August 31, 2006
Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
Ron Gustavson writes with a great link, Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. It includes all manner of tools, targeted at developers and super users, and has a very good section on XML tools.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:07 PM
August 29, 2006
XML Schema Book
Someone asked me to recommend a book about XML Schema, and I didn't hesitate to point to Priscilla Walmsley's fine book, Definitive XML Schema.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:44 PM
August 27, 2006
‘The Complete New Yorker Solves the DVD-swapping Problem
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:42 PM
August 26, 2006
New Office
I moved my office in July, shortly before taking some vacation in Maine. My new office is in Waltham, at 45 First Ave (which Yahoo maps insists on calling 1st Ave). Anyway, it is a nice office, and is right off the highway. I moved mainly because my older son will be attending a nearby high school, so I am about to embark on a few years of commuting on Route 128 with my teenager. Wish me luck! My younger son doesn't seem inclined to go to this same high school, but there is a chance that starting next year I could be commuting with my two teenage sons. I am not sure that is actually possible...
While the office is in Waltham, I decided to change my mailing address to a PO Box here in Melrose. My full contact information is over on my New Millennium Publishing contact page.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:14 PM
Google Books Stupid Page of the Day
I don't know, but maybe they were going for an aerial view here? Every page I looked at in this book is badly done. Is this what some of the top libraries in the world want done with books that are nearly 200 years old? And when Willis A. Boughton donated this book to the Harvard libraries in 1933, did he expect the book to be manhandled this way? I go back to an earlier post I wrote, reflecting on how the president of the University of Michigan gushed about the role of Google Books in historic preservation. Did it ever occur to anyone that Google might know how to build a search engine, but they might not have a clue about how to handle and digitize books?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM | TrackBack
August 24, 2006
DRM Vendor Market Consolidates, but Deployments Seem to Be on Rise
Writing for DRM Watch, Brett Sheppard has a brief roundup of recent Enteprise DRM deployments.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:45 PM
In the Mushroom Summer
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 74
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
In the Mushroom Summer
Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower,
mist in the pines so thick the crows delight (or seem to), winging in obscurity.
The ineffectual panic of a squirrel
who chattered at my passing gave me pause to watch his Ponderosa come and go-- long needles scratching cloud. I'd summited but knew it only by the wildflower meadow, the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian, scattered among the locoweed and sage.
Today my grief abated like water soaking underground, its scar a little path of twigs and needles winding ahead of me downhill to the next bend. Today I let the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.
Reprinted by permission from "The Hudson Review," Vol. LIX, No. 2 (Summer 2006). Copyright (c) 2006 by David Mason. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:27 AM
August 23, 2006
Eliot Kimber Meets MarkLogic
Eliot Kimber gets his first look at MarkLogic and likes what he sees.
UPDATE: Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg was relieved to find out that Eliot liked the software despite Eliot's blog subtitle, "All tooks suck. Some suck less than others."
NOTE: Yes, if you are reading closely, "Mark Logic" is the company but the product is called "MarkLogic Server." I have no idea why there is a space in the company name but no space in the product name.
WHICH REMINDS ME: If you are interested in exploring XQuery, Mark Logic's Stephen Buxton has co-authored an excellent book, Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 AM | TrackBack
August 22, 2006
Amazon's aStore Feature
I do the Amazon.com affiliate thing, and noticed today they have a new feaure, currently in Beta, called an aStore. As Amazon describes it, "aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website." It really is easy to create one, and I did a bare-bones one in a few minutes, highlighting the work of my favorite author, Andre Dubus.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:23 PM
SEO and Content Management
Writing for CMS Watch, Randy Woods and Julie Batten offer some excellent, detailed advice about SEO and content technology.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:54 AM
August 21, 2006
Yankees Finish Red Sox Beat Down
Wow, good thing I am not a Sox fan or anything.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:48 PM
August 20, 2006
Google Books Stupid Page of the Day
The thing I have noticed, scanning so many pages of Google Books, is that when the scanning of a book starts to go wrong, it goes very, very wrong.
But, hey, they've got hyperlinks!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM
August 16, 2006
Exploding Laptops and Other Nuisances
According to The New York Times, a Dell notebook computer in Thomas Forqueran’s pickup truck caught fire in July, "igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks." (Emphasis added.)
I can see keeping ammunition in your glove box, but in the gas tanks too?
Of course, the real tragedy is that he may never get to read Instapundit again.
UPDATE: Click on the picture for a closer view. Do you suppose he was smoking a cigarette when he put the ammunition in the gas tanks?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:58 AM | Comments (1)
Cracking PDF
Over at PDFZone, Don Fluckinger has a great piece about the re-emergence of ElcomSoft as one of the good guys--or not.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:50 AM
August 13, 2006
Currently Reading
Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:33 PM
Cup of Joe
Have I ever mentioned how much I like coffee? This was a good cup, all the better because I had it at Ferry Beach.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:24 PM
Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane...
