Bob DuCharme, author of many successful books and a long-time XML expert, is leaving Lexis-Nexis. If you’re looking to hire a senior XML person with good name recognition, you might want to make their loss into your gain.
A couple of times every month, I open all the bills, bank statements, investment statements, and government correspondence for my three (!!) corporations and blast through the paperwork (somehow, I always seem to open cheques from customers a bit more promptly). I’ve read marketing books that suggest businesses should use invoices and other business correspondence as an opportunity to market to customers, and the banks, phone companies, and even the government have taken this to heart — when I open a typical envelope, I’ll pull out a 1-2 page statement, then dump the envelope and several pages of brochures and newsletters into the recycling pile.
Am I an anomaly for not reading those? I discard them just as fast as I discard spam email, except that in the case of spam, I at least have to scan the subject lines first. For the junk inserts, all I have to do is feel the glossy paper under my fingers, or catch a glimpse of a smiling model staring off the page, and my arm reflexively tosses them; even easier, once I’ve pulled out the actual statement or invoice, I know that everything else is junk, and don’t need to examine it at all.
How are marketers ever going to reach people when we’ve developed such good, and even casual defences against them, both online and in print?
In L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Project Gutenberg), the Tin Woodman was originally a human named Nick Chopper. In an effort to prevent his marrying his sweetheart, the Wicked Witch of the East cursed his axe so that it would cut off part of his body every time he tried to chop wood. Nick lost his limbs one by one, only to have them replaced with metal versions by a friendly tinsmith. Eventually he lost his head and trunk as well, and had them replaced with tin in the same way.
Nick’s story might sound painfully familiar to anyone who has spent time working with IT in large enterprises or government. Big organizations will buy a huge, off-the-shelf software system in an attempt to save the cost and risk of building their own, only to replace one part after the other because of lack of scalability, bad performance, bugs, or missing features. They end up with a system that they’ve built almost entirely themselves (at perhaps double the cost of a from-scratch system) but still have to pay royalties to an outside vendor to use.
Why does this happen? In principle, buying instead of building is a great idea — it lets a company share development costs with many others while concentrating its limited IT resources on its core specialties. This approach works, however, only when a product does something that is well understood and widely implemented (i.e. it’s a commodity). When considering an OTS product instead of building a system from scratch, a company should ask itself two questions:
If the answer to either of these questions is no, then you’re looking at a potential Tin Woodman: you’ll probably end up chopping off one limb at a time and rebuilding the product yourself, piece by piece. That’s not always a bad idea — companies will often choose to outsource R&D by funding the initial development of a product at another (usually smaller) company and serving as the launch customer — but in those cases, both management and IT know what they’re getting into, and there’s no expectation of simply installing the software, doing a bit of configuration and testing, then going into production in six months.
Philip Greenspun has an posting about the problems with early retirement. It’s hard for people to sympathise with the problems of a guy who has enough money that he can buy fun airplanes and not work 9-5, but I have to say that nearly every word of his posting rang true for me. Like a lot of people, I did well consulting during the dot.com boom, so when the tech market dried up earlier this decade, I was in a good enough financial position that I could basically stop working and take a two-year sabbatical until the market picked up again.
I imagined that I’d come up with a brilliant business idea, invent something important, or at least figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I did learn to fly and buy a (really cheap, old, slow) airplane, but otherwise, those years stand out as probably the least fun of my life. A bit of leisure, like a bit of chocolate, is nice, but retirement — or, in my case, a extended sabbatical — is like an all-chocolate diet. I’ve been busy again for the last couple of years, and I’m much happier this way. I also find that I’m more creative and get more personal stuff done (exercise, reading, etc.) precisely because I have less time to do it. I’m more organized, more motivated, and, I think, nicer to the people around me.
I no longer dream of early retirement and a life of leisure — work, as long as it’s not stupid or excessive, really is the only path to happiness. +1 for the Puritan work ethic (though we could have done without the Maypole-felling and witch hunts).
Here’s a genuinely heartwarming story. The RIAA is after David Greubel of Arlington, Texas for having 600 downloaded songs on his family computer, and is trying to get him to pay USD 9,000 to settle out of court. Greubel’s 15-year-old daughter wrote an e-mail about the case to the punk rapper MC Lars (Download this song), and Lars passed the e-mail on to his management company, the Nettwerk Music Group, which also manages Sarah McLachlan, the Barenaked Ladies, and Avril Lavigne, among others.
Terry McBride, the head of Nettwerk, decided to help Greubel, and says he has the support of all the artists he manages (including those whose songs were found on Greubel’s computer). He has offered to pay all of Greubel’s legal costs to fight the RIAA and all of his fines if he loses. He says that he does not necessarily agree with downloading ripped songs (which happens to be legal here in Canada, where Nettwerk is based), but that suing fans is just bad business:
My hope is that this (Nettwerk’s support) will create a positive concrete conversation between the artists, their managers and the record labels as to what the future is . . . The fan is the future. Suing the fan is like shooting yourself in the foot.
Note: I don’t read Slashdot any more — I’m sure this is also there, so apologies for any duplication.
