I know what it’s like to be laid off, I’ve been through it twice. If you need help connecting up with a new gig, whether at MarkLogic or a hand-off to one of the zillion headhunters that constantly harry me, let me know. Send me email and I’ll do what I can. -m
Category: everythingismiscellaneous
My quest for a backup brain is (almost) at an end. Evernote flat out rocks. It runs as a great Mac app (on that other OS too, in case through some disaster I ever need it). It has a nice web interface, including a web clipper. It’s on the iPhone. Anything I put in there…
I think it’s really cool that Palin could be the next vice president of the US. I thought a VP had to be a resident of the US, though. Wait, what to you mean “not that one”…? -m
He won an olympic silver medal in the much-publicized race where the gold winner came in 0.01 second faster. And he blogs. He writes: On winning a SILVER medal: I am completely happy, and still in complete disbelief that I was able to achieve this feat! I’m not joking… It’s a tough loss, but I’m…
Without the bike commute, I’m back to barefoot running for exercise. I can now do a stretch of 2 miles on asphalt with no problems (other than sore calves). Why barefoot? Because it feels better, and it’s ultimately easier on the joints. The human biomechanical system does excellent work if you let it, and is…
From the observing-the-human-condition department. Seems I have a hard to pronounce name. For the record my first name has a long I; it’s MY-ka, not MEE-ka. When someone gets it wrong, I don’t hold anything against them. Afterall, how to pronounce any given name is pretty arbitrary. But there are a few names that are…
The W3C RDFa specification is now in Candidate Recommendation phase, with an explicit call for implementations (of which there are several). Momentum for RDFa is steadily building. What about eRDF, which favors the existing HTML syntax over new attributes? There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced…
Andy King’s Website Optimization is now in print from O’Reilly. This book covers it all: performance, SEO, conversion rates, analytics, you name it. If you run a web site, you’ll find this useful. I tech edited and contributed a small portion, about the growing trend of metadata as site advantage. Go check it out. -m
That’s my game idea. Unfortunately I won’t have time to develop the idea, so somebody else go for it–just mention my name in the credits ;) My 7-year-old has just discovered Oregon Trail, or more accurately Westward Trail, a respectable online clone. -m
I haven’t seen an announcement about this, but try the following query on Yahoo Search: [searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.rdf.rdfa] (link). It shows documents containing RDFa, with Digg at the top. Since this is a Searchmonkey ID, it’s also usable in Searchmonkey to actually extract the metadata and use it to customize search results. Does your site use RDFa…
Day 3 and the first real difficulty: I can’t type most of my passwords except by muscle memory. Overall, though, I’m enjoying the challenge, even if my postings are conspicuously short. :-) -m
I hoped for something fresh, but this from Len Merson is only warmed-over GTD. Avoid–go for the original. -m
I taught Anita some Python this weekend, and was peppered with questions like “where is the key for the two little lines?” “You mean a quote mark?” “Yeah.” I’m going through much the same now. Moments ago I changed my keyboard layout to dvorak. Why? I type alot. Variety helps keep carpal tunnel at bay….
When making hash browns xkcd style, there are at least 14 ways it could go badly. That’s not a potato, it’s a misshapen rock. Unexpectedly flammable tennis racket. Sparks landing on gas can. Food poisoning via undercooked hash browns due to limited flame contact time. Broken plate fragments. Dripping, flaming gasoline. Swing and a miss;…
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them… The prescient Vannevar Bush, who foresaw (among other things) the importance of hyperlinks. -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…
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…
Some books you forget immediately, but some stick with you. Some affect you so profoundly that years later you still think about them. They get under your skin and shape your future. Here’s my list: How to Win Friends and Influence People This got me through years of W3C work, and still affects every human…
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
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…
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…
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…
I visited the Amazon home page today to find this: Thanks, Amazon! Now sit back down, you’re scaring me. -m
While I’ve got your attention, here’s an XPath (1.0) puzzler. I have an RDFa dataset compiled from various and sundry sources. It’s all wrapped up in a single XML file. I run this XPath to see how many meta elements are present: //meta and it returns a node-set of size 762. Now, I want to…
Here’s the best news I’ve had all day: the creators of MST3K are reuniting under a new effort, called Cinematic Titanic, the firstfruits of which are due out this coming Monday. I’ve been a long time fan of MST3K, watched most of the early episodes on UHF in Minnesota. And for the record, I like…
I came away from the XML 2007 conference with lots of new ideas and inspirations. I’ll write some postings about individual technologies in the coming days. But for now, another RDFa question. If I need to represent a list, what is the best way to do it? Does it differ between ordered and unordered lists?…