Bitworking - theories of software development

The problem with MetaData.

Today on [rest-discuss] Roy Fielding debunked the REST implies opaque URIs legend.

It's true, it's true. I've been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and have, of course, accepted. [Dave Winer]

Congrats Dave!

And I thought UDDI had reached a low point when somebody from Microsoft floated the idea of using it to register RSS feeds. Now this proposal for XRIs appears. Timothy Appnel summed up the situation well with "Please Put UDDI Out Of Its Misery".

Oh yes, Dilbert is covering Extreme Programming.

An amusing observation. I was reading the TrackBack specification and came across something that I hadn't really thought about before. Here is the mime-type of the stuff sent to the server when you do POST from a web form:

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Do you see that?

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Yes, x for experimental. I think by now that format is little beyond experimental. Hey, I thought it was amusing.

Taking up Mark's request for small world stories.

My wife Lynne and I both graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University. While as an undergraduate I was good friends with Dee Sweet who had the strange title of co-president of the Biology club. Co-president. Who the hell has co-presidents! Anyway I never met the co-president, only saw him through a door way one day when he dropped off some papers at Dee's apartment. His name, which I learned later, was Ken. That was our first non-meeting.

After graduation Ken moves to Stafford with his family. I grew up in Stafford. My whole family still lives there.

Later Ken moves to Niantic, CT. Into the Giant Neck Heights sub-division. Five houses down the street from my Father-In-Law. They waved to each other on my Father-In-Law nightly walks.

Later we move into a new house in a sub-division in Apex, NC. Two houses down the street from Ken and his family who had moved there the year before.

At this point in the story we still don't know any of this.

My Father-In-Law is visiting and has driven his van. We are all outside watching the kids play in the street. Ken and his wife are out for a walk. As they walk by my Father-In-Law's van Ken points to a small green sticker on the bumper of the car, "GNH".

"What does that stand for?", he asks jokingly, "Giant Neck Heights?"

And from there we spent an hour unraveling the trail backwards.

I also have another smaller small world story. Does that make it a micro world story? Anyway... I was hired at my last job on the same exact day as Matt. Matt turns out to be the son of one of my wife's grade school teachers.

Here is my first pass at an Image Publishing API.

Micah Dubinko recently announced his SkunkLink XML linking proposal. Finally an XML linking proposal that is worth reading. It is concise and to the point and covers the 80/20 tradeoff very well. When working on the XML formats for RESTLog ( archive , template) I looked at the specifcation for XLink, the XML Linking Languge. The syntax was far too verbose and the mechanism was too complex both to produce and consume. Even in the specification itself they use DTDs to default attributes to make their examples shorter. HLink was another proposal that I looked at the also had similar problems. In contrast the SkunkLink proposal would be very easy to implement on both the generation and the consumption side. In addition it is also very amenable to "view source" learning. I hope this proposal gets some traction.

As an addendum to yesterdays post about Pattern Recognition I would like to point out that William Gibson now has an active blog. Now if he'd only turn on the RSS feed for his blogger powered site then life would be good.

The latest book from William Gibson is Pattern Recognition and will be available on February 3, 2003! My copy is now pre-ordered.

That takes care of spending the money I got for Christmas, the rest of which I spent on music and a donation to the EFF. I hadn't planned it out this way but I ended up giving twice as much money to the EFF as I spent on music this year. Next year I'll aim for donating twice what I spend movies.