I scan documents for two main reasons:
It’s very easy to scan individual pages to just about any format in Linux using graphical frontends like XSane or The Gimp, but when there’s more than one page, nothing beats PDF for ease of use at the receiver’s end (especially when you’ll be sending the file to an admin assistant running Windows and reading e-mail in Outlook). After a bit of experimentation, I found a few steps that actually work:
-density option with your scan DPI so that the pages come out the right size, e.g. “convert -density 150 *.tiff output.ps”.I’ve tried many other approaches (including using the libtiff utilities with all compression options, and using convert to go straight to PDF), and they all result in either huge or malformed PDF files. This is the one approach that works for me.
There must be a tool out there, GUI or command line, that willallow me to batch scan multipage documents straight into PDF without all this messing around. I haven’t found it, but I’ll be happy to hear about such a tool in comments.
(Updated to include MSN response; updated again for the China thing.)
According to this CBC article, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have all willingly handed over search records to the U.S. government (they claim that no personal information is included, but personal information can often be inferred from search URLs). Google said ‘no’, and is now taking the fight to court.
The request is unrelated to national security — instead, the government is gathering background evidence to defend an anti-porn law in court.
Update: Ken Moss defends MSN’s action (via Dare Obasanjo). Ken’s comment repeats the point made in the CBC article that MSN believes it released no personal information.
Update #2: And now, Google has agreed to censor search results for China. It guess this pulls Google back down to a karmic break even: defender of privacy rights in North America, but anti-free-speech collaborator in Asia.
[Update: comments are now fixed — if you have any comments about XML 2006, please feel free to leave them.]
I am chairing XML 2006 this fall, taking over the conference after five successful years under Lauren Wood.
This year’s conference’s time and place has changed since the announcement at XML 2005. The main conference will now take place from Tuesday 5 December to Thursday 7 December, 2006 at the Sheraton in Boston, MA. Tutorials will be held immediately before the conference, on Monday 4 December. Friday 8 December will be available for organizations to hold meetings, BOF’s, and so on.
Please update your calendars now. If you have a blog with readers who might be interested in XML 2006, I would be grateful if you could pass on this update, so that it reaches as many people as possible. Ditto for any mailing lists.
The planning committee is about to begin work setting up themes and tracks, so if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them as comments or to send me a private email. We’re looking forward to reading your paper submissions, and to seeing you in Boston next December. In the meantime, don’t forget to take a look at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam this May, and Extreme Markup Languages 2006 in Montreal this August.
(Technorati: xml2006)
[Update: in a comment, Mihai Parparita points out that the Graffiti v.2 was changed for legal reasons, not aesthetic, as explained in a Wikipedia article.]
I got a Palm Z22 for Christmas, to replace my old monochrome Palm Vx. I know that most people have moved beyond Palm, but I like a PDA that’s very small and simple. I make heavy use of Laurie Davis’s outstanding free CoPilot app, especially when I’m in the pilot lounge at some distant airport and need to figure out a new route or recalculate time and fuel for a new upper wind forecast.
I love a lot about the Z22, but its one huge, ugly wart is Graffiti v.2, which I had never encountered before now (I’m not sure when it first came in). I have known Graffiti v.1 for years, and can enter it as easily as I touch type. Now, a handful of letters have changed rather arbitrarily, and I keep having to bring up the little virtual keyboard. I’m working on learning the new shapes, and I acknowledge that they would have been better choices for v.1 all those years ago, but what real benefit came from fixing them after the fact? A few engineers might have satisfied their perfectionist aesthetic sense, but thousands of existing, experienced Graffiti users were no doubt gratuitously annoyed, just as I am now.
Let’s not do the same thing with XML and other specifications — sure, we made mistakes writing them, but unless the mistakes are huge, why annoy millions of users with tiny, backwards-incompatible changes? We were forced to create SAX 2.* to support the XML Namespaces specification, though we did our best to maintain backwards-compability, even where we could have made SAX more elegant with a little tweak here and there — the same thing happened with the DOM people. For XML itself, I agree with Tim Bray that it would be convenient to write a specification that combines XML 1.*, XML Namespaces, and the XML Infoset into a single document (as long as nothing else changed — I wouldn’t follow Tim in removing DOCTYPE, as annoying as it is), but otherwise, my motto for specifications is long live v.1!
Kurt Cagle has an interesting piece on the term Open Standard and what, if anything, it means. Rather than a definition, I’m more interested in a shiboleth, a single test that can tell us whether source or a standard (or any other intellectual thingy) is open.
How about this: source code or a standard is open only if it can be forked against the objections of the maintainer. At first glance, this looks horrible — forking is usually considered the worst fate for a standard, a loud non-confidence vote in the maintainer — but that’s the point. Just as a true Democracy (in the modern, non-Athenian sense) allows you to throw out your government, a truly open standard or source code base allows you to throw out your maintainer. If the copyright terms, patents, or anything else prevent forking, then a standard or source code base is not open.
Sometimes a fork forces the original maintainer to get in gear. In the world of source code, XEmacs is an excellent example — while the maintainers of Emacs stubbornly refused to add anything but the most minimal support for modern GUIs, the early success of the GUI-fied XEmacs eventually forced them at least partly into the modern world, however reluctantly. Other times, a fork fixes something that is broken. In the world of standards, XML, with a more agile standards process and sharper focus (at least in the early days), forked and then completely replaced SGML. Linux is a stranger kind of fork, stealing all of the utilities that were being designed for Hurd without bothering with Hurd itself.
Like the ballot box for a politician, the fork — or even the threat of it — is what makes maintainers listen.
Quoderat 