June 29, 2004
Ease of Use in XML Editing
What makes for ease of use in setting up editors and authors to begin using XML for content development? How much of it is making the DTD or schema useful and intuitive? How much of it is customizing the editorial tool to make it productive?
Or am I even asking the right questions?
Bear in mind that I am referring to the average content creator, and not necessarily someone who is comfortable with XML or even something like HTML markup. Imagine that this person, like most computer users, has created most text using a commercial word processor, an email client, and web-based forms.
Your thoughts?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:30 PM | Comments (1)
June 27, 2004
Those Darn Red Sox
The Red Sox took two out of three against the Phillies this weekend. They won the Friday opening game, 12-1, lost yesterday, 9-2, and romped again today, 12-3.
Guess which game I spent more than $300 dollars taking my family to see?
I love baseball, and I often remind myself to love baseball first and the Red Sox second. I don't like to see them lose, of course, but what really sucked about the 9-2 loss was the way they lost—they committed four errors in the field, and they only managed to score 2 runs despite out-hitting the Phillies, 14-13. Red Sox pitchers threw a staggering 174 pitches in 9 innings, only 112 of them for strikes, walked four batter, hit another one, and threw a wild pitch.
Today they turned it all around. They scored 12 runs on 12 hits, made a single uneventful error, and pitched well.
Go figure.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 PM
June 24, 2004
Coco Crisp
Coco Crisp is the switch-hitting centerfielder for the up and coming Cleveland Indians. I don't even want to know if it is his real name or not, as it rockets him to the top of my all-time Major League Baseball Food Team. It puts him past Catfish Hunter, Mudcat Grant, Tim Salmon, Steve and Dizzy Trout, and one-time teammates Chili Davis and Candy Moldonado. Let's not forget Alfredo Griffin. Bill Bean (and Billy Beane). Randy Bass. Bob Kipper.
(There is also now a Barry Wesson in the majors, but I haven't come up with a rule yet for brand names. That would open the floodgates to the likes of Bill Campbell and Tom Prince, for starters.)
The more uncommon the food name, the better. Thus, I prefer a name like Strawberry over, say, just Berry. There is only one Strawberry in the history of major league baseball. There are a number of Berry's in the history of baseball; the one I always think about is Ken Berry, who played most of his career with the White Sox and was a nemesis to the Red Sox.
The Red Sox have had a few food-named players. Jim Rice of course. Steve Curry. Charlie Berry and, much later, Sean Berry. Jeff Frye and Jack Coffey (admittedly a stretch on spelling, but this is more often a spoken discussion than written, and would allow names like Johnny Oates and Bob Veale to be added to the larger roster). Rob Deer (if you include game) and Jimmie Foxx (if you include game and allow for a stretch on spelling). Catfish Metkovich (you could look it up!).
(If you want to get cute, you could also add to the Red Sox list Bernie Carbo, Eric Wedge, Guido Grilli, Jack Baker, Tom Brewer, and old-time player Ralph Glaze. Don't forget Wes Stock and Taffy Wright.)
Another list, for another time, is the startling number of Red Sox players past and present whose last name is also a place name in Massachusetts. Tim Wakefield. Carl Everett and Everett Scott. Fred Lynn and Lynn McGlothen. Joe Hudson (and a Sid Hudson back in the 1950s). Wes Gardner (and a Larry Gardner back in the early 20th century). Tom Bolton. Jeff Plympton. Erik Hanson. Garry Hancock. Mike Paxton. Bill Lee, Lee Graham, and Sang-Hoon Lee. Lou Clinton. 1920s one-hit wonder Bob Adams. Allen "Rubberarm" Russell, Jack Russell, Rip Russell, and Jeff Russell.
Current Red Sox announcer and former big league pitcher Bob Tewksbury is an honory member, despite having never appeared for the Red Sox.
