November 29, 2005
Gilbane Conference Starting Today
The Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies kicks off today. I am part of an analyst panel tomorrow, where a group of us will discuss content technologies and trends. Then on Thursday I will be moderating a session, Blogs & Wikis @ Work, which will include case studies on blog and wiki technology in enterprise applications.
I will be doing some blogging from the conference, though I am not sure how much as I have some meetings with vendors planned as well.
It's not too late to register for the entire conference. You can also register for free to see the technology demonstrations, attend one of the keynotes, and attend the sponsor reception Wednesday evening.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:10 AM
November 28, 2005
Books by Friends: Meal Makeovers
I have this nice pile of books next to my desk that have been written by friends of mine, so I thought I would take time out to highlight them over the next few weeks.
This book, The Mom's Guide to Meal Makeovers: Improving the Way Your Family Eats, One Meal at a Time!, was co-written by my friend Janice Bissex, who is a nutritionist. The book has done very well, and among our circle, people are always pointing out, "this is one of Janice's recipes" at pot lucks and such. As the title suggests, the focus is on family meals, so think "good, healthy food that doesn't require hours to make." My favorite is the Oh-So-Easy Chicken Parmesan. You can get some of their recipes online here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:43 PM
Last, but Not Least
Here is the princess, Smudgie.
She thinks pictures are not all that dignified, so I had to sneak up on her during her nap. Now she won't speak to me for a week.
UPDATE: Smudgie has made this week's Carnival of the Cats, and, if you read the comments, she may be joining a select crowd at the home of the Carnvial.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:57 PM | Comments (3)
O Canada!
I have always said Canada, and especially, Ontario, has had a special role in advancing XML (and SGML before it). This article backs me up on it, and makes the case that Ottawa deserves special mention. The article does a great job of giving proper due to companies like Exoterica and MicroStar, and the many forward-thinking and smart people who have worked for them over the years.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:48 PM
You Can Get Anything You Want...
... at Alice's Restaurant.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, read this, or better, yet, this. You can even listen to it here, and for free no less! If you are a serious fan, there is an entire Arlo concert (in pieces) here, here, here, and here.
Careful--apparently listening to this song identifies you as a lefty.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:12 PM
November 26, 2005
The Amazon.com Concordance Feature
I really like Amazon.com's concordance feature, which is better explained here. Here is the concordance for the DRM book that I helped write. It reads like every conference call I have had for the past 10 years. Better yet, here is the concordance for Joyce's Ulysses.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:37 PM | Comments (1)
November 25, 2005
Mosey
I had some posts of my dogs earlier here and here. Here is a picture of one of the cats, the heat-seeking missile Mosey, enjoying some blankets and comforters fresh from the dryer.
In case you were wondering, yes, he is polydactyl.
UPDATE: I changed the polydactyl link above, as the page has been protected. You can also read the wikipedia entry on polydactyl cats here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:26 PM | Comments (1)
A Poem
You Are
On a hot summer day,
you are the salt water to my hips,
and the approaching wave.
In the cool of November,
you are the last little pile of raked leaves.
At such moments,
I like to think I am
the perfect amount of room
in the waiting leaf bag.
Those who skate know the thrill
of being the first on the ice
after the Zamboni has finished its work.
The hard clean surface
under the glean of water.
That first stride onto the ice,
the skate edge catching exactly right.
You are that first stride.
And you are the perfect moments when I run.
The downward side of a long hill.
The deep filling breath.
The first glimpse of the finish line.
When night comes, you are, of course,
the first moment of our kiss,
our hands on each other's hips.
And then you are uncomplicated sleepiness,
a soft pillow,
the sheets and blankets arranged just so.
When I rise in the morning,
you are the first sip
of cream-silkened coffee.
Back in our bedroom,
I study the curve of your bare hip.
You are the freshly sliced canteloupe,
and I am the ready spoon.
-- Bill Trippe
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:39 AM
November 24, 2005
Another XForms Book
Updating my eForms Resources page, I noted there is a second book out on XForms. I haven't read it yet, so I can't compare it to Micah Dubinko's book, which is excellent.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:33 AM
November 23, 2005
Updates to Resource Sites
I made some updates, both cosmetic and substantive, to my two resource sites, eForms Resources and CMS Resources. I found several resources related to XML eForms that I had never unearthed before. Some of them, like this presentation on eForms for government (PowerPoint format), were a couple of years old and very good, but they hadn't come up on my Google searches before. Either older materials are finding their way to the Web, or Google is doing a better job of finding them.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:37 PM
November 22, 2005
And the Other 75% Were Lying
Almost a quarter of British motorists admit they have been so distracted by roadside billboards of semi-naked models that they have dangerously veered out of their lane, Reuters news reported earlier this week.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:04 PM
Currently Reading
Alfred Lubrano's Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams. There is a brief profile and precis of the book here.
