For instance, The Business Value of Windows Vista. Seriously, Vista for “speed and security”? Or mobile? The comments on this post alone are worth the click. -m
Category: trends
New gear, an Ooma VOIP box. I plan to post more technical details soon, but the short story is that you get a sleek little box that goes between your dsl or cable modem and your router, and you get unlimited local and long distance calling. For free. For life (or 3 years, according to…
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…
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…
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
Never let anyone say that forms are easy. What seems like a boring, tedious topic on the surface is surprisingly deep and challenging. As evidence, the multi-billion-dollar plan to modernize the US census in 2010 has fallen back to paper technology. Sadly their plans didn’t involve XForms. Highly-critical applications, like say voting, are even more…
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…
Some time ago, Doug Crockford’s excellent blog pointed me to this page on “excessive DTD traffic” at the W3C. Go ahead and follow that link, I’ll wait… All the standard templates that show how to construct a basic XHTML page include a public identifier of http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd and often a namespace name of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. As the…
As spotted on TechCrunch, full article. This is a game-changer folks. Check out the comments attached to the article. -m
One whole evening of the program was devoted to XForms, focused around the new 1.1 Candidate Recommendation. I admit that some of the early 1.1 drafts gave me pause, but these guys did a good job cleaning up some of the dim corners and adding the right features in the right places. This is worth…
Due to some unauthorized activities on my webspace, I’m trimming my online profile, notably the Brain Attic sites. These were my home base for consulting, which I haven’t been doing for 2+ years. Less surface area exposed means less exposure to the bad guys. This site, and XForms Institute are staying up for now, as…
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…
Depending on who’s asking and who’s answering, W3C technologies take 5 to 10 years to get a strong foothold. Well, we’re now in the home stretch for the 5th anniversary of XForms Essentials, which was published in 2003. In past conferences, XForms coverage has been maybe a low-key tutorial, a few day sessions, and hallway…
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
A strange note at the top of the web site that appeared in the last couple of days: Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007 It’s underlined to look like a link, but in fact is just styled that way. Some further observations and questions: The…
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…
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
Yeah, it’s for real. You save 27%! Sure, it’s powered by Amazon, but it’s still a little weird to see this come up in search results… -m
Go check it out. It even has a Tidy option to clean up the markup. But they missed an important feature: it should include an option to run Tidy on the markup first then validate. This is becoming the defacto bar for web page validity anyway… -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….
James Clark is blogging. A few zillion people have already mentioned this. A slightly tangent observation: I had trouble reading through an entire article in web form, but had no problems returning later to the atom feed. At first I chalked it up to early morning grogginess, but it seems to be a repeatable phenomenon…
I don’t remember ever spelling this out, so: Any posting that adds to the discussion shall be accepted Any posting by a spammer/robot/pay-per-post flunkie shall be rejected Any posting that would offend my grandma shall be rejected Any posting that takes too long for me to categorize per above MAY be rejected These aren’t hard-and-fast…
Today Yahoo! launched oneSearch on their other front page, m.yahoo.com. OneSearch has been available for a while, but only from within Yahoo! Go. Now it’s available to millions of mobile devices equipped with a data connection and XHTML browser. The basic premise behind oneSearch is to replace the tri-modal search box, where you have to…
Go read it for yourself. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is all too widespread in the industry. -m
Last week I did something pretty foolish: I placed an order with Amazon. A few days later six new books arrived–two on math, two on brewing, Dreaming in Code, and one on guitar playing. All of these went directly to my toread list, a huge library of books that probably wouldn’t remain standing if I…
ERH’s comments on XForms, as part of his predictions for 2007. Worth a read. -m