On the evening of November 17, 2022, I tweeted thusly: Lesson 1: Before you ask people to be hardcore-devoted to you, first you need to demonstrate that you have the qualities of a leader. In THEIR eyes, not yours. Lesson 2: Actually, you don’t ever ask people to be devoted to you. Instead, you inspire…
Category: commercialism
I recently joined LinkedIn as a Senior Staff engineer–an individual contributor role more senior than any of my previous roles. As such, I’ve been inundated with every manner of request for my time. Part of my journey toward handling this situation is writing up my thoughts. Let’s go. Does time work differently for “senior” engineers?…
When their hand was forced by hard evidence, Apple admitted what many people had suspected: they deliberately slow down older phones, in as little as a year. Their apology letter is a masterpiece of copywriting. But let’s have a closer look, shall we? A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy…
Your shiny new iToaster complains when you plug it in: “This appliance has not been approved. Insert $0.25 to continue.†Net Neutrality explained.
(From the archives: I wrote this over 2 years ago, but never hit publish. At last, the tale can be told!) If you haven’t seen it, the keynote at MarkLogic World 2013 is worth a look. I was on stage demonstrating new Semantics features built into MarkLogic server. Two of the three demos were based on…
I am trying something new with the GeekThoughts domain. Instead of pointing to my blog, it’s pointing at some cool geeky things on a CMS that’s easier to update. Won’t you check it out? geekthoughts.info
This past weekend marked my five-year anniversary at MarkLogic. It’s been a fun ride, and I’m proud of how much I’ve accomplished. It was the technology that originally caught my interest: I saw the MarkMail demo at an XML conference, and one thing led to another. The company was looking to expand the product beyond…
This week marked the MarkLogic World conference and with it some exciting news. Without formally “announcing” a new release, the company showed off a great deal of semantic technology in-progress. Part of that came from me, on stage during the Wednesday technical keynote. I’ve been at MarkLogic five years next month, and the first piece…
The valley is buzzing about Marissa’s edict putting the kibosh on Yahoos working from home. I don’t have any first-hand information, but apparently this applies somewhat even to one-day-a-week telecommuters. Some are saying Marissa’s making a mistake, but I don’t think so. She’s too smart for that. There’s no better way to get extra hours…
In Nate Sliver’s new book, he mentions a classification system for experts, originally from Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock, along a spectrum of Fox <—> Hedgehog. (The nomenclature comes from an essay about Tolstoy.) Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas. The are ideologues and go “all-in” on whatever they’re espousing. A great…
MarkLogic 6 launched today, and it’s full of new and updated goodies. I spent some time designing the new Application Builder including the new Visualization Widgets. If you’ve used Application Builder in the past, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the changes. It’s leaner and faster under the hood. I’d love to hear what people think…
A lexer might seem like one of the boringest pieces of code to write, but every language brings it’s own little wrinkles to the problem. Elegant solutions are more work, but also more rewarding. There is, of course, a large body of work on table-driven approaches, several of them listed here (and bigger list), though…
I’m getting ready to leave for MarkLogic World, May 1-3 in Washington, DC, and it’s shaping up to be one fabulous conference. I’ve always enjoyed the vibe at these events–it has a, well, cool-in-a-data-geeky-way thing going on (like the XML conference in the early 2000’s where I got to have lunch with James Clark, but that’s…
I’ve been thinking a lot about big data, and two recent items nicely capture a slice of the discussion. 1) Alex Milowski recounting working with Big Weather Data. He concludes that ‘naive’ (as-is) data loading is a “doomed” approach. Even small amounts of friction add up at scale, so you should plan on doing som…
I’m sure this is old news by now, but here’s one more data point. As it turns out, XForms Institute uses an old skool XForms engine written in Flash, dating approximately back to the era when Flash was necessary to do XForms-ey things in the browser. The feedback form for the site is, quite naturally,…
Check out these tips. The article talks about iPad, but they work on iPhone too, even an old 3G. One one hand, it shows the intense amount of careful thought Apple puts into the user experience. But on the other hand, it highlights the discovery problem. I know people who have been using iOS since…
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…
MarkLogic 5 is out today. Here’s five things beyond the official announcement that developers should know about it: If you found the CQ sample useful, you’ll love Query Console, which does everything CQ does and more (syntax highlighting!) Better Search API support for metadata: MarkLogic has always had support for storing metadata separately from documents….
One book that Ken Bado, the MarkLogic President and CEO, likes to talk about is Good to Great, (subtitled why some companies make the leap… and others don’t), a result of many man-years of meticulous research. There’s plenty to think about in this book. It talks about the qualities of a “level 5” executive: the…
What’s that on your TV screen? Why, it’s MarkLogic, again. Why President Obama Picked the Bay Area And it’s true, we’re hiring big time. Maybe your resume should be in that pile… -m
This is a non-technical description of why Yahoo! Mail is unsafe to use in a public setting, and indeed at all. I will be pointing people at this page as I go through the long process of changing an address I’ve had for more than a decade. What’s wrong with Yahoo Mail? A lot of…
Dear Yahoo, What’s the deal? Shortly after FireSheep was announced on Oct 24, 2010, you should have had an emergency security all-hands meeting. You should have had an edict passed down from the “Paranoids” group to get secure or else. Maybe these things happened–I have no way of knowing. But it is clear that it’s…
This is indeed a sad day for all of us, for on October 1, a great app will be gone. Though we hardly had enough time during his short life to get to know him, like the grass that withers and fades, this monkey will finish his earthly course. I know he left many things…
I wanted to say something snarky about Microsoft’s new slogan, but the comments on the linked article did a pretty good job already. Ahh snark, the unthinking-man’s eloquence. -m
As the world of web apps gets more framework-y, I need to get up to speed on contemporary automation testing tools. One of the most popular ones right now is the open source Selenium project. From the look of it, that project is going through an awkward adolescent phase. For example: Selenium IDE lets you…
Thought experiment: are there any commonly-expressed semantic queries–the kind of queries you’d run over a triple store, or perhaps a SearchMonkey-annotated web site–expressible in common type-in-a-searchbox query grammar? As a refresher, here’s some things that Google and other search engines can handle. The square brackets represent the search box into which the queries are typed,…
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…
Facebook (v): to deliberately create an impenetrable computer user interface for purposes of manipulating users. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
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…