for now, another RDFa question. If I need to represent a list, what is the best way to do it? Does it differ between ordered and unordered lists?…
If you want to get anything done, give it to a busy person… In my life, I’ve started four novels, completed my goals on three, gotten to “The End” on two, and completely flamed out on one. The first was in 2001. I hadn’t written much since high school. Something clicked in my head that…
Well, my plans for a series of postings about details of implementing XPath 2.0 fell rather short, so let’s skip straight to the good stuff. An article by Mike Kay giving the details of the Saxon architecture. On the surface it’s about performance, but it also has an excellent section in internals. Worth a look….
Or, why the Kindle cost $399 at launch. What is Amazon’s most valuable IP? How about a list of registered users who are guaranteed as willing to pay a premium price for a nifty gadget (I mean “service”) along with the exclusive privilege of buying more things from Amazon? Somewhere in Amazon’s database land, alongside…
That was the subject of an email I got this morning. After I headed in to work, I listed to Science Friday, which included the Ig Nobel Prize festivites. One of the winners? CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring…
Due to some unauthorized activities on my webspace, I’m trimming my online profile, notably the Brain Attic sites. These were my home base for consulting, which I haven’t been doing for 2+ years. Less surface area exposed means less exposure to the bad guys. This site, and XForms Institute are staying up for now, as…
Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books? There’s…
Amazon announced their ebook reader today, Kindle. Some of the earlier hype I’d read about it suggested that it would be not only a reading tool, but a writing tool as well. Nope. The obvious thing is the keyboard, an immediate non-starter for typing more than a few words. But if an external keyboard is…
As one who, in the all-too-near future, will be hammering out the visuals to go with my talk at XML 2007, this made my day. (be sure to check out the deeper pages too) -m
OK, let me take a step back from specific technologies like RDFa, let’s go through a really simple example. On a certain web page, I refer to a book. That book has a price of 21.86 US dollars. The page is intended as primarily human-readable, but I want to include machine-readable data too, for a…
What is the difference between placing instanceof=”prefix:val” vs. rel=”prefix:val” on something? How do I decide between the two? In the example of hEvent data, why is it better/more accurate to use instanceof=”cal:Vevent” instead of a blank node via rel=”cal:Vevent”? -m
“Compact Clark Notation“. (Inspired by reading this) -m