Going away for a week (so possibly minimal posting here). What am I bringing to read? The Watchmen Analog magazine (Nov 2008 issue featuring Robert Sawyer) Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive Make magazine (issue 15, DIY music) Check some of these out. What do you like to read when travelling? -m
Category: announcement
Mur Lafferty’s new superhero novel is making the rounds. She’s encouraging everyone to buy a printed copy on August 25 (buy it here) to make a nice impression in the bestseller lists. I’m a sucker for these kinds of promotions. The full text also recently appeared on the Escape Pod feed, under a Creative Commons…
This post will be continuously updated to contain the most recent details about an XQuery 1.0 RDFa parser I wrote for Mark Logic. It follows the Functional RDFa pattern. At present there is little to say, but eventually code and more will be available. Stay tuned. -m
By now you’ve likely noticed the Geek Thoughts postings here. This is an experiment on a few different levels. What makes comics special? To what extent are pictures, often little more than stick figures, a critical part of the web comic experience? Can a web comic still be funny and thought-provoking with only words? Specifically…
My traditional mead, the one that took years to make took the gold in the 24B (Traditional, semi-sweet) category at the mead-only Arizona Mead Cup. (results) This one goes back before the Great Hard Drive Crash, where (combined with a freak that-directory-didn’t-get-backed-up-bug) my early meadmaking records were lost. But there are a few hints left…
Through the weekend I put most of the final touches on an implementation of RDFa in XQuery. The implementation is based on the functional specification of RDFa, an offshoot of the excellent work coming out of the W3C task force. The spec contains a procedural description of the parsing algorithm, and several have successfully followed…
Looks like a reasonably-sized revision. The first public working draft seems downright thin, in fact, relative to all the SHOULDs and MAYs in the requirements document. In particular, I’d like to see progress on 2.3.16 Higher order functions. (Then do we get a book XQuery: The Good Parts? …kidding..) -m
My next Meade Classe will be on Saturday, August 2nd, which happens to be Mead Day. Come learn…and taste. Full details: Mead brewing and appreciation class Mead, honey wine, “the nectar of the godsâ€. Whatever you call it MoreFlavor Los Altos is sponsoring a class to help you learn more about this wonderful fermented beverage…
I’ll be up in San Francisco the rest of this week at the Mark Logic User Conference. If you’ll be there too, be sure to look me up. -m
From the Yahoo! Developer blog, new search keywords you can use to hone in on indexed microformats. For example, to see every hAtom-bearing page that mentions ‘dubinko’ use the query [searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.uf.hatom dubinko]. Works similarly for hCard, hCalendar, hReview, and XFN. I’m sure more are coming soon too. -m
I registered ‘xfv’ on Google App Engine. Too bad there doesn’t appear to be any significant XML libraries supported. I have XPath covered by my pure-python WebPath, but what about Relax NG? Anyone know of anything in pure python? -m
In my about page, I’ve written my CV in two lines. Why don’t you try it, then link back to here? I’ve been known to use this as an interview question, and it’s quite a bit harder than it looks. A clever candidate will turn the paper sideways giving themselves more room to write “two…
You probably noticed the byline on my recent Yahoo! developer network posting. It, and a few more posts still in the pipe, list me as a “SearchMonkey Team Alumnus”. So yeah, it’s official, I’ve hung up my exclamation point and moved on to something else. Specifically, Mark Logic, where a group of impressively talented people…
Yeah, more than ever before. See my article on Yahoo! developer net. The stuff I talk about here is currently live in the indexer. -m
you can spot me in this pic. Have you tried out SearchMonkey yet? -m
I’m posting this during a power outage. Since I re-rigged my telecom setup with the Ooma box, I put all my telecom and internet boxes on a UPS. I’d been itching for a power outage to test it out. Temperatures are close to 100F today here, and with all the AC units working, I got…
Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there….
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is now shipping from Amazon and other stores. I reviewed a pre-release copy of it and liked it. But the best part is–like Cory’s other books–it’s downloadable right now, for free, under an open content license. I can attest that this is an effective strategy for getting your name and your…
If you have webdev skillz, you might be interested in the SearchMonkey launch party on May 15. Good food, good drink, good coding. Space is limited, but I have a few invites to share. Comment here or contact me offline if interested. -m
Today happens to mark the 6th anniversary of my blog. To celebrate going into year seven I’m refocusing it, including a new name: Micahpedia. Blogging is an important skill, a subset of the overall skill of managing your online persona, so it’s worth devoting some attention to. The ego-burst doesn’t hurt either. My concrete goal…
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but SearchMonkey (now an official name, not just a project name) is in external limited beta. Keep an eye on ysearchblog, lots more technical content is on the way. -m
So today Yahoo! announced a major facet of what I’ve been working on lately: making the web more meaningful. Lots of fantastic coverage, including TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (and others, please link in the comments), and supportive responses and blog posts across the board. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this good about being a…
Somehow I missed this posting and the underlying news that a Y Research project has a nice public demo of semantic search, driven by RDF, RDFa, and microformats. Still a rough sketch of a full solution, with multiple-second access times. But I particularly like the query for renaissance faire. -m
As spotted on TechCrunch, full article. This is a game-changer folks. Check out the comments attached to the article. -m
It’s been an exhausting past couple of weeks, but life goes on. WebPath made front page at next.yahoo. I’m starting to get feedback from developers who are actually using it, filing bugs, suggesting features, and it’s gratifying. The community is still building up. Won’t you join too? -m
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…
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…
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…