The valley is buzzing about Marissa’s edict putting the kibosh on Yahoos working from home. I don’t have any first-hand information, but apparently this applies somewhat even to one-day-a-week telecommuters. Some are saying Marissa’s making a mistake, but I don’t think so. She’s too smart for that. There’s no better way to get extra hours…
Category: trends
In Nate Sliver’s new book, he mentions a classification system for experts, originally from Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock, along a spectrum of Fox <—> Hedgehog. (The nomenclature comes from an essay about Tolstoy.) Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas. The are ideologues and go “all-in” on whatever they’re espousing. A great…
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’m getting ready to leave for MarkLogic World, May 1-3 in Washington, DC, and it’s shaping up to be one fabulous conference. I’ve always enjoyed the vibe at these events–it has a, well, cool-in-a-data-geeky-way thing going on (like the XML conference in the early 2000’s where I got to have lunch with James Clark, but that’s…
Check out these tips. The article talks about iPad, but they work on iPhone too, even an old 3G. One one hand, it shows the intense amount of careful thought Apple puts into the user experience. But on the other hand, it highlights the discovery problem. I know people who have been using iOS since…
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…
Andromeda took the facebook Challenge, and found 52 separate requests in 24 hours that would have gone to the facebook mothership. Watch her blog for more updates. How about you? If you look through these logs, pay particular attention to the referer field. This tells you on which site you were browsing when the data…
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…
I’ve seen lots of discussion for and against link shorteners, but not specifically this line of argument: Let me grab a random shortened link from Twitter. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back. http://bit.ly/b1fYi1 OK, that’s six characters in the domain, a slash, and six more characters. 50 years from now, if bit.ly is still…
Whenever I undertake something big and challenging enough to be worthwhile, whether editing a W3C specification, running a more demanding distance, a new software project, or something else, I notice a similar trajectory of progress: Ready to start: Full of adrenaline and excitement. Audacious goals seem readily reachable. 5-10% through: Whoa, this is difficult! And…
The opening day of the conference was not Balisage proper, but a separate symosium on “XML for the long haul”. Some interesting tidbits overheard, in no particular order… “it is not necessarily clear that this approach would capture the difference between the ridiculous and the merely implausible.” Complexity — what is the relationship betwen complexity…
Andrew Zolli argues in Newsweek that online content should never have been free. I’m probably not the first one to make this profound observation–but if it were not for the free online edition of Newsweek (and link aggregator sites like Digg) I wouldn’t have read a single word of Newsweek in years, nor would I…
Celebrating 500 posts since I went to WordPress in May 2006. Prior to that, an additional 730 posts as I floated through a typical evolution of blogging platforms: Easy start: blogger (299 posts in 24 months) Succumbing to the desire to roll your own (259 posts in 12 months) Realizing that rolling your own is…
On May 8 I wrote: it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together. On July 2, the W3C wrote: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed….
I enjoyed this post, from Jeremy Allison as it turns out. It talks about how GPL software is “the new BSD” when it comes to cloud computing, since redistribuion of the software doesn’t happen, and thus doesn’t trigger the relevant clauses of the GPL. Any old company can use, re-use, and modify the software without…
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…
Steorn is making noise again about the free energy device they claim to have invented. The proper scientific attitude to have toward such claims is skepticism, though most responses (always from individual who have never seen it) goes well beyond that. But think of the downside if every phone, iPod, refrigerator, car, air conditioning unit,…
First the bee colonies start to disappear. Next, acorns. Does anyone have a map of the acorn-devoid areas? -m
I got a call today from a pushy recruiter. That’s nothing new. What’s different is that she was not looking for the usual resume, but rather desperately trying to place candidates. (Or maybe it was just social engineering…) Is anyone else seeing a reversal in recruiter cold-call strategies? How flooded is the tech job market…
Haven’t mentioned here that RDFa is a W3C Recommendation. I’m thrilled that something that I’ve been thinking about for a while is ready for prime time. Also, as of this writing the first page of results at Google still prominently links to a terribly outdated draft of the spec. The first page of results at…
Levy a $24,000, one-time tax, payable in installments over 10 years, against anyone who took out an interest-only mortgage (or various other high-risk instruments) during the previous 10 years, using the full nasty power of the IRS to collect (garnishing wages, etc.) Take the proceeds and give it to homeowners who did NOT engage in…
It’s been 0x40 years since the dedication of the Mark I. Wired has some great photos and background information. Less than a year later, Vannevar Bush would advance the state of the art with his article As We May Think. A year-and-a-half later, ENIAC unveiled, and with it Turing-completeness. And things have been speeding up…
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…
Nope, not spam. You can now order electronic components from Amazon, advertised right on the front page for me. What can’t you get on Amazon? -m
The old rule: only even-numbered Star Trek movies are any good. The new rule: only odd-numbered Indiana Jones movies are any good. -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…
According to Ars Technica, Google captured 61% of mobile search market share in the first four months of 2008. Yahoo! came in at a distant 18%, so pretty much reflecting desktop search market share. This is due, of course, to Google being the default provider on the iPhone, and the iPhone being the biggest bulk…
Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know. Netflix has gone on record as saying that although their Instant View library, viewable online or via the hardware Roku player, is much smaller than their DVD library, they’re working hard on closing the gap. For instance, one quote says “adding titles at light speed”. But some titles…