To celebrate the unlamented demise of Valleywag, use as many of the ten insulting words you should know (along with any other appropriate words) as you can in a single short paragraph. Post in the comments below. This site is for geeks of all ages, so keep things PG. All right, PG-13. My favorite will…
Category: stuff
I’ve successfully completed the National Novel Writing Month challenge–to write 50,000 words during the month of November–for three years running, and now I have three draft novels sitting around. At some point, racking up mere drafts gets to be pathetic, so this November I’m picking one to dig into with a heavy editing pass. I’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…
Actually, instead of a review, let me quote the opening testimonial from the inside-front cover. Competing globally with dynamic capabilities is the top priority of multinational executives and managers everywhere. Rethinking strategy in a highly networked world is the big challenge. How can your company navigate successfully in this turbulent, highly networked and socially connected…
Someone overseas, whom I consider trustworthy but haven’t actually met, wants to buy one of my domains. Great! There’s not huge sums involved, though it’s a hassle to move the money and coordinate the transfer. Readers: Any advice on how to complete the transaction? Escrow service? Anything lighter-weight? Comment below. -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
Commentators, having long since run out of useful things to say about YHOO+MSFT, only bemoan how it continues to drag out. In reality, deals of this size do tend to take a while. Microsoft (and specifically Ballmer) aren’t walking. Why? Because they need Yahoo. They need search share–the deal with Google only puts on more…
I was on the right page at the right time and spotted this: WIth zero votes for any candidate and zero precincts reporting, CNN calls it. Now, I’m no stats expert, but this one seems a bit extreme. Comments? -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….
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…
“Rails is a lot of fun, and lets me do cool new things – but it’s hard to eat it.” Simon St. Laurent -m
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…
As spotted on TechCrunch, full article. This is a game-changer folks. Check out the comments attached to the article. -m
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…
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…
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…
Amazon announced their ebook reader today, Kindle. Some of the earlier hype I’d read about it suggested that it would be not only a reading tool, but a writing tool as well. Nope. The obvious thing is the keyboard, an immediate non-starter for typing more than a few words. But if an external keyboard is…
I see from the system requirements that Leopard requires an “866” Mhz processor. Is this a hard limit, or just an advisory? My first Mac–the one I wrote the book on–is a lowly 800 Mhz. box. Is it worth trying to upgrade it? -m
The more I look at RDFa, the more I like it. But still it doesn’t help with the pain-point of namespaces, specifically of unmemorable URLs all over the place and qnames (or CURIEs) in content. Does GRDDL offer a way out? Could, for instance, the namespace name for Dublin Core metadata be assigned to the…
If you’re in the South Bay and like mead, you need to check this out. -m
In the last few weeks, I’ve been getting more recruitment pitches, including from the well known person ________ who is now at _______, for a think-tank position with _______, multiple LinkedIn requests from Web 2.0 company ________ and even ________. So, is this a sign that the general industry is picking up? -m P.S. I’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
Watch this space for details. I’ll be speaking about something related to Python and XPath 2.0. Watch this blog for tidbits on the subject. :) -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…
In the last couple of days, I’ve had three completely separate instances of people freshly interested in XForms coming to ask me about Stuff. A declarative model is pretty much irresistible compared to the alternatives. But nobody can directly use an abstract declarative sculpture–sombody needs to put some solid vocabulary and processing meat on the…
Today is my 2nd anniversary at Yahoo!. Looking back, it’s been a great time. Since I don’t know how long ago, I’ve fantasized about being involved in research. Check. Since sitting across from the mobile guys for 5 years in W3C meetings, I’ve fantasized about working in mobile. Check. And since I wrote Web search,…
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