Welcome to my personal website. This is where you can find out more about me, connect with me, dive into the various companies I have built or invested in, or read my recent musings and blog posts. I've been active in the software industry since 1983 and have seen platforms come and go, so I believe in maintaining a web presence that is indeed reachable from anywhere, is under my full control, and is not part of any particular silo - and you have found that place now.
Nonetheless I do maintain a presence on most social media sites, too, so please feel free to follow me on X.com or connect with me on any of the other sites on the left, but please do write a short note on where we met or how you know me so that I can approve those connections appropriately. If you're really old-school, you can also reach me on the amateur radio bands. My ham radio operator call-sign is K1XML.
Short Bio
Alexander Falk founded Altova in 1992 in Vienna, Austria; member of the W3C XML Schema working group that defined the XML Schema 1.0 specs; member of the W3C Advisory Committee; co-creator of the popular Altova XMLSpy XML Editor; established US subsidiary Altova, Inc. in 2001 and relocated to the USA; President & CEO of Altova; VIP member of the Kepler Society (Alumni Club of the Johannes Kepler University). Always interested in new technologies and creating new developer products that improve the software development cycle. As an entrepreneur and investor the focus is clearly on software, drones, IoT, and XML-related technologies. More career details can be found on LinkedIn.
Altova
Altova® is a software company specializing in tools that assist developers with data management, software and application development, mobile development, and data integration. The creator of XMLSpy® and other award-winning products, Altova is a key player in the software tools industry and the leader in XML solution development tools.
Altova offers a complete line of desktop developer software for XML, SQL, and UML; high-performance workflow automation server products; and a cross-platform mobile development platform. With over 5.5 million users worldwide, including 91% of Fortune 500 organizations, Altova is honored to serve clients from small and medium-sized businesses to the world’s largest organizations.
Rotary
I have been an active member of Rotary for many years and previously served as President (2018-19) of the Marblehead Rotary Club, and as District Governor (2022-23) of Rotary District 7930, which covers Northeastern Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire. For the coming three Rotary years 2024-2027 I will be serving as both District Rotary Foundation Chair for District 7930, and as Major Gifts Initiative Advisor for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene for the Rotary Foundation.
Recent XML Aficionado Blog Posts
I took a 1 ½ hour test drive in Northern NH today, including several different traffic situations on state highways, federal highways, in towns, parking lots, and a ski resort. The new FSD v12.3 handled everything with zero disengagements. In summary, this is one heck of an impressive AI system! The step up from 11.4.x to 12.3 is significant and a true quantum leap, as it feels incredibly natural and human-like in its driving behavior.
Approximately 15-20% of SciFi stories deal with AI, robots, or other artificial beings becoming sentient. And of those stories, 60-70% include some form of significantly negative outcome for humanity. Therefore, I must ask the question: should we really incorporate these stories into the training corpus for AI development?
I made up a little logic puzzle today and tested it with the most prominent LLMs, including GPT-4, Claude 3, Gemini, Grok, and Chat with RTX. My goal was to see to what different degrees the various AIs would be able to solve the multiple steps required to untangle this riddle and whether even a single one of them would be able to arrive at the correct solution.
Claude 3 Opus was the only AI to solve the puzzle correctly and showed amazing problem solving skills and comprehension in the process that appeared to be bordering AGI.
A copy of XMLSpy version 1.3 from 1999 landed on the moon this week as part of the Arch Mission Lunar Library onboard the Nova-C IM-1 Odysseus lander from Intuitive Machines. The lander appears to have tipped over and is now sideways, but the Lunar Library is most likely intact.
Chat With RTX is a new demo app from NVIDIA just released today that lets you personalize a GPT large language model (LLM) connected to your own content—docs, notes, videos, or other data. Leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), TensorRT-LLM, and RTX acceleration, you can query a custom chatbot to quickly get contextually relevant answers. And because it all runs locally on your Windows RTX PC or workstation, you’ll get fast and secure results.
Over the past few weeks I have now begun a new chapter of knowledge management and exported all of my content from OneNote, Google Keep, and from my blog and imported them all into Obsidian, thereby converting them into Markdown format and - most importantly - simply having them as regular text files on my laptop, instead of some proprietary format in some proprietary software. And having all of the information all in one place, instead of being separated between blog and internal knowledge base. The blog is now simply a one folder in my Knowledge base that I decide to share with the world by publishing it under the xmlaficionado.com domain.
With the new version 3.1 of Altova RecordsManager you can now create a complete database solution - with multiple linked tables, list views, detail views, reports, and example data - from just a single AI prompt written in plain English.
MobileTogether has stepped up its game by integrating comprehensive MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) support, empowering developers to craft MQTT-enabled applications with its efficient, low-code platform. This move significantly broadens the scope for creating a variety of IoT automation applications, from smart office solutions to large-scale industrial automation.