If you have a keen interest in eBook markets and technology, you really should follow the TeleRead blog. This weekend it has a number of fine entries, including Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane about your eBabel problem—if you want to woo romance readers. The advice applies to all kinds of readers, including romance readers.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM
August 12, 2006
Publishing Technology Survey
IDEAlliance is conducting a survey of publishing technology, and will be sharing the results. According to the Web site:
This IDEAlliance Publishing Technologies Survey is being conducted to assess the state of publishing technologies and standards in the industry today. First we ask for general information about your organization and your role. You do not have to reveal your name, company or position. However note that we provide survey results to any one who is interested. Next we focus on digital media assets both for archive and for product delivery. We hope to assess current media formats and identify trends for the next two years. We then move our focus to systems. Here we hope to assess the current systems that are installed and in use as well as the wish-list for the next 2 years. Other areas of inquiry include technology standards, both awareness and adoption.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:24 PM
Google Books Stupid Page of the Day
Check this out. And then the frontispiece photo, where they apparently failed to notice--or failed to do anything about--an overlay over the page. Once again, Project Gutenberg does it much, much better.
UPDATE: It also occurs to me that Google Books does nothing for the visually impaired, but other eBook efforts do.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:37 AM
August 11, 2006
Google Books Stupid Page of the Day
Oy vey. Start here, and keep paging forward. Maybe the person scanning this book was drinking.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)
eMail RIP, Redux
Everyone knows email is hopelessly broken. For example, note this excellent article, written three years ago, and the situation has only worsened. Indeed, if you google "email broken" the first several hits are from 2003. It is as if everyone has simply accepted it.
But should we? Every now and then I look at my own spam problem. In the last 10 hours, for example, I received 195 emails, and 134 of them were spam. 113 of the spam were successfully trapped in my Outlook spam folder, leaving me to clean up 21 of them from my Inbox. This is in addition to a spam filter that one of my ISPs provides; that filter traps about 200 spam a day. At one point, I was diligent about reviewing the spam to see if any real email was incorrectly trapped, but now I rarely do. Last night I cleaned about 7400 spam from my Outlook spam folder after a perfunctory search for a few keywords ("XML," "content," "Melrose" (my hometown)) and saving a half-dozen or so noncritical emails.
Shouldn't there be more of a solution to this problem?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 10, 2006
Wise advice to Amazon
Adobe's Bill McCoy and TeleRead's Michael Banks weigh in on Amazon's new push to have publishers use the bookseller's Mobipocket format.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:15 PM
protectedpdf
On behalf of a client, I sat through a demo yesterday of a DRM technology, protectedpdf, from Vitrium Systems. I was impressed. It embeds the client right in the PDF file, eliminating the requirement for a separate plug-in or client download. It also showed an impressive flexibility about the types of business and use models you could implement. For example, one use showed a marketing white paper where you could view the first few pages of the PDF, but then had to enter personal information (name, address, email, etc) in order to view the rest of the white paper. I didn't dig in too much, but I liked what I saw.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:18 PM
My Father Teaches Me to Dream
I stand corrected. Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 72
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s have a tough, no-nonsense take on what work is. If when I was young I'd told my father I was looking for fulfilling work, he would have looked at me as if I'd just arrived from Mars. Here the Pennsylvania poet, Jan Beatty, takes on the voice of her father to illustrate the thinking of a generation of Americans.
My Father Teaches Me to Dream
You want to know what work is?
I'll tell you what work is:
Work is work.
You get up. You get on the bus.
You don't look from side to side.
You keep your eyes straight ahead.
That way nobody bothers you--see?
You get off the bus. You work all day.
You get back on the bus at night. Same thing.
You go to sleep. You get up.
You do the same thing again.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
There's no handouts in this life.
All this other stuff you're looking for-- it ain't there.
Work is work.
First printed in "Witness," Volume 10, Number 2, and reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1996 by Jan Beatty, whose latest book, "Boneshaker," was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 PM
August Morning
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 71
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
William Carlos Williams, one of our country's most influential poets and a New Jersey physician, taught us to celebrate daily life. Here Albert Garcia offers us the simple pleasures and modest mysteries of a single summer day.
August Morning
It's ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife's eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
Poem copyright (c) by Albert Garcia from his latest book "Skunk Talk" (Bear Starr Press, 2005) and originally published in "Poetry East," No. 44. Reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:54 PM
But Did Anyone Bother to Check if Google Has a Clue?
University of Calif. Joins Google Book Scan Push
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:54 PM
August 6, 2006
Google Books Stupid Page of the Day
One could guess at what this page is supposed to include on it, but, then again, maybe not. All of which makes this sound like a good idea.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:22 PM
Improving eBook Reading
Jon Udell has a practical suggestion for improving the reading experience with eBooks.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 PM
