XML Today

I don't normally drag political issues onto the pages of XMLToday, but the onslaught of bad legislation that are little more than corporate power grabs needs to be stopped. SOPA and PIPA, intended to "protect" intellectual property, looks like an open invitation not only to dismantle the open source community, but could be used to imprison people who argue against the government or against powerful corporate sponsors.

The year 2011 has been characterized by revolutionary fervor - change is everywhere, often coming out of nowhere, upending the traditional establishment that had held sway for so long. It's a motif that's played out in the streets worldwide as financiers everywhere went from being the wunderkinds and heroes of entrepreneurship to becoming grasping, thieving robber barons, at least in the public perception, and as people tossed out of work, tossed out of their homes, in short becoming the ultimate disposables, finally started fighting back.

One of the joys of being a consultant is that you go through stretches where there's not much to do, and then you get thrown into a project where you're burning 50+ hours a week, your kids have trouble recognizing you, and where you wake up with nightmares about code that simply ... won't ... work! I'm in the latter phase at the moment, though look to be wrapping up soon, at which point I'll finally get around to finishing the SVG book that I've been working on since March (sigh).

Shhhh ... I have a secret.

While I've been digging deep into the innards of MarkLogic's XQuery implementation I've accidentally fallen in love with something that's not quite a part of XQuery. It's a magical little object called a Map.

This map is not the one with roads and rivers and names and political boundaries. Instead, it's something that should be familiar to programmers in most other languages: a hash table. Like such objects elsewhere, this hash map can prove to be a remarkably useful instrument for an XQuery developer.

Hmmm -- there's a bad moon rising in the operating system sphere. Last week, Steve Jobs passed away of cancer, and made the cover simultaneously of the three primary news weeklies. Dennis Ritchie will probably not achieve that fate, which is in many ways a shame. Jobs was a showman, a marketing genius without parallel, but he was never really a geek. Ritchie was. In the late 1960s, he set about with Ken Thompson to create a new operating shell for minicomputers at Bell Labs, eventually resulting in an assembly language-based core system called UNIX.

There are few people at any given time that can truly be said to have changed the course of civilization by themselves. Steve Jobs, the founder of both Apple and Pixar, was one of those few, and his death today at the too young age of 56 truly marks the end of an era that he, in many ways, helped to create.

In a recent article I posted here, one key piece of reasoning depended on the properties and behavior of Complex Systems. This sort of thing will come up again and again. Partly it’s me (I find Systems Theory increasingly indispensable as an investigative, analytic, and descriptive model); but partly it’s objective reality. It’s getting harder and harder to ignore, or defer responding to, Systems-driven global phenomena that have real near-term consequences. It all seems to be coming together in a spectacular crunch, and that’s not coincidental: this global trend is driven by the increasing interconnection and scale of human activity.

IT plays a huge part in this, and has to respond in two ways. First, Complex Systems show up in our application problem domains more and more often, so we need to figure out how to work with them. Second, IT itself gets Complex, and when it does we're better off if we understand the behavior of Complex Systems. This is something of a problem: Systems Theory is generally not well known, especially in our field, and there’s a lot to it.

A Physics professor of mine once used the phrase “motorcycle tour though a museum” as a rueful lament about how small a glimpse, of how vast a subject, undergraduate Physics courses could actually provide. I’ve stolen this from him, and I hope he’d approve.

In that spirit, here’s a basic overview of the general nature, shape, and implications of Complex Systems. Don’t expect theoretical precision. I’ll just try to make things conceptually accessible at a pretty high level.

Now you probably know enough to decide whether to read further. If you do, grab your boots, jacket, do-rag, helmet, assless chaps, mirrorshades, whatever you think you need for the road; and let’s roll.

I discovered the other day that if you copy and paste a table from a PDF file into text, it generates the output as a list of all of the columns in sequential order, paragraph separated. Given the need to parse this back into a data structure, I wrote the following XQuery function to do the conversion, working within MarkLogic (the function itself, textutils:list-str-to-records(), is vanilla XQuery - only the calling function is ML specific). So, without further ado:

This particular article has been a long time in the making - the NoSQL conference, Aug 23-25, 2011, was a remarkably busy event, then I come home just in time to deal with Hurricane Irene coming up the coast to meet us. A day without power and three without Internet similarly proved challenging, and provided an all to real reminder of how dependent we are upon a reliable supply of electricity and the Internet itself. Save for a few downed branches, we otherwise survived without mishap, and now its just down to picking up the pieces and moving on.

There are a number of intriguing widgets that have emerged from the HTML5 spec. A rather tantalizing one is the progress meter, designated by the <progress> element. The role of <progress> is obvious enough - it provides a way of giving feedback about the state of a given transaction, whether it be the percentage of a download, progress in an application wizard, score in a game or volume of a speaker.