Great Leap Blogwards

XML Resume

2009-01-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

Still a work in progress, but after researching for a few days I created a viewable resume based from an XML document.

First off I do know that there is at least one other project with similar goals (the one I know of is http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/ that seemed interesting). I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes you have to do work to learn how wheels work.

Aside from a few schema-related issues I had with their project, I did want to practice a bit more about XSD, and not focus on their older DTD file. I also wanted to spend time to learn more about XSLT.

My main thinking for this is when looking for a job and for each Job Agency they have their own way of collecting information, so I am supposed to re-enter my work history for each site, and then there are usually parsing problems for those that try to parse my Word resume so most work has to be done by hand. Plus when I talk to others that see that info they right away comment that info seems missing and hard to read so can I just sent them a Word doc anyway.

Some of the thoughts that went into the XSD:

· It was not just an academic exercise, I wanted it to be usable

· Allow me to use all my existing info, and expand for other career-types

· Try for it to be accommodating to the people involved: e.g. I don’t like leaving a phone number without letting people know what time-zone that phone is in, we don’t all like in the same spot and I want others to think about where (and when) they are calling

· To be open about what people want to present: e.g. whether you want to talk about accomplishments in a role, or what your responsibilities were, or both

· Have a skills list which is probably what searches should be focused on, not just parsing all of the text

· Being flexible about addresses: e.g. not worrying about zip-code format or making sure it is complete – the people that are filling it out know what they need for others to find them

· Also being flexible about dates; I don’t always have set dates for when I go from one project to another (in the same company) and we don’t always need to know the exact date anyway. If we start something in a particular month or year that should suffice

It is not complete, but viewable at http://www.greatleapforwards.com/docs/resume/xsd/resume.xsd

So the next task was to work on the transformation. I knew some XPATH statements but that took a bit of time (and patience).

While working on the XSL file, I always defined a class in a style-sheet so I can modify the format in the CSS later.

For now I kept it simple, but does what I want it to do.

The end result is at http://www.greatleapforwards.com/Resume.aspx

The next (possible) task is to look at a transformation that will create a DOCX file. I may hold off on that because many agencies will just say “I can’t read that file, can you send me an old-version Word file”

Back for now

2009-01-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Yes it has been some time since I posted anything, I've been busy with Facebook, or just wondering why I should write something that is seldom read.

a new technology: C

2005-02-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

You might think there was a problem displaying the character # or even ++ on your browser.
But no, I stated just plain old C.
Over the past few weeks I have been in a few book stores, naturally visiting the computer section.
Looking at the new development books in the section I was surprised, nah shocked, to see a number of C books.

Is this a retro style thing?

Have we given up on this wachy OO stuff?

Did the (different) book companies find some big warehouse of old books and are trying to unload them?

I don't understand...

Some companies get it, some don't

2004-12-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

I have used Quicken & Quick-Tax for several years. I've been happy to promote a Canadian company and despite some grumblings they do have some good features.

Every year it seems that I question whether or not it is worth the money to upgrade - but most times I give in to the temptation of a few new features.

When I started up my Quicken program the other day it warned me that my license is about to expire. I thought that odd since I thought I was on a continual monthly fee.

Apparently I am on a monthly fee for their services (mainly the stock tracker and downloading transactions from banks) but it was set to expire after a year.

I phoned up asked a few questions, got half-decent answers after a few minutes of being on hold, lengthened my online service contract (it now can go until 2006), and when I participated in their phone survey afterwards I gave good marks for the service people.

The product people, or the group that decides how it is marketed, I have a 1 out of 9 to.
Despite being a customer for several years, and normally upgrading or getting the new version - I have to go out and buy a new version if I want to upgrade.

There is no automatic process, there really isn't even a non-automated process. More to my point is there is no loyalty discount, there is no benefit of me having a version already and wanting some new functionality.

I need to get a complete new version (at no discount), and uninstall the old one, install the new one, probably sit on hold to activate the new oneâ€¦

Congratulations Quicken people - you're a big company now. I don't like you.