(In an odd detail of this Boston placename thing, the Red Sox once traded away a promising young infielder, Adam Everett, for outfielder Carl Everett. In another, Lou Clinton was traded for Lee Thomas.)
Sadly, Daryl Boston never played for the Red Sox. Nor did Lee Hancock.
But Ernest Dudley Lee did.
(How about an all music team? Steve and Dave Sax. Frank Viola. George, Buddy, (and many other) Bell's. Ryan Minor. Bill Singer. Jimmy Key. Sam Horn (who was a teammate of Dave Sax and Jody Reed at the same time.)
OK, I will stop now.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:36 PM
June 23, 2004
Raw Material
I have been slowly but surely getting myself organized since moving my office from Melrose to Cambridge. In fact, I actually moved to two places at the same time. I took all of my technical work to my new office in Central Square in Cambridge; at the same time, I took all my personal work to an office in the third floor of my home. I am sitting in the home office now. I don't know how realistic a goal this is, but I am hoping to do all my technical work in Cambridge and my more personal work here at home. Ultimately, I have the lofty goal of making more and more money writing narrative nonfiction, but for now I am still on more or less the same track. Indeed, since my move to Cambridge I am as busy as I ever have been.
One of the benefits of this move is that I threw a bunch of stuff away. I had been in the Melrose office for 4.5 years. It was amazing how much I accumulated in that time. My older son and his friend filled a small dumpster in about an hour. Most of it was periodicals, the majority of which live online now, but it also included a lot of marketing materials, trade show brochures, outdated (and therefore useless) technical books, broken equipment, broken furniture, and unused and outdated office supplies. I threw away my old Macintosh Plus, but kept the 40MB hard drive (though I am not sure what is on it).
My office in Cambridge and my office at home are both pretty sparse. They both have a desk, a chair, and a bookcase. My one good file cabinet is in Cambridge, so I will have to do something about one here at home.
I am glad to now have close at hand a great deal of raw material for my personal writing. This includes manuscripts and journals that date back to college, and personal organizers that date back to my early career. I find such things to be embarrassing, poignant, startling, and confusing all at once. For example, I can open an organizer from November 1988 and see that on the 30th I had a series of meetings, my notes from which are cluttered with acronyms (EDG, ESD/PL, ESD/SC, Building R, T Building.) I even had a "mini-meeting" that day (yikes!), and I left early to get an allergy shot at 3:30. I had written one urgent marginal note, "Bug Sally!" Sally was my sponsor on a state grant I was running that year, but I can't imagine what I needed to bug her about. A few days later I interviewed for a new job&mdash:one that I would eventually get, though I wouldn't start for several more months. 1989 was on the horizon, and it would be a big year for me. I would start the new job, which turned out to be the best of my career to that point, I would get married, and I would turn 30. My penmanship seemed to reflect the eagerness and good energy I had for the next year.
This is good stuff. 1988 was a pivotal year for me, and 1989 even more so. I am looking forward to digging in.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:30 PM
Time to Redesign
I am finally sick of this bare-bones design and would like to redesign. Of course, I dojn't have time to actually do this. I would be interested in hearing from developers who use MovableType and would be interested in taking on the task of helping me choose a new design and then implementing it. Should I upgrade MT at the same time?
Please contact me via email.
btrippe@nmpub.com
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:41 PM
June 19, 2004
Structured Authoring in MS Word
Anyone doing structured authoring in Word such that they can produce
reasonable XML at various points in the workflow? I would love to hear
about user experiences. This would include folks who are using add-on tools such as those from i4i and Hypervision.
Feel free to post here or contact me off list.
Bill Trippe
btrippe@nmpub.com
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM | Comments (2)
June 18, 2004
My Own Experience with Moore's Law
I bought a new hard drive yesterday for one of my desktop machines—a 100 Gigabyte drive for 100 dollars. It made me harken back to one of my biggest early computer purchases in 1987, when I bought a hard drive for my Macintosh Plus computer. I had been been growing tired of swapping floppies in and out of my dual floppy drives. If I remember correctly, the first floppy disk held the operating system and the second floppy disk would hold the application, such as Microsoft Word. So if you were creating a document, you would swap the application disk in and out for a data disk when you needed to load a new document or save the one you were working on.
