Frequent “KellBlog” (just trying it on for size, see previous post ) readers should know that I have a keen interest in open source intelligence (OSINT) both because we do a fair bit of business within the intelligence community at Mark Logic and because I’m inherently fascinated by the notion of things hiding in plain sight. It must be the math puzzle guy in me, but there is something really cool about linking together a series of public information and transforming it into actionable intelligence. I think Malcom Gladwell’s New Yorker article, Open Secrets , about which I blogged here , is a fascinating piece of work and a must-read for anyone with an interest in OSINT.

Read more here:
Harvesting Deep Web Content for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)

Oracle reported its fourth quarter yesterday with several interesting highlights: Non-GAAP operating margin was 51%, the highest in Oracle history Fees for updates and support (aka, maintenance) were $3.1B, growing at 8% Fees for license were $2.7B, decreasing at 13% Oracle “beat expectations” despite both revenue and profit falling Oracle headcount remains flat at about 85,500 people (roughly the size of Nashua, NH ) I would dare say that all this continues to validate my Oracle has become Computer Associates (without anybody noticing) hypothesis. See this Mercury News story for more.

Originally posted here:
Oracle Operating Margin Tops 50%, Maintenance Bigger than License

Over the last two days I’ve been attending the ODF Interoperability Workshop, a fascinating event that brought together ODF implementers from many countries to talk about the issues and collaborate on interoperability testing.  The workshop web site covers the details of the agenda, provides a variety of related content (including the presentations), and lists the objectives of the event: The aim is to provide a low-level hands-on interoperability testing environment in which vendors and community members can fine tune the interoperability capabilities of their ODF implementations and make test cases, recommendations and create best practices for implementors.

Visit link:
ODF Plugfest, The Hague

I was reading this interesting post, Emerging Enterprise Content Management Trends , on the Gilbane Group blog this morning when I stumbled into this rather amazing soundbite. Jeff Fried, VP Product Management for Microsoft’s FAST search engine actually proclaimed that “keyword search is dead!” Now, last I checked, Fast was doing around $50M — oh sorry, I mean post-correction of accounting irregularities , $35M a quarter in enterprise search revenue and that Microsoft paid $1B for the company in order to do a “best defense is a good offense” strategy vs.

Continued here:
Things Not To Do: Declare Your Category Dead

I stumbled into this video today which I think provides an excellent introduction to Creative Commons , the non-profit organization that provides standardized licenses to grant various types of copyright permissions on someone’s work. While I’m not an expert at this — at all — a few years ago, it took me less than thirty minutes to go to their site, find an appropriate license, and start publishing this blog under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial-Share Alike License . If you’re interested in learning more about this topic and the legal foundations for important web 2.0 concepts like re-mixing and mash-ups, then watch the six-minute video, below

See the article here:
Creative Commons Introductory Video

Mike Moritz , a leading venture capitalist, and one of the top honchos at (Mark Logic investor) Sequoia Capital , was recently featured in an interview in the San Jose Mercury News . I’ve met Mike several times over the years and can say that when he starts talking, smart people start listening, kind of an EF Hutton of modern times (see this thirty-second 1980s advertisement to get the reference). The article begins: One of the world’s pre-eminent venture capitalists, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, has picked winners like Flextronics, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, PayPal and Google by focusing on small teams or individuals that on first glance might appear to be unfundable.

See more here:
Mike Moritz Interview in the Mercury News

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately in the blogosphere about various approaches to document format interoperability.  It’s great to see all of the interest in this topic, and in this post I’d like to outline how we look at interoperability and standards on the Office team.  Our approach is based on a few simple concepts: Interoperability is best enabled by a multi-pronged approach based on open standards, proactive maintenance of standards, transparency of implementation, and a collaborative approach to interoperability testing.

Continue reading here:
Standards-Based Interoperability

Our client required a modification to an existing web solution that displayed confidential results in html format, which could be printed from the results page.  The data was sensitive and was being forged, so we looked at adding a watermark.  This required moving across to using reporting rather than html, so we started building up a report structure. I was very pleased to find that Active Reports provided a WebViewer control, especially since it gave you the option of either displaying reports with an ActiveX option or with a Adobe Reader option.  My assumption was the latter required extra processing to convert a document to PDF first.  However, the ActiveX option requires the client user to have internet access to download the plugin, whereas the Adobe browser plugin can be installed from a downloadable installer that can be run on any PC

See the article here:
Active Reports: Displaying reports in a browser

I think you’ll be extraordinarily lucky to find a product that does this for you automatically, and efficiently. However it’s easy enough to check the condition by hand, with reasonable efficiency so long as you can access everything in the collection efficiently: let $ranges := for $doc in collection(…) return <range start="{$doc/doc/@start}" end="{$doc/doc/@end}"/> let $sortedRanges := <ranges>{ for $range in $ranges order by xs:integer($range/@start) return $range }</ranges> let $valid := empty($sortedRanges/range[xs:integer(@start) le xs:integer(preceding-sibling::range/@end)]) return $valid If scanning the collection is too expensive, then you can maintain a document "by hand" that contains the ranges redundantly. Regards, Michael Kay http://www

See the original post:
Define no-overlaps constraint based on two
integers(range index?)

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.

See the article here:
Mark Logic Lands $12.5M in Capital to Sustain High Rate of Growth