HR-XML, FlyVideo3000 Support, Mono turns 5 years old!
HR-XML
Was working on resume this morning when I ran across something cool called the Human Resource XML Consortium. This is one of the best uses of web services and XML standardization outside use specifically in the tech realm.
You see, my resume is really written in XML. I did that about 4 years ago so that I could write a few XSLT sheets to export the real resume. My experience crosses so many areas, so its really hard to show specifically to the human resource officer who is going to get my resume I know exactly what they need, simply because many of them don’t understand the technology as well as the developers I would be working for in most cases. With this method I can filter and sort specific areas and use different versions of the text so I can match to each specific case as best as possible. All I have to do is tweak a few sorts and xpath queries in the xslt and out comes a specific resume for someone. The other main goal was to be able to export my resume to different formats like XHTML, Text, and an XML schema for converting to PDF (and even someday Word XML and OpenDoc).
What is of interest to me is that the HR-XML guys have come up with a standardized XML scheme for resumes (which happens to be fairly similar to my resume). Though, once its in that format, it conforms to everything published by the HR-XML and when everyone starts using all the HR interchange formats (which from the sponsors might already be true), then I’ll be slightly over the curve. That is if it the general public picks up on it, which I can’t see why not 
I’ll release the code that makes this possible later. I think that HR-XML has really got something here.
Update:
“greencrab” (with a nasa.gov ip even :-P) else emailed me about http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/. It’s got Debian packages on apt-get even. Pretty neat stuff.
FlyVideo3000 Support
I wrote a patch for the Linux kernel to support the $18 FlyVideo3000 NTSC video capture card for video4linux. Nothing big but its my first kernel patch I got to send in so I’m excited. Really there isn’t any code, just adding a definition but still, got to start somewhere. See it here: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115011638432595&w=2
Mono turns 5 years old!
It’s simply amazing how far Mono has evolved over the years. From its early days in 2001 when the annoucments of what the guys over at Ximian became public knowledge, its simply amazing to see how many people have joined in. This project is massive now. Well over 3 millions lines of code.
Here are some interesting links in Mono history:
- The old “Mono Internet Server” “MIS” to test sockets and IO back in early 2002:
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/dick-mis-server.png - GTK# Hello world app from 2002 back in Gnome 1.0: http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/gtk-hello-world.png
- The nearly famous email from Miguel speaking to the gnome-hackers community on the relationship of gnome and mono. This is required reading for everyone: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-February/msg00031.html
Tags: Linux, Mono & .NET, Personal
June 12th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
If you like HR-XML, you might like to check out xmlresume. I find it easier to use and you could use apt-get if you use Debian.
June 12th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Hey Zac,
My company is a HR-XML certified member and quite funny you did this.
The thing is HR-XML is not promoting their schemas to the public area but rather to software publishers in the HR market so those companies have their products talking to each other using a standard set of definitions.
The only issue why they are not pushing HR-XML to be the standard candidate Resume structure is because of competencies management: there is today no standard reference library of skills shared commonly therefore, your resume can’t be processed automatically by systems understanding HR-XML.
It still helps on structuring your resume in a standard way for presentation purposes.
That’s one of the big issues commonly shared by Application 2 Application or Business 2 Business integration (using either web services or any other remoting capability): the lack of common references for huge business hierarchal datasets.
June 12th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Just a quick addition on my previous comment regarding HR-XML.
Another huge topic for HR-XML consortium is how to handle culture specifics:
Basically, in some countries, some fields are mandatories while other aren’t.
Therefore, the schemas can’t easily provide restrictions such as mandatory fields without moving into local versions of each HR-XML schemas.