December 2022. There’s a definite sense that technology is accelerating. In the last six months alone, a handful of AI technologies have made incredible leaps forward in generating images and fluent human language interaction. Some days it’s a challenge to even keep up with the headlines. And yet, XML is still here. Even if in…
Category: stuff
Carol Dubinko died peacefully in her sleep at 11:51pm Eastern on May 28, 2022. She was 73 years old. She will be missed.
Thinking about bit operations on more humane terms.
If you haven’t been following Ted Nelson on YouTube, you’re missing out. Recently, he’s been posting a series of informational videos on the Xanadu architecture and concepts. Even more recently, he hosted a live Q&A session, taking questions from Twitter. Ted Nelson’s Channel What’s Xanadu, you ask? It’s the original concept for a hypertext system,…
I did a thing. I am experimenting with machine learning and neural networks. To do so, I need a real-world dataset to play with. For starters, I am using a 5×7 pixel array, as common in many DIY projects, representing digits 0-9. Please help me my drawing a picture of the randomly-selected digit below. All…
Filed under need-to-try this: A homebrew version of a popular hacker drink called Club Mate. I already have a carbonator cap and CO2 setup, as part of my beer brewing hardware. One variation I would experiment with is cutting down on the sugar. Even though Club Mate isn’t very sweet, it still has a fair…
I’ve mentioned Virgil Matheson in these pages a few times, but never made a full accounting. When I had my O’Reilly book published, I submitted a simple dedication in the manuscript: for Virgil But for whatever reason, it didn’t make it into the printed edition. This post is a small step toward letting the world…
Today is the 10-year anniversary of this epic message from James Clark on the relative merits of Relax NG vs. XML Schema, and whether the latter should receive preferential treatment. Still relevant today–the discussion is still going, although an increasing number of human-readable web specifications have adopted RelaxNG in some form. -m
I’ve used this same recipe for three things: weight loss, after-exercise protein, and sore-teeth liquid diet. It’s great. 1 cup 2% milk 1 cup Dannon Fit & Light vanilla yogurt 1 scoop Syntha-6 protein powder (banana is great) Mix. This yields 450 calories with a whopping 39g of protein, 48g of carb (but only 30g of…
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…
This epic posting on MVC helped me better understand the pattern, and all the variants that have flowed outward from the original design. One interesting observation is that the earlier designs used Views primarily as output-only, and Controllers primarily as input-only, and as a consequence the Controller was the one true path for getting data…
My personal machine is ailing. It freezes up for 30 seconds at a time–even iTunes stops playing. FireFox crashes before it’s done launching. I’m scared to reboot for fear the machine won’t come back up. SMARTReporter lists an operating age of 15k hours, a suspicious Power-Off_Retract_Count of over 25 billion–whatever this represents, it’s happened an…
I have a batch of chocolate mead that’s been brewing since 2007. Mead bulk ages well, but this is a new personal record. Today, I started siphoning it into the bottling bucket when I noticed that it wasn’t completely clear. I use a mineral called sparkalloid which causes any haze/protein/particulate to settle to the bottom,…
This came from a comment on the prior post, and it’s worth a shout of its own. Don Norman on the importance of command lines, including the ubiquitous search box, in modern UI. -m
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’m enjoying the results of this Python project from Music Hack Day way too much. It analyzes an audio clip to detect the beats, then uses time stretching and compression techniques (that don’t alter the pitch) to rearrange each measure into a “swung” groove. Fantastic. I wish they’d take more requests! -m Try this one…
If you dig a bit, there’s all kinds of interesting background material about the terrible disaster ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico. For example, a map of the thousands of rigs and tens-of-thousands of miles of pipelines. Some of the best infographics are from BP itself. And for when you can no longer stand the…
I first ran in to Martin‘s work in back-issues of Scientific American. He stopped writing his Mathematical Games column in 1981, but my mentor Virgil Matheson had all the older issues and had a free hand in lending them out, albeit one-at-a-time. From my mentor, I also got the best math book I’ve ever read,…
The 60th anniversary of the creation of Bananas Foster is around the corner, and the project I started this weekend should be ready just in time. I’m keeping the recipe under wraps for now, but it involves ripe bananas, a particularly buttery variety of honey, brown sugar, homemade caramel, vanilla, and cinnamon. This should turn…
Phrase seen in this article about whether video games are art, and Roger Ebert’s opinions thereon. “Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature…” Hmm, Mr. Ebert doesn’t seem to be up on the concept of hypertext, which has manifold connections with cinema….
Some thoughts worth considering on state of HTML development today. -m
MZFinance.NoPasswordToken_message is the apparently Google-unique error message my iPhone gave me today whilst purchasing a free app. Always one happy to leave a new mark on the web, I’m recording it here. If you’ve seen it too (and you come here within the 30-day window) please post a comment on your experience. -m
Hands down, the stupidest Science Friday segment evar. I want my 11 minutes back. -m
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….
I just ordered a beer appreciation kit from tasteyourbeer.com. I’m all for less swilling, more appreciating. This one includes little vials of 13 different kinds of hops to compare. Train your palate, but be warned: once you start down this road, forever will it dominate your soul. You’ll be picking out different flavors in everything…
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,…
MarkLogic fans should check out Norm Walsh’s posting about his talk at the NY User Group. If you follow the right Twitter feeds, this is probably not too much of a surprise, but now the cat is officially disjoint with the volume inside the bag. Disclaimer: be sure to read the disclaimer there. -m
There are no limits, only quanta. There is no smooth, only lumpy. Analog is a myth; the world is digital. We just haven’t found the extent of its mantissa. – SymbolismLost. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
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…
This article states: The analysts determined YouTube’s bandwidth costs by assuming that 375 million unique visitors would visit the site in 2009, with 20 percent of those users consuming 400 kilobits per second of video at any given time. That works out to 30 million megabits being served up per second. That’s a heck of…