Working at MarkLogic has forced me to recalibrate my expectations around XML-related performance issues. Not to brag or anything, but it’s screaming fast. Conventional wisdom of avoiding // in paths doesn’t apply, since that’s the sort of thing the indexes are made to do, and that’s just the start. Single milliseconds are now a noteworthy…
Category: commercialism
Here’s my first experience with Amazon’s new Kindle client for Mac: After digging up my password and logging in, I was presented with a bunch of books. I picked the last one I’d been reading. It downloaded slowly, without a progress bar, then dumped me on some page in the middle. Apparently my farthest-read location,…
Andrew Zolli argues in Newsweek that online content should never have been free. I’m probably not the first one to make this profound observation–but if it were not for the free online edition of Newsweek (and link aggregator sites like Digg) I wouldn’t have read a single word of Newsweek in years, nor would I…
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…
Excellent article in Wired, perhaps a good explanation of my career. :-) Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. Which sounds like a fairly typical spec review at Mark Logic. Hint: we’re hiring–email me….
Check out the updated careers page, including a quote from YT. If you’re looking for an amazing place to work, get in touch with me. In particular I’m looking for top-notch JavaScript/FE/UI people. -m
The best thing a user can do to advance the Web is to help move people off IE 6 — Ryan Servatius, senior product manager for Internet Explorer. Source. -m
One of the lead bullets describing why XForms is cool always mentions that it is based on a Model View Controller framework. When building a full XRX app, though, MVC might not be the best choice to organize things overall. Why not? Consider a typical XRX app, like MarkLogic Application Builder. (You can download a…
One particular conversation I’ve overheard several times, often in the context of web and standards development, has always intrigued me. It goes something like this: You know, Ted Nelson’s hypertext system from the 60’s had unbreakable, two-way links. It was elegant. But then came along Tim Berners-Lee and HTML, with its crappy, one-way, breakable links,…
At the risk of sounding fanboy, are Windows 7 reviewers logic challenged? Not to pick on any one in particular, but here’s the most recent one I bumped into–I’ve seen similar qualities in other reviews. Under the reasons to get it: 1. Your computer can probably run it. Unlike Vista, which proved a giant slop-feeding…
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…
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…
An editor’s view on the modern publishing market, how it’s changing, and challenges any book faces in running the gauntlet of publication. Worth a read. -m
Here’s the scenario: The night before a long flight, I upload my personal files into a freshly charged Kindle 2. To preserve the battery, I switch off wireless and in the bag it goes. The next day, on the plane, I open the Kindle…and it’s showing an entirely depleted battery, exclamation point and all. Can…
According to this page, it’s here. At least the source code is. You heard it here first. -m
Several folks have been pointing to this article which has some choice quotes along the lines of If we examine the nontrivial-sized DBMS markets, it turns out that current relational DBMSs can be beaten by approximately a factor of 50 in most any market I can think of. My employer is specifically mentioned: Even in…
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…
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….
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…
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
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