I’ve been using Gemini to analyse my code this fine evening. It’s mostly Ant with some XSLT thrown in. The AI’s very good at resolving my Ant XML properties and will resolve those properties in a millisecond, something that embitters me because at XML Prague just a week ago, I spent 10 minutes talking about how to resolve those. It does a great job. I was wondering about an Ant script that I wrote, expecting to find a nested properties error.

But it correctly identified my well-formed-only mode, set via a Boolean property, and pointed out my mistake. That property was set elsewhere, which is why I didn’t spot it right away.

So I’m left wondering if my AI aid actually helped me or made me more stupid. I missed that Boolean property. I might have spent up to 30 mins without that hint.

For those ethically inclined among you, those 15 or 30 minutes could make a difference. Did a dozen or so human readers in Africa prepping AI responses just have their lunch denied? Did I kill a baby seal or deny Somalian kids their daily water quote? A mean thing to say, I know, but my question is real. Did that AI make a difference?

Plenty of shitty reasoning to excuse myself, but I don’t want to go there.

The real question is is it justifiable in any way to have me fix a bug because of the 30-minute win I suspect it gave me?

As in, do you have any? And if you do, please contact me directly.

I found myself out of a long-term gig, recently. The customer did away with all of their contractors. This one felt almost personal to me because I’d been on it for a long time, relatively speaking, and I had a role far removed from a simple hired hand. But shit happens. I was in fact a hired hand. Tougher times.

So I’ve been looking, lately, I went on LinkedIn, where I pay for Premium membership which supposedly gives me an edge. I honestly don’t think it does, because their AI algorithms border on painful and so the top jobs you are suggested appear to be basic string matches. Not the relevant strings, mind, but your job titles. If your resume says you are a CEO (because I am; I’ve run my business for 30 years now), your top jobs will be CEO work. Which is ridiculous. My career is about XML technologies. I do XML, XSLT, XQuery, XProc, not to mention XML vocabularies like DITA, S1000D, and DocBook. And, of course, SGML, the ISO standard that led to XML.

None of the CEO jobs had anything to do with markup technology.

I contacted LinkedIn support. They said it’s all about refining your searches and filtering so the AI can learn, but since that’s what I’d already been doing, I thanked them while remaining doubtful. That very same day, my top job matches (the ones thinking I am a CEO so I must be looking for CEO work) magically disappeared.

Coincidence? I’m sure it was.

The other job suggestions I get are “architect” jobs. Again, this borders on the simple-minded. My CV lists a few job titles stating I am a “content architect”, sure, but unless you are very, very literal about it, you won’t haul me in for a rebuild for a property in Manchester. Right? In a string match, I’d sort of get that. But I’ve been suggested any number of “architect” roles where the only common denominator is that string. “Architect”. Integration, enterprise, more buildings, etc. They focus on “architect” but are not able to read the context, not even to match keywords that are actually there (and, for that matter, exclude those that are not).

It’s more of the same if you do text-based search yourself. Looking for “SGML XML” results in anything but. “XML XSLT” rarely gets anything useful. Etc. None of the buzzwords in my field yields a meaningful result, just more of the same nonsense.

Five years ago, though, adding keywords is how I found the long-term gig that eventually prompted this post.

Now, I get nothing of the sort. I cannot do a text-based search. I have no way to look for jobs that match my expertise. The filters offered by LinkedIn are geared towards jobs and roles they know about. I wanted to say “understand” but I think that’s stretching it.

LinkedIn is filled to the brim with AI these days. They base much of their business on it. Everyone is posting about it. Action figures, images, fake posts, tweaked articles, vibe programming, you name it. It’s everywhere.

But if this is the extent of its usefulness, count me out.

Michael Sperberg-McQueen, a legend in the markup community, died yesterday morning. He was, of course, co-editor of the XML specification and chaired the XML Schema working Group at the W3C. Others may remember him for his instrumental role in developing and maintaining the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and still others will recall his many thoughtful papers and presentations on various aspects of markup theory.

But Michael was also one of the organisers of the Balisage markup conference. His closing keynote, carefully crafted and eloquently given, would always end the conference. We would all gather around him to listen and reflect, with those of us having presented at the conference impatiently waiting for him to mention our talks, because he always did. He would effortlessly weave our presentations into his narrative, making us feel appreciated and important and heard; we’d all feel like rock stars, as Eric van der Vlist once put it. Michael was an extraordinary public speaker, and to this day some of his talks still come off as magic.

If you speak at Balisage, you’re always introduced by one of the organisers, usually Jim Mason, Norm Walsh or Michael. This year — just over two weeks ago — Michael introduced me. Before, we chatted for about ten minutes. He made sure he would pronounce my name correctly, but then really wanted to discuss the mainframe computers that my slides started off with. This was Michael for you; no matter what you brought to the table, he’d be able to discuss it, often at length and in great detail.

He was also a generous man, appreciative and kind, always giving credit where he thought credit is due. This year, I was immensely proud to be mentioned in his Balisage talk, having proposed ideas he had decided to use in his work. He didn’t have to; my ideas were hardly original and I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have as much as reacted, but he did. And it meant a lot to me.

Michael will be sorely missed. Today we mourn.

