If you want to get anything done, give it to a busy person… In my life, I’ve started four novels, completed my goals on three, gotten to “The End” on two, and completely flamed out on one. The first was in 2001. I hadn’t written much since high school. Something clicked in my head that…
Category: everythingismiscellaneous
That was the subject of an email I got this morning. After I headed in to work, I listed to Science Friday, which included the Ig Nobel Prize festivites. One of the winners? CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring…
Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books? There’s…
As one who, in the all-too-near future, will be hammering out the visuals to go with my talk at XML 2007, this made my day. (be sure to check out the deeper pages too) -m
OK, let me take a step back from specific technologies like RDFa, let’s go through a really simple example. On a certain web page, I refer to a book. That book has a price of 21.86 US dollars. The page is intended as primarily human-readable, but I want to include machine-readable data too, for a…
What is the difference between placing instanceof=”prefix:val” vs. rel=”prefix:val” on something? How do I decide between the two? In the example of hEvent data, why is it better/more accurate to use instanceof=”cal:Vevent” instead of a blank node via rel=”cal:Vevent”? -m
Many things in life are simpler when you only need to be within 5%: Pi is pretty much 3 Water weighs pretty much 8 pounds a gallon A quart is pretty much a liter (and a gallon, 4 liters) A year has pretty much 360 days, and pretty much 31 million seconds The speed of…
If you’re in the South Bay and like mead, you need to check this out. -m
I didn’t get to do much for Yahoo Hack Day, but I did get to help a coworker a teeny bit with an implementation of Y! Search for social web sites, including Facebook. There could be some interesting repercussions from that, so I won’t say more now. But what did surprise me is how many…
Speaking of podcasts, last week I unsubbed from Rocketboom, the show having officially become unbearably advertising-swamped. It feels good (but not as good as getting that hour-per-week of my life back from Diggnation). Possibly coming soon: unsub from Security Now, instead of fast-forwarding through half of it at present. -m
EXSLT support coming to Firefox 3.0. Python Flyweights. Timeline of MSFT engagement on document standards. RDFa Primer. And not that this is a conspiracy blog or anything, but strange things are afoot at Minot AFB, hours from where I grew up. -m
My Copious Free Time(tm) has been filled lately by two different evaluation projects. One is the 2nd Annual Writing Show Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest, for which the first round of judging is just winding up. The main benefit for contest entrants is that every submission gets a professional critique of at least…
It’s too easy to get absorbed in all the terrible things happening on the news. But not everything is like that. Take 7 minutes and watch this. -m
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Jean Bottéro Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn Yeah, they’re related. -m
I just finished an online version of SICP, the famous computer science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (link to full and official text online). What do I mean by “finished”? Well, there are online video lectures (link to iTunes-ready RSS video feed), expertly delivered by SICP authors Sussman and Abelson themselves in 1986….
I fell asleep one night while reading Ray Kurzweil, and had this crazy dream where the internet called me up (over VOIP, naturally) to complain that none of my web pages made sense. Par for the course, I thought at first. But then I told the internet a few things, to let me worry about…
The approximately seven readers of this blog have probably already heard this, but just in case: I have a new role at Yahoo!–working on next generation search. Lots of details are still falling into place. For now I describe it: “Imagining, specifying, prototyping, developing, and evangelizing next-generation web search experiences leveraging the full and unique…
Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. –Gertrude Stein …the solution to the overabundance of information is more information. –David Weinberger in Everything is Miscellaneous. Weinberger’s book is a great read, taking you to lots of different places–from a prototype Staples store to the underground Bettmann Archive, and…
Havi Hoffman at Yahoo! gave me an advance copy of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. I’ve been a fan of Weinberger for years–I even quoted him in my book. I’m just getting in to the reading. I’ll report back when I have more to say. -m