Thrilled, THRILLED to announce that I’ve been accepted to the 2010 Viable Paradise workshop. I sent in the first 8000 words of a manuscript that about half of the 7 readers of this blog have looked at. You know, the one that is Science Fiction–literally, fiction about science. So I’ll be spending some time in…
Category: announcement
For anyone trying to get up to speed on the technology side of non-traditional databases, including NoSQL concepts and not-your-father’s-XML, this webinar looks like a good start. Tuesday June 29, 2pm EST, 11am PST. -m
I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long…
Brief note: The W3C XProc specification, edited by my partner-in-crime Norm Walsh, has advanced to Recommendation status. Now go use it. -m
The new MarkLogic developer site is up, cleaner, better organized, and more social. Even cooler, it’s an XSLT-heavy application running on a pre-release version of MarkLogic. The new blog gives some of the details of the new site and transition. So, if you’re already a MarkLogic developer, this is a great resource. And if you’re…
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
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…
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…
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…
Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic is available to watch instantly on Netflix, but only until November 30. Recommended viewing for the weekend. -m
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…
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…
XForms 1.1 is now a full W3C Recommendation. Compared to version 1.0, which went live a bit more than 6 years ago, version 1.1 offers lots of road-tested tools that make development easier and more powerful, including new datatypes and XPath functions, a significantly more powerful submission subsystem, and a more flexible event model. And…
Come learn more about Mark Logic and get a behind-the-scenes look at the new Application Builder. I’ll be speaking at the NOVA MUG (Northern Virginia Mark Logic User Group) on October 27. This turns out to be pretty close to the big Semantic Web conference, so I’ll stick my head in there too. Stop by…
Fed Thread is a front end for the newly XMLified Federal Register. Why is this a big deal? It’s a daily publication of the goings-on of the US government. It’s a primary source for all kinds of things that normally only get rehashed through news organizations. And it is bulky–nobody can read through it on…
Another XForms site launched this week. This one seems pretty close to what I would like XForms Institute to become, if I had an extra 10 hours per week. -m
I had been asking around earlier for large RDF datasets. Here’s one. Looks like a great contest to build an app around this, but unfortunately, the deadline looks like it’s soonish (1 Oct). What is it? The major part of the dataset was crawled during February/March 2009 based on datasets provided by Falcon-S, Sindice, Swoogle,…
As part of the 300 program, Steorn recently released specific details about their technology, which was pretty much the whole point of the 300. The general reaction has been vaguely positive and appreciative (like this posting), though there is a huge self-selection bias in play. Their key operating principle is clever and unlike anything I’ve…
I’m heading off to beautiful downtown Montréal this weekend for Balisage, my first appearance at this particular conference. If you’re heading there too, look me up. -m
I hate moving at high speed with multiple large chunks of metal in close formation. I hate the sound of traffic. The smell. I hate it when people jump in a car to drive somewhere a block away. I hate driving. I hate parking. I hate SUVs. Also, getting a root canal leaves me in…
I’m noodling around with requirements and exploring existing work toward a solution for “decentralized extensability” on xml-dev, particularly for HTML. The notion of “Java-style” syntax, with reverse dns names and all, has come up many times in the context of these kinds of discussions, but AFAICT never been fully fleshed out. This is ongoing, slowly,…
Come join me at the Demo Jam at Balisage this year. August 11 at 6:30 pm. There will be lots of cool demos, judged by audience participation. I’d love to see you there. -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,…
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….
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…