The premise of the book is simple--people with blue collar roots who rise to the middle class have a different frame of mind from people who were born to the middle class. While I don't quite meet Lubrano's principal criterion for the people he calls "Straddlers"--he focuses on people who are the first in their family to attend college, and both my parents were college graduates--I identify deeply with much of what he says.
Early in the book he riffs on some of the values of blue collar culture, including some things he still holds close today:
Other things, too: loyalty; a sense of solidarity with people you live and work with; an understanding and appreciation of what it takes to get somewhere in a hard world where no one gives you a break; a sense of daring; and a physicality that’s honest, basic, and attractive. (When I worked for New York Newsday, a disgruntled reader had been stalking me and persistently threatening my life. A colleague suggested I get a "goon" to protect me. An editor answered, "Alfred doesn’t need a goon. Alfred is a goon.")
Later, he talks about his grandfather, a bricklayer, and what a tough man he was:
Sometimes, we'd simply look at the buildings on which my father and grandfather had worked. My grandfather was Ellis Island, Class of 1914. As a kid, he boxed and performed gymnastics on piles of horse manure dumped by the city in empty lots. Once, he lifted his junior high school principal and hung him on a clothes hook in a classroom wardrobe. "Guy deserved it," my grandfather said, and we believed him. He was handsome, with his mustache, thick hair, and eye twinkle. George Clooney looks so much like him in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? that my mother cried when she saw it. Now when the urge strikes, I can go to New York and see his handiwork—run my hands over the bricks that line the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or any one of dozens of places that look like buildings to you but are monuments to me. He saw New York as two things: the deepwater port of possibility where you could make enough money to buy a place for your wife and raise your three daughters, and the lunatic town where punks sprayed graffiti over his bricks. He died when crack was big, and the city's renegade feel had soured him. Several Straddlers told me about a bluecollar elder who impressed them as much as my grandfather did me. These tough-guy old-timers possessed a characteristic—-strength, or dignity, or willfulness—-that Straddlers tried to emulate in their own lives. While working-class machismo doesn't always serve a Straddler well, sometimes just the knowledge that they share genes with people of courage can help a limbo man or woman through the hard days and nights.
Well said, and exactly the sentiment behind something I wrote about my own grandpa, Giacomo Tripi, Ellis Island, Class of 1909.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:15 AM
XML 2005
I didn't attend XML 2005, but Lisa Bos of Really Strategies did, and she has a roundup of some interesting announcements and some thoughts about Documents 2.0.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:19 AM
November 21, 2005
Tuning In, Redux
So after playing with the AM radio and the ionosphere the other evening, I then spent a couple of days in a rental car with XM Satellite Radio. I got a kick out of it at first, and was thrilled to find an all-baseball talk station. But, then, a day or so into it I realized that they were repeating a lot of programming. It didn't help that I seemed to hear the same disucssion of Alex Rodriguez winning the AL MVP (and beating out mi hombre, David Ortiz) over and over and over again. So I was beginning to conclude satellite radio might not be for me, but then I heard about this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:43 PM
Random House Pushes Back
Google Print, aka, Google Book Search, is not without its challengers. Authors have sued, publishers have sued, and now publishing giant Random House has essentially said, "thanks, but no thanks."
(For some background, the blog, DigitalKoans, has a useful bibliography.)
I called Random House, but they wouldn't comment on the details of any relationship, so what I am about to say is purely speculation. But it seems to me that Random House is saying the digitization and control of their books is their job, and not Google's, and I wonder if this might play out in a certain way.
1. They opt out of the Google program and do their own digitization.
2. They post their digital files on a public web site for wide searching but controlled distribution.
3. They make their own arrangement with Google Book Search, offering limited rights to their own digitized files--or not. They would already be in organic Google results, and Google wouldn't shut them out because they're Random House and represent too much of the book business.
That seems to the kind of control Random House is aiming at. This gives them organic search results in Google, with the specific Book Search results as well, if they want them. It also has the effect of calling Google's bluff. I mean, if Google is only doing this for altruistic reasons, why not let the publishers do their own digitization?
