I’m pleased to report that Mark Logic has announced the closing of a $12.5M round of financing from Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital . While most VCs are surely doing some portfolio triage in response to the current economic environment, and while that means that duo-syllabic, business-model-free, web 2.0, social-something start-ups will not have easy access to funding, the flip side of the “too sick to save” part of triage is that some set of companies — presumably the promising ones — will indeed have access to capital on favorable terms. People seem to forget that triage means “to divide in three groups” and that while things may indeed be grim for the group III patients, that things can be pretty good for the group I ones.

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Mark Logic Lands $12.5M in Capital to Sustain High Rate of Growth

W3C and other standards organizations are in the business of defining languages — conventions that organizations can choose to follow — and not in mandating operational behavior — telling organizations and participants in the network how they are supposed to behave. Organizations (implementors, operators, administrators, software developers) are free to choose which standards they adopt, and what their operational behavior will be. In some posts on the www-tag mailing list , I was trying to point out the risks in defining languages such that the "meaning" of the language depends on operational behavior.

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Language semantics and operational meaning

Aslightly interesting standards aspect to the ODF 1.1 interoperability problems that MS Office SP2 is caught up in. To my mind either the problem is in the short term only and intrinsic to the ODF feature, or the problem does not lie with Microsoft for making their choice, nor with other implementers for making their choices, but with the ratty choice of markup used for this feature in ODF 1.n itself.

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Where everyone knows your name: ODF 1.1 formula support in Office SP2

Adobe’s FXG seems to be to PSD what OOXML is to .DOC: a re-factoring of a middle-aged binary format in XML with a focus on fidelity rather than elegance. My working model is that we need to think of the de-proprietarization of market-dominating technologies in the intensely pragmatic model of a sequence of bigger fish swallowing smaller fish: a sequence of consolidation of dialects, modularization of parts, then adoption into pluralistic frameworks and Adaptability Standards, allowing user selection of winning mini-technologies. Each stage of which will take at least a major software release cycle

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The big fish swallow the little fish: Adobe’s FXG and MicroSoft’s OOXML

Rob Weir posted on his blog a couple of days ago an Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability .  I think it’s great that he has brought up spreadsheet interoperability, and specifically the issue of formulas, which seems to be the main thrust of his post.  I mentioned on the day of our SP2 release last week that “I’ll be doing some blog posts that get down into more of the technical details, to help explain some of the engineering decisions that we made in our implementation,” and Rob’s post is a good starting point for that conversation.

See the article here:
ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability

But it does go back to a point I have made several times on this blog over the last few years: the more that our laws require the use of open standards, the more that we will need to make sure that the kind of “openness” involved or created by those standards actually allow grass-roots market-enhancing (which may in some cases be a euphemism for ‘disruptive’) implementation. So I am favouring the term Open Technologies rather than Open Standards: meaning technologies and their enabling standards which don’t exclude implementation for reason of size and complexity, just as much as for reasons of openness or language or timezone or IP or corporate affiliation or technological tradition. In fact, I would go as far as proposing the following rule of thumb: no open standard should make a technology that would take an experienced and expert developer more than one month (full-time) to develop.

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How big should an open standard be? A real issue for Open Standards and FOSS

Consider that there may be one hundred million word processing documents printed every day (anyone know the real number?) That could mean a million extra pages per day generated because of page-profligate settings or algorithms. Now, paper is usually made from estate timber, so there probably is no SAVE THE TREES deforestation angle. But paper production takes energy, toxic bleaches are used, power is used to make it, fuel is used to transport it, if it is disposed by burning the carbon gets released, and more toner cartridges are used

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Greener typesetting

Whew, it has been a while since I wrote my last blog.  New initiatives for the new year have been keeping me fully consumed.  However, one of these new initiatives has reached a point where it was time to get it written up on my blog. The cost of Medicaid and Medicare has been written about often as government budgets are re-evaluated and the new administration takes root.  With econonmic times being what they are the number of beneficiaries are increasing in an already overburdened system of service to US state and local communities.

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Applying SOA to improve US Medicaid and Medicare

I’m happy to announce the 10.1.3.4.1 release of BI Publisher. This release rolls up bug fixes and enhancements since 10.1.3.4.0 to include the following: Support for Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3 Extended Support for Single Sign-On Providers Automatic Refresh of LDAP Cache Support for Siebel CRM Security Support for Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for Burst Reports Data Model Enhancements Web Service Data Set Type Enhancement: Specify Path to Data in SOAP Response SQL Query Data Set New Property: Use Default Schema Only Support for JNDI for Scheduler Connections Support for Expressions to Calculate Date Parameters RTF Template Enhancements Get List of BI Publisher Configuration Settings Enable Debug Mode for an RTF Template Number to Word Conversion in Report Output Remove Logos and Links from the BI Publisher Header Disable Access to Guest Page Updates to the BI Publisher Web Services For more details on this release please see: BI Publisher New Features Guide Release Notes Certification Information Note: something is wrong with the doc pages at the time of posting.

Originally posted here:
BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 Enhancements

In an earlier post, I said that key to government opening its data to citizens, being more transparent, and improving the relationship between citizens and government in light of our web 2.0 world was ensuring content on government sites could be easily found in search engines . Architecting sites to be search engine friendly, particularly sites with as much content and legacy code as those the government manages, can be a resource-intensive process that takes careful long-term planning.

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Practical Tips for Government Web Sites (And Everyone Else!) To Improve Their Findability in Search