On May 8 I wrote: it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together. On July 2, the W3C wrote: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed….
Roger Ebert review (“a horrible experience of unbearable length”) Fake Shia LaBeouf blog (“no no no no!”) Smashing box office records (200 mil in 5 days, “The per theater average, by the way, was astonishing: $26,453.”) -m
The Steorn 300 program is underway, and yes, I am one of the 300 looking at their information which is coming out in once-a-week bursts in the form of educational modules. So far, nothing interesting. Some basic physics lessons, and somewhat more interesting forum activity. But all signs seem to be pointing in the wrong…
I’m thrilled to announce MarkLogic 4.1 and with it my project App Services, is here. Top-of-the-post props go out to Colleen, David, and Ryan who made it happen. You might already know that MarkLogic Server is a super-powerful database slash search engine powering projects like MarkMail. (But did you know there’s a free-as-in-beer edition?) The…
When I get time, I want to watch all of this program on fora.tv from Dave McLean in SF who talks about how to make beer, why it tastes like it does, and why some people prefer various styles of beer. It’s a good follow-up to the NHC reception I made it to last week,…
A great introduction article. Maybe it’s just the crowd I hang with, but RDFa looks like it’s moving from trendy to serious tooling. -m
I spent 2 days at the Yahoo! campus at a VoCamp event, my first. Initially, I was dismayed at the schedule. Spend all the time the first day figuring out why everybody came? It seemed inefficient. But having gone through it, the process seems productive, exactly the way that completely decentralized groups need to get…
I’m sticking around Sunnyvale, but am selling my house. It’s a smaller “starter home”place good for a small family. It’s close to Yahoo!, Google, Ebay, Cisco, and lots of other South Bay companies. In a great neighborhood with lots of parks, restaurants (Giovanni’s Pizza just down the street is fantastic), and a nearby movie theater….
Since all these childhood media properties (just recently Transformers, G.I. Joe, Land of the Lost) are getting the movie treatment, why not a few more? Pez, the movie (directed by Michael Bay) A band of interdimensional travelers with rectangular bodies and grotesquely large heads arrive on earth to plant monitoring probes, with sprout out of…
The central thesis of The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is dead on: engineers get too wrapped up in their own worlds, and left entirely to their own whims can easily make a product incomprehensible to ordinary folks. For this reason alone, it’s worth reading. But I do question parts of his…
I was shocked today to find out that one of my old friends from the Yahoo Search days was let go in the last round. He’s simply brilliant and would have been one of the last people I would have expected that the managers-in-purple could do without. At the same time, I’m getting hounded by…
Balisage, formerly Extreme Markup, is the kind of conference I’ve always wanted to attend. Historically my employers have been not quite enough involved in the deep kinds of topics at this conference (or too cash-strapped, but let’s not go there) to justify spending a week on the road. So I’m glad that’s no longer the…
Google Android Will Be on 18-20 Phones by End of 2009 source. Let’s see, Larry, Sergey and Eric Schmidt, there’s three phones… More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
About a week ago I moved XForms Institute over to Subversion. Now the entire site is under version control, with a local copy I can edit. Publishing is as easy as logging in and running the command ‘svn up’. Honestly, I should have done this long ago. And any future sites I work on will…
From Brewster Kahle. Good read, so to speak. -m
Another anniversary this week, one year at Mark Logic. Much of it in stealth mode, but more details of what I’ve been up to are forthcoming. -m
Take something that’s done, no matter how crappy, and submit it. Right now, I’ll wait… Next time you have something ready, by comparison it will be ever so much better, and you’ll have no excuse to avoid submitting that as well. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
This brilliant bit is almost a throwaway paragraph on page 304, near the end. [Two men in a satirical dialog] managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement ‘unknowability’…
My plan is to start unsubstantiated rumors about the SUV Flu, and by association cause people to distance themselves from said implicated devices. You can help. Despite denials from the CDC (you know they’re in the pockets of the auto industry), SUV flu is serious and spreading fast. You might already have it and not…
The new feature called rich snippets shows that SearchMonkey has caught the eye of the 800 pound gorilla. Many of the same microformats and RDF vocabularies are supported. It seems increasingly inevitable that RDFa will catch on, no matter what the HTML5 group thinks. -m
As of today, I have been out of Yahoo! for a full year. And what a year it’s been… I guess that means I’m now free to recruit…any good XML people still wearing purple? -m
If you haven’t already, check out HTML: The Markup Langauge. Besides being a cool new recursive acronym for HTML, it is a reasonably-sane document. Also worth a look: Differences between HTML4 and HTML5. Many of the ideas from XHTML 2 (of which I was an editor at one point) are there. I think it’s time…
The universe is deeply, fundamentally weird. At the quantum level, all kinds of non-intuitive effects are the building blocks of, well everything. So what if not just observing, but believing in a particular outcome could influence the actual outcome of an experiment? Something like that could explain a lot: many of the claims of perpetual…
I’ve been experimenting with the preview version of Wolfram Alpha. It’s not like any current search engine because it’s not a search engine at all. Others have already written more eloquent things about it. The key feature of it is that it doesn’t just find information, it infers it on the fly. Take for exmple…
I found this explanation the most readable I’ve seen yet. She has slides too. The settlement itself has been recently delayed, which seems like a good idea for something of this magnitude. -m
Don’t panic. Panic == not thinking clearly. Avoid Twitter until symptoms subside. Probably HuffPost and Drudge too. Think ahead. If you don’t already have an Emergency Preparedness Kit assembled, well, that was kind of dumb. Over your next few trips to the grocery store, gradually get stuff for one. Don’t believe everything you read on…
Thanks to those who wrote in with bug reports about the XForms Validator: something changed recently and made the inserted Google Ads script confuse browsers, resulting in a blank page where you’d expect results. I’ve turned off the response-page ads, which were only getting in the way, and the problem seems to have vanished. Carry…
Lots of news reports about Geocities claim it was purchaed for “4 billion” dollars. But not really–that’s a pretty hefty rounding from 3.57 B. Also, that wasn’t cash, but magic boom time inflated stock. Yahoo was at $335.875 on announcement, so the deal amounted to about 10.6 million shares. Or at today’s values, a little…
I’ve always thought that the EXSLT model of developing community specifications worked well. Now a critical mass of folks has come together on a similar effort, aimed at providing extensions usable in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery, and other XPath-based languages like XProc. Maybe even XForms. Check it out, subscribe to the mailing list, and…
Hey readers, all seven of you, can you help me out? I’m perhaps finally switching to a Mac-native text editor, TextWrangler, or if I really like it, BBEdit. Within that app, what’s the easiest way to enter unusual characters not found on a keyboard, say Å¡ (Latin s with háÄek) or ḫ (h-breve below)? In…