This makes a lot of sense to me. And, Random House aside, I would certainly take this approach if I were a publisher. Publishers have compelling reasons to digitize anyway—for marketing purposes alone, even if eBooks continue to yield small revenues. And the options for digitizing seem to be getting cheaper by the minute. If I'm a publisher, why should I cede the business to Google?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:32 PM
November 14, 2005
Tuning In
I had a long drive back from southwestern Connecticut to Boston this afternoon. About an hour into the drive, the sun set, I was bored, and I began scanning the AM dial, picking up distant stations. I have always enjoyed this phenomenon, where AM radio waves travel further between sunset and sunrise. This wikipedia entry describes the phenomenon in brief, and mentions there are some people who are really serious about it. So I spent a few minutes each listening to stations in Buffalo, Rochester, NY, Montreal, Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, Charlotte, and other places. It was radio drive time, so there wasn't much more to listen to than traffic reports (Pittsburgh sounded especially backed up) and weather (Charlotte 72, Buffalo 49). No surprise that stations sound drearily the same, with local advertising jingles providing the only variety. I was also struck by a particularly paranoid sounding home security ad from Charlotte; it had me ready to run out and buy one, and I even found myself briefly noting the 800 number. I also noted one insurance ad in Cleveland that seemed to repeat the phone number 16 times in 30 seconds. Is there something about Cleveland where people have trouble remembering phone numbers?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:03 PM | Comments (1)
November 13, 2005
Manufacturing Competitiveness Conference
I am going to be attending a day-long conference on Wednesday the 16th. The topic is manufacturing competitiveness, and the keynote speaker is Jack Welch. If I have a chance to ask Mr. Welch a question, it will probably be about whether IT gives the United States an edge in manufacturing. Chances are, given the nature of the conference and the setting (the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center at UMass-Dartmouth), he will have touched on it already in his remarks. And given that GE has implemented content management and related technology on such a massive scale, I will be curious to see if the topic of content comes up at all.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:16 PM
Ted Kooser
When I taught composition and literature classes in the past, I often used a Ted Kooser poem as a perfect example of imagery. The poem, Flying at Night, like most of Kooser's poetry, speaks for itself.
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
Kooser is poet laureate of the United States and winner of the most recent Pulitzer Prize in poetry. I also recently learned that he is Unitarian Universalist, which is my adopted faith. The magazine UU World has a really fine profile of Kooser. Kooser is not without his critics, and I think this profile does a nice job of answering them.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:53 PM
November 12, 2005
Flexible, Powerful Publishing for Small- and Mid-Sized Organizations
The SSP seminar this week reminded me that I had spoken at the SSP annual conference this past June. Shortly after the presentation, my notebook blew up, but Mark Anderson of Cadmus, who moderated the panel, was kind enough to dig up a copy of the presentation.
The presentation asks and answers a few basic questions. Isn't it reasonable to be able to do electronic publishing of appropriate quality at a reasonable cost? And isn't it also reasonable to be able to respond to new electronic publishing channels and opportunities without breaking the bank, giving too much away, ruining your health, or setting your hair on fire?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:59 PM
November 8, 2005
Current Trends in Publishing Technologies
I am speaking today the SSP Fall Seminar, Tech Blitz: Embracing Technology and Process Changes. It is being held in Philadelphia at PALINET Headquarters. You can download a PDF of the slides here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:18 AM
November 4, 2005
Andre Dubus
I brood (so much so that I had to think for a really long time before I decided to use the word "brood"--I also considered dwell, and considered the noun form, "brooder.") I have the kind of mind that yields few immediate and clear answers. Ask me my favorite food, and I will begin to list almost every style, "Italian, Thai, Indian, Sushi, Korean..." (Ask me my favorite color, and I will say "blue," but I don't really believe it.)
However, there is one question for which I have a firm answer, and that is, "Who is your favorite author?" I will immediately answer, Andre Dubus, and, knowing that he is not the best known author and is sometimes confused with his son, I often provide a brief introduction. "He was a writer's writer," I will usually say. "He wrote almost exclusively short stories, and many people count him among the greatest short story writers ever."
I could go on, but I usually don't. I don't say too often that I have read everything he wrote, and even less often do I say that I read his stories over and over and over again. And I probably almost never say that certain of his stories have informed and moved me more than anything else I have ever read. Reviewing one of Dubus' books for Harper's, Frances Taliaferro said it best, "Dubus at his best can evoke thoughts that lie too deep for tears."
I recently found one of my favorite Dubus stories, "If They Knew Yvonne," online. Recovering Catholics will especially like it, I think.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:09 AM | Comments (1)
November 2, 2005
All Shakespeare, All the Time
In a conversation today about some software testing that was going poorly, I happened to quip, "something wicked this way comes." Someone on the line immediately responded, "I loved that movie!" I was glad I was on a conference call, because I had no idea what this person was talking about and didn't have to even nod knowingly. I was thinking about the line from Macbeth, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes," but a little research told me that the reference was to this movie, which a little more research told me is based on this book.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:35 PM
November 1, 2005
Another take on XML eForms
Writing for PDFzone, Don Fluckinger voices some skepticism on all the buzz about XML-based eForms.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:21 PM
Good Grief
Just what the industry needs--another XML patent troll.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:16 PM