I bet I can probably find somewhere a competitive upgrade discount where I can switch to Microsoft Money for a cheaper price.

The old adage: If you don't want to look after your customers, someone else will.

For the amount of functionality in there I would think it is not impossible for a group of open source developers to deliver much of what is already in Quicken.

The stock ticker stuff is done on a thousand web-sites, so it cannot be too difficult to implement.
The downloading transactions interface is not too complicated either. I would say the only difference between transactions to Quicken and CDDB information coming into my music player is that the one set of information is coming from banks (bank coincidentally is Latin for "we'll find a way to charge you").

But I am hoping there is somebody out there that is up to the challenge - and I for one would certainly help the effort.

Let's end document centric thinking and move to functionality based thinking

2004-11-19T05:30:00.000-08:00

I started this post a while ago, but today I had a brief discussion about content management so that pushed me to finish off this rant and post it:

Why is it that we are still dealing with Word .doc files and WordPerfect files and Excel files...

Shouldn't we be dealing with a help document file, or a resume file, or a numbers comparison file?

I got to thinking about Microsoft's next big release and how the operating system will include/leverage the database engine so you don't have to worry as much about where things are stored (be it files or contact info or emails etc) and you just need to state what type of information it is and then later on you will be able to retrieve it.

I have had a project idea on my to-do list for a while where I combine my Outlook emails & contacts with my doc files in my folders and all of my bookmarks and have one way of getting at that information versus me trying to remember - so did I save that attachment to a folder or is it still in an email or was it even an attachment or was it maybe just on somebody's web-page?

We should have to care about where the information is, we just need to know what it was to find it again.

Recently I was given to files to review from an organization. I got confused because they gave an xml file, a Word doc file, and a pdf file with essentially the same info. Mainly because they didn't know who would have what application to read the information.

While that was a nice thought for them to do that, it exemplifies the problem that nowadays too many companies waste time repeating the same functionality.

Do I care if company A stores their data in a more elegant storage structure than company B? Not a rat's ass.

Do I ignore company C if their files are 20% bigger than company D? I might not care if it was 2000% bigger - I would probably focus on the functionality of the application and how easy it is to use above all else.

So the next question is: how can company's use the same file for different purposes?

I am not seeing the world as one mother of an xml file. Some scholar can take this the next step and toss the file concept and we apply the principle of getting at data through interfaces to a generic data store. But for now different information can be stored in different files.

What I am saying is that we have Excel spreadsheets for storing numbers, and then somebody copies a page of those numbers into another doc because other users are not allowed to change the file and they don't know how to use Excel to get at the data they want. Somebody else exports a graph and makes it into a pdf for easy viewing.

And there is a different spreadsheet for each department and each month of the year.

And there is an accompanying Word doc that describes how to use the file.

How come we don't just have one file that has defined interfaces on what data the user wants to see and how the user is going to see that data.

Shouldn't a software company's focus be on the functionality, not how they store the data?

Gone are the days that it was company secrets how the information gets stored, complex file formats that prevent competitors to get at that information.

Nowadays:

1) if a company wants to block anybody from getting at that information - they can. Security algorithms easily solve the challenge of hiding the information

2) a company's strengths is normally how well they SHARE the data, with other systems and how things can get automatically updated in or out. the exact opposite worry of how to hide data so nobody can see it

3) the company strengths is in how to make sure the end user can use the data easily.

If one person should only see a part of the data, that is possible.

If another person should only be able to update part of the data, that is possible.

If another person wants to see a different view of the data, that is possible.

If another person wants to update the data from a different data source, that is possible.

If another person wants to quickly/automatically jump to a section of the data, that is possible.

If another person wants to include other references to data, that is possible.

If another person has a lot of data to include but wants to compress it for storage reasons, that is possible.

So if all of this is possible, and just about all companies can do ALL of these things - why is it that we still use different file types for different reasons?

One small step for blogging

2004-11-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

One great leap (forwards) for blog-kind.