I was frugal enough then that I really thought long and hard about buying a hard drive. They were expensive, and in the Macintosh world, it meant choosing from a long and dizzying list of hard drive manufacturers. I finally settled on a Jasmine 40 MB hard drive for $700.
The math is pretty amazing. My 1987 purchase worked out to $17.50 per Megabyte, and my 2004 purchase worked out to .09 cents per Megabyte. Check my math, but this is significantly faster than Moore's Law.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:20 PM | Comments (2)
June 13, 2004
Flying at Night
I spent the evening of my 45th birthday napping in the back of an idling 757. In one of those special Hells that the airlines seem to have mastered, United kept us waiting on the tarmac at Logan Airport for about four hours before taking off for Chicago. First the pilot was late, then the weather in Chicago was bad, and then the weather around us in Boston was bad. All this without so much as a pretzel to eat. Finally, at about 10:30 we took off. As we left Boston behind us, I caught a glimpse of Fenway Park, brilliantly lit with the grey-white tarpaulin protecting the infield. Someone near me mentioned the Red Sox had been losing the game, 4-1, but the striking green of the outfield grass still warmed my heart.
I hadn't planned to spend my birthday in an airplane, least of all an airplane taking me to business meetings. But such is life when you are self-employed--when the work is there, you do it, whether the work is in Chicago or not, and whether or not it is your birthday. But I am not griping. I like my work, I like making money, and I like traveling. I didn't travel much for work until I was in my late 30s, so I have not burned out on business travel. For the most part I go to places I enjoy--New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia.
The real irony of the moment wasn't so much that it was my birthday; the real irony was that I was napping. Somehow, in a jam-packed airplane, I had three seats to myself, and once I knew that we were in for a long delay, I lay down and quickly fell asleep. This wasn't a first for me, but it was close to one. I am a nervous flyer, and always have been. I don't nap in airplanes because I am convinced that my nervous energy is a big reason for the plane staying in the air.
I didn't fly until I was 21, and my first flight--all the way to Greece--culminated in a teeth-grinding, gust-blown, and gymnastic final approach and landing that had everyone cheering and crying in relief when we finally touched down. I was traveling with my girlfriend and her parents, and we were all shook. My girlfriend's father was a quiet man, not prone to histrionics, and when we discussed it afterwards he admitted after the third aborted landing attempt he decided maybe we were not going to make it in safely.
(If you have never been in a Jumbo Jet when it aborts a landing, I probably cannot do the moment justice. But imagine that you are in a plane, a few feet over the runway, about to touch down, when suddenly the nose of the plane lurches up and the plane fills with the deafening roar of the engines at full thrust. There is a horrifyingly long, pregnant moment when you realize you are still going down even though the pilot is clearly urging the plane to go up. The G force has you pressed in place--even if you could decide whether to duck and cover you are effectively paralyzed.)
I won't bore you with the long list of things I did to get myself to fly with any regularity. Suffice to say that the winning combination proved to be drugs, a learned relaxation technique, and knowledge. I finally realized that planes--and pilots--do the things they do for a reason. For example, I was terrified for years by the habit planes have, after roaring to a takeoff, of slowing down after the initial blast into the air. Flight after flight I imagined the plane was losing power and stalling, and I would go blind with fear imagining what happens to a 200,000 pound jet that has stalled 1000 feet over downtown Boston.
Finally, one day on a flight the captain invited us to listen to air traffic control and I did. Much to my delight, I discovered that the pilot was doing precisely what he was told to do! In this case, to take off and then level off at 3000 feet and a speed of 200 knots. Suddenly, there was an order to the universe. Those agonizing dips of the wing and turns when preparing to land? The seeming devil-may-care rocky descent down from cruising altitude? Again, they are told to do this. Moreover, they are amazingly calm and matter of fact with each adjustment.
