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.

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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

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Creative Commons Introductory Video

Learning to use keyboard shortcuts is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, you get fed up with how hard it is to pull off a task and you feel a certain sense of triumph when you find a shorter way of doing a repetitive task.  On the other blade, becoming more efficient in what you do is part of the service to your employment contract.  You’re getting paid to perform a quality service as quickly as you can. So what then is “the most useful keyboard shortcut you never used”… Ctrl+A This is the shortcut for “select all”, which selects all the text in the current control or document.  It’s supported by most text editors, including fields on a web page, email editors, text editors, Office documents.  So let’s look at some sample uses… You’ve just written a nice comment on someone’s blog and you have that nagging doubt that the browser will get stuck and when you press Back your comment text will have disappeared.  Just before you hit the Post button, hit Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C.  Now your text is sitting in memory in case everything goes wonky.

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The most useful keyboard shortcut you never used

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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

There’s been so much hype about the would-be, Google-killer, computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha , that I’ve been reluctant to blog about it both because I’m not eager to contribute to the hype tsunami but also because I’m so overwhelmed by the number of articles I’ve bookmarked that it would take hours to sort them out into a coherent post. To give you an idea of how much Stephen Wolfram thinks his work, the “quick introduction” video is 13 minutes and 23 seconds

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My Favorite Wolfram Alpha Query

This is our last public announcement regarding these separately-subscribed upcoming on classes … the early-bird period for lower registration prices ends next week for these in-depth and comprehensive hands-on training classes in the Los Angeles area, full-price registration available until June 3: Monday, June 8, 2009 to Friday, June 12, 2009 Practical Transformation Using XSLT , XQuery and XPath (5 days): http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/training/ptuxq/ptuxqsyl.htm Monday, June 15, 2009 to Wednesday, June 17, 2009 Practical Formatting Using XSL-FO (3 days): http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/training/pfux/pfuxsyl.htm Venue – Embassy Suites, Santa Ana Airport (1325 East Dyer Road) http://tinyurl.com/3b5rz7 Instructor/author: http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/bio/gkholman.htm Registration: http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/forms/register.php#form We recognize these are difficult economic times for many companies, but thankfully air fares are low

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[Announce] XSLT/XQuery/XSL-FO hands-on courses June 2009 -
early-bird date approaching [XQuery-talk]