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ALEXANDER FALK
 



ENTREPRENEUR. INVESTOR. CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF ALTOVA. DISTRICT ROTARY FOUNDATION
CHAIR 2024-27 AND PAST DISTRICT GOVERNOR 2022-23 OF ROTARY DISTRICT 7930, WASH
MAJOR GIFTS INITIATIVE ADVISER 2024-27 AT THE ROTARY FOUNDATION.
INTERESTS: AI, FSD, MOBILES, DRONES, IOT, JSON, XBRL, XML, XPATH, XQUERY, XSLT,
XML SCHEMA, AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES.
HOBBIES: SKIING, BOATING, READING.

 


BLOG

xmlaficionado.com
blog.altova.com

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COMPANIES

Altova
Fenway Sports Group
Axiom Space
VelloHealth
Skycatch
InsideTracker
VirZOOM
Black-I Robotics


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SOCIAL MEDIA

@afalk on LinkTree
@afalk on Twitter
@afalk on Facebook
@a.falk on Instagram
@afalk on LinkedIn
@afalk on Xing
@afalk.bsky.social on Bluesky
afalk@snort.social on Nostr
afalk@getalby.com on Bitcoin Lightning

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ROTARY

Marblehead Rotary
Rotary District 7930
Rotary Youth Exchange
ESSEX
Rotary International

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CONSULTING

Consulting Services

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TESLA

Tesla Referral Link

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POLICY

Email Policy

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FAMILY

Nora Falk
Calvin Falk
Swanee Falk
Heinz Falk
Till Davy

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ALEXANDER FALK



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


FIRST FSD V12.3 TEST DRIVE IN NH

2024-03-22

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.


IS IT SMART TO TRAIN LLMS ON SCIFI ABOUT AI REBELLION

2024-03-10

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?




LOGIC PUZZLE RESPONSES FROM LLMS SHOW VAST DIFFERENCES IN AI COMPREHENSION

2024-03-07

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.




XMLSPY ON THE MOON

2024-02-24

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

2024-02-13

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.




REORGANIZING MY KNOWLEDGE BASE

2024-02-10

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.




CREATING A COMPLETE DATABASE SOLUTION FROM A SINGLE AI PROMPT

2024-02-07

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.





MQTT APP DEVELOPMENT

2024-01-16

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.




RECENT ALTOVA BLOG POSTS




COPYRIGHT © 2024 ALEXANDER FALK. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE MY OWN, AND NEITHER ALTOVA NOR ANY OTHER PARTY
NECESSARILY AGREES WITH THEM. ALL POSTINGS ON THIS WEBSITE AND ALL RELATED BLOGS
ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITH NO WARRANTIES, AND CONFERRING NO RIGHTS. ANY VIEWS
EXPRESSED IN COMMENTS RESPONDING TO MY POSTINGS OR BLOG ENTRIES ARE THE OPINIONS
OF THE RESPECTIVE COMMENT AUTHOR, AND NEITHER I NOR ALTOVA NECESSARILY AGREE
WITH THEM.