Rumor is that the .Mac service is being renamed to “Mobile Me”. Great, in it’s present state, it’s always been the kind of thing that’s completely useless to me, even aside from the annoying name. But watch out: everyone’s favorite gang of bankrupt litigious weasels, the SCO group, in a desperate effort to prove they…
Category: commercialism
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
A very short rant on the state of XQuery tutorial materials on the web (not naming any names or linking any links). I get it. Thank you for your fanatical emphasis on FLWOR constructs, but there is much more to it than that. A few introductory sources don’t fall in to this trap, though. Mike…
I just found out about a nice little XForms engine called Ubiquity. (Having dinner with Mark Birbeck, TV Raman, and Leigh Klotz certainly helps one find out about such things) :-) It’s a JavaScript implementation done right. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Seems like a nice fit with, oh maybe MarkLogic Server? -m
If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element….
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
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….
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
Tips from Leo Reilly in How to Outnegotiate Anyone (Even a Car Dealer!). Be patient. If you insist on having something today, know what you want and be prepared to pay for it. Never disclose your deadline. Cultivate a positive relationship with the other party. Don’t make the other side look stupid (for a prolonged…
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
Roughly speaking, the innovator’s dilemma happens when a product progressively gets more and more advanced features, to the point that it misses out (by listening to customers) on an entire new opportunity. At that point, a simpler, competing product can come into play and make large gains. But what happens when a company is generally…
I’m not involved in the the corporate wrangling about Microsoft and Yahoo! talks. Which leaves me relatively free to comment on it. [Disclosure: I am, not too surprisingly, a Yahoo! shareholder.] Lots of things have been happening lately. A deadline of, well, today. Talks of Google adsense trials. And all kinds of merger speculation involving…
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, herself rowling in gazillions of dollars, is along with her publisher suing Steven Vander Ark, a poor librarian who produced a lexicon of the Harry Potter universe. Rowling says it’s not about the money, it’s about control. Poppycock. If that was the case, she would have objected to the web…
Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden, largest app clusters of this particular platform can: Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day. However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m
I have here a pre-release copy of Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother. With permission. In plain text. Being read with the UNIX command less. On an XO laptop. And so far it’s awesome. -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
Amazon hosted a networking event tonight. They had me at free beer and a chance to look at a Kindle. Now that I’ve actually played with one, I can comment on some of its features for better or worse. It’s heavier and more solid than it looks. With the little padded cover, it could pass…
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
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…
Take a look at this URL, and the page behind it. This is a list of all the Flickr photos with the tag “xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/“. Although these have been around for a while, I hadn’t been aware of this kind of tagging until recently. Why “xml” in the namespace declaration? This doesn’t have much to do…
Admittedly, their marketing folks wouldn’t describe it that way, but essentially that’s what was announced today. (documentation in PDF format, closely related to what-used-to-be Konfabulator tech; here’s the interesting part in HTML) The press release talks about reaching “billions” of mobile consumers; even if you don’t put too much emphasis on press releases (you shouldn’t)…
I discovered this by accident, but my life has been measurably better since. You probably already know that you can switch apps quickly with Cmd+tab. But if you reach your pinky up a bit more and hit Cmd+~ you can rotate through the windows of the current app. This turns out to be most useful…
Thanks to all the folks who showed interest in this little XPath puzzler published here a few weeks ago. Some asked to see the dataset, but I’m not able to release it at this time (but ask me again in 3 months). Turns out it was a combination of two bugs, one mine, one somebody…
The new ticker symbol is SCOXQ.PK, as in “pink sheet”. From the soaring heights of the $20s, it’s now under a dime per share, as bankruptcy proceedings move forward and their attempt to charge fees for all Linux users continues to crumble. Serves ’em right. -m
I visited the Amazon home page today to find this: Thanks, Amazon! Now sit back down, you’re scaring me. -m