An old draft that I found, checking the list of posts…

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I bid on, and won, a Dolby CP200 cinema sound processor on eBay. The CP200, for those of you who have no idea what I’m on about, is the best and most versatile cinema sound processor Dolby ever made. It was first introduced in 1980, 36 years ago, but it’s still relevant today if you want to be able to run every sound format in commercial use during the last 50 years, instead of just the more common ones. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering.

So while waiting for the package to arrive, I decided to head over to www.dolby.com to read up on the processor. Who better than Dolby to explain how it works, right?

Wrong.

Dolby Laboratories, by all appearances, is now nothing more than an anonymous licensor of digital technology providing endless platitudes about their intellectual property in HTML5 responsive design, equally dreary regardless of device. You might actually like the site if you are five and play Pokemon Go, but those of us who think of Dolby as the only true manufacturer of cinema sound equipment will feel old and lost. I did try the Search box (which was surprisingly hard to spot on the page), typing in “CP200”, hoping against hope that the glossy exterior hid actual substance, but, of course, the single hit returned was irrelevant and wrong.

It was as if the CP200 had been made by someone else.

It could have, actually, and I should have known. I emailed Dolby a few years ago, when trying to locate an extension card to another Dolby processor I own, the CP500. While helpful, the Dolby rep had no idea what I was talking about. He did forward my email to a tech who knew the card but said that they hadn’t had one in years, very few were ever made, and there were no schematics available.

Dolby, it seemed, had forgotten their roots.

Some dreadful news if you are at all familiar with the ever-diminishing group of film projectionists and techs in Sweden: Mats Kullander passed away today.

I’ve known Mats since the 80s when I was a humble projectionist working at SF Bio, the premier Swedish cinema chain, and he headed the chain’s technical department. He had the unfortunate task of having to close down a number of much loved single-screen theatres in Gothenburg, a task that did not at all endear him to us projectionists. We had many a battle but also an increasing number of fruitful and respectful exchanges, and by the time I left in the 90s, Mats had become a much-respected source of information and stories about our shared interests, including a love of 70mm projection and cinema technology.

I lost touch with Mats for a few years until Facebook came along and many old-timers started gathering there; it’s where many, most even, chat these days. Well, unless you still work in the industry, which I don’t. There are groups of like-minded individuals on Facebook discussing film projection, projectors, 70mm, large-screen formats, and classic theatre design, and there was Mats also, always ready for an anecdote or useful information.

Mats retired some years ago, but they would call him whenever there was a 70mm print to be screened. 70mm projectionists are rare these days so he would run shows at the Rigoletto in Stockholm. He’d introduce new projectionists to the craft, of course, but mostly, I’m sure, he’d be there simply because of he truly loved the work. I believe his last film may have been Oppenheimer, just a few months ago. He’d post pictures, and I’d miss the work terribly.

Today, we mourn.

As an IT professional, I’m reasonably senior in my chosen field and fairly visible at that, so I get quite a few cold calls and emails, asking me to consider this or that position. The best callers have done their homework so at least I get a decent discussion. Sometimes I even get an offer. Most, however, haven’t done their due diligence at all. Am I a Java developer? No. Am I a software architect? Not really. Do I need lists of people using software similar to that of my latest client’s? No, absolutely not.

My pet peeve right now is the laziest of the lot, recruiters emailing me long lists of openings as varied as a 95-yo’s prescription meds list. Would I please have a look and see if something is of interest. In other words, I can’t be bothered to do my homework, so can you please do it for me?

I’m sure some of these people think they’re helping me out, but most aren’t all that interested. They have a job to do but emailing one list to a 1,000 people is so much easier these days than reading said list before splitting it into meaningful groups and then matching profiles with each group. It’s the scammer mentality: if 1% thinks the Nigerian prince and his gold mine are real, then the campaign is a success!

The problem, of course, is that headhunters, recruiters and the like, unlike scammers, do not operate anonymously. LinkedIn is a big place, but not that big, and eventually word gets out. Recruiter A is not serious. Avoid. Sure, it will take time, but ask yourself:

Do you really want to be that guy?

It’s the first day of Balisage 2022 (online only), and I’ve been enjoying every minute.

Now, my holiday ended yesterday. I’m still in holiday mode. Lots of golf, relaxing, BBQs, meeting friends and family. Stuff. And I have not been particularly interested in markup, beyond some initial XProc and XQuery (and a few bugs I needed to sort out) during week #1. I was not super happy to start working again, and let’s not talk about this morning.

Luckily Balisage is online and a six-hour time zone difference away, so I worked the day and then logged on to Balisage for today’s talks. There’s been a few interesting ones. My favourite so far was a talk on Invisible XML or iXML, as they call it. It wasn’t as much a talk as it was an overview of where the standard (yes; I do consider Community Group specs standards) is now. I specifically liked the demos, with every single implementation astonishingly good. Did I already use “super”?

I can’t find fault with the other talks today, but you do get favourites. Mine was this, but also a chat session afterwards.

See, following the last talk for the day, I logged on to a “birds of a feather” session about conversions from and to MS Office and Open Office formats. It was a bunch of people talking about MS Office (etc) conversions and their approaches, tools, etc for doing the job. Right then and there I rediscovered my love for what I do for a living.

We all share an understanding about markup and the use of angle brackets, and the session was all about that. Tricks, tips, libraries, tools, shared experiences. Enough to make me remember what it is that made me choose this path in the first place. For a first day back at work, I could not be happier, and it’s what Balisage is all about.