"United 245," the air traffic controller will say. "Climb and maintain 10,000 feet."
"Roger," I will hear my pilot's bright reply. "United 245 climbing and maintaining 10,000." A split second later the engines will rev up as the pilot begins to urge the plane upward. All is right with the world.
Believe me, I still have my anxious moments. The shuttle from Boston to La Guardia, for instance, can give me a couple of jolts. Depending on the weather and the approaches they are using, a typical La Guardia approach and landing has the plane making a steep turn directly over Shea Stadium. If I make the mistake of looking out the window at the wrong moment, it seems as if I am about to spill out of the plane and into centerfield. The irony of me being a Red Sox fan and Shea being the scene of the crime in the 1986 World Series always feels especially cruel at that moment. Then the actual landing is always bracing. I have not looked this up, but I think La Guardia has absurdly short runways, causing the planes to brake much more sharply than they do at other airports. The shuttle seems to land, brake violently, and take an immediate right-hand turn into the terminal. In my mind's eye, the plane is on two wheels, the right wingtip sparking off the tarmac. (I compare this with landing at Indianapolis, where the runways are the length of the state of the Indiana and we seem to taxi for a week.)
So sleep I did, only to be gently awakened by the flight attendant as we were about to finally take off. This is when I glimpsed Fenway. Then I stayed awake long enough to get my pretzels and drink before I fell asleep again.
The next day in Chicago was a whirlwind. Two meetings at two ends of the metropolitan area, and a long drive back to the airport. I got good and lost, and the air was heavy as I drove. It wasn't raining yet, but they were close to calling off the White Sox home game that night, and it was only 5:00. I feared a repeat of the night before--hours waiting out the weather before I could get home. So far I had resisted feeling sorry for myself, but my resistance was weakening.
As it turned out, the pilot was late again, and the weather was bad. As I ate a quick dinner in the terminal food court, I could hear the rain drumming off the metal roof, and the wind was pushing torrents of rain back and forth across the tarmac in front of me. They were nice enough to let us wait in the terminal this time, so we spent 3 hours lounging around the gate before we finally boarded. I had eaten my fill, and I had three seats to myself again, so this time I didn't even wait for the snack before I lay down and fell soundly asleep.
Once again, the attendant woke me. The weather in Boston was clear, and it was well past midnight as we passed over the city and began an arc out past my hometown of Winthrop and out into the Harbor. I say hometown, but in fact it is the town of my youth. I live 10 miles north and west of Winthrop now, but many days it feels 1000 miles away, even more now in the few months since my mother died. It is a peninsula that juts out into Boston Harbor, almost curling around the airport and the downtown skyscrapers; this time of night, it was perfectly outlined by its streetlights. With the shape I knew so well glowing beneath me, the plane made a long, lazy turn out over the Harbor and then began its approach to the runway. Winthrop was out my window again. I marveled for a moment at being in the air, and remembered the hundreds of times as a child I had stood on that ground below me and watched planes passing overhead. Where were those people going, and where had they come from?
The air was still, and the plane was straight and true as the pilot edged the nose of the plane up slightly and slowed for touchdown. There would be no gymnastics tonight. In a few minutes I would be in my car, driving the 15 minutes home to my wife and boys. I thought of my birthday for a moment, and then of my mom, whom I had said goodbye to just weeks before in a nursing home somewhere in my vision right now. I miss my mom, but the soft glow of the lights seemed to be telling me that--just as this familiar shape of Winthrop was here for me now--so too perhaps was she. There were few cars on the road, and few lights besides the yellow-amber glow of the streetlights. I would be the last person to call Winthrop pretty, but, tonight, in this light and from a few hundred feet above, it may have been the prettiest thing I have ever seen.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:42 PM
June 9, 2004
Tools for Creating Graphical Views of DTDs or XML Schemas?
Do any of you use tools to create graphical or tree views of XML? See, for an example, the Elm Tree Structure in this example from the W3C:
http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec-report-19980910.htm#AEN664
I have used DTD2html in the past, which creates a nice HTML tree view, but something like the Elm Tree would be better.
If you have any ideas, post here or email me at btrippe@nmpub.com.
Thanks!
Bill
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:49 PM | Comments (3)
June 7, 2004
Correct Feature List for XML Repositories?
I have been looking in detail at XML repository tools on the market, as well as the major relational database vendors for their support of XML. One of the things I would like to include in the CMSWatch report is a feature matrix, showing how the various tools compare in key features. The following is the current feature list I am reviewing with the vendors.
APIs
DOM
Persistent DOM view
SAX
Java
JDOM
COM
SOAP
.NET
Conventional database APIs
WebDAV
XML:DB
STORAGE
Native Storage of XML
Validation on input/store
Validation on output
Accepts well-formed XML
Accepts non-XML data
Use DTD for database definition
Use W3C schema for database definition
Use RelaxNG schema for database definition
XML view of RDBMS data
Easy to update storage model if DTD/schema changes
Index at Database Creation
Ad hoc/multiple indexes after database creation
Incremental indexing
Type-aware queries
XML STANDARDS SUPPORT
Xlink
Xinclude
XQuery
XPath
XSLT
XQuery Update
XQuery Module
DATABASE MANAGEMENT FEATURES
Data replication and synchronization
Transaction support
Rollback
Versioning
Multi-level user security
Security based on XML tree/element
Online backup
Offline backup
Tuning and optimization
Span physical disks
Hardware optimization
XML triggers
OS/Platform SUPPORT
Windows 2000 Pro
Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2000 Adv. Server
Windows XP Pro
Sun & FSC Solaris 8 (32 bit) - UltraSPARC
Sun & FSC Solaris 8 (64 bit) - UltraSPARC
Sun & FSC Solaris 9 (64 bit) - UltraSPARC
AIX 5.2 (32bit)
AIX 5.1 & 5.2 (64bit)
HP-UX 11.0 (32bit)
HP-UX (11i (64bit)
Red Hat Linux Adv Server 2.1 (IA 32)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (IA 32)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for S/390 zSeries
OTHER
Data binding support
Extended SQL queries
Scalable: can run multiple instances
Scalable: single instance can manage multiple data models
ADVANCED TEXT SEARCH
Full text search
Wildcards
Boolean operators
Proximity searching
Structural search (utilizing the XML structure)
Optimize search based on structure
Stemming
Thesaurus Support
Fuzzy Searches
PERFORMANCE
Data shredded from XML to other formats?
Querying
Mass Load Performance
Indexing Performance
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:11 PM
Thought for the Day
Writing is very easy. All you do is sit in front of a typewriter keyboard until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.
--Red Smith
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:18 PM
June 6, 2004
Books on eForms Technologies
There is a growing list of books covering the emerging eForms technologies, especially books about InfoPath and XForms. I have been maintaining a list on my eForms resources page, but thought it would be worth highlighting here as well.
Amazon.com: Books: Professional InfoPath 2003
Professional InfoPath 2003, Ian Williams, Pierre Greborio. From the back cover: "Microsoft InfoPath 2003 helps developers tackle forms-based information-gathering with the full range of XML technologies. This book quickly guides experienced Office and XML developers through InfoPath fundamentals, including XML form templates architecture, form definition file structure, available external data sources, and backend services. From there, you'll delve into validation and updating forms, both during development and as business needs change. Finally, you'll examine the InfoPath security model, learning to implement and deploy trusted forms. The second part of this book is an intensive case study covering metadata processing, exporting XML data to Excel for analysis, and much more."
