The introduction of a computer into a house or business meant the introduction of more stuff. Computer, monitor, cables, printer, etc. The whole "Paperless Office" thing was a sham, owning a computer meant even more paper than ever was printed and lying around. But recently that trend in our house has started to turn around. We're not actually moving in the other direction yet, but I do see things leveling off.

There are two things that have been bothering me for a while now. The first is that the only realistic way out of our current situation, barring a Japan-like lost decade, is to inflate our way out of the Great Recession, yet there isn't any movement in that direction. The other thing that has puzzled me has been the treatment of China as if it were an economic miracle, impervious to any rational market behavior.

Lynne has her Apex Math site up and running. Having done teaching and tutoring for years she has strong opinions on how math is taught in schools today, and how it should be changed to help the students and give them a positive attitude about math. She's now taken that experience and put it into a set curriculum for a whole range of grades and areas, from K-2 to Algebra.

Do not get me wrong, I'm thrilled to see some of the ideas that I've talked about finally getting traction in the wider community, and pleased that someone came up with a different name than Megadata, but in looking at many of the discussions it appears that there's way too much focus on the "SQL" part of NoSQL. While breaking away from looking at data merely in a relational manner is a good start, it misses the larger picture, which is that working with Megadata, really large data sets, the nature of the problems and the nature of the solutions markedly changes.

I just pushed a prototype of what I'd like the next version of the GData Python Client to look like, along with a design document. Please send feedback to the gdata python client library contributors mailing list.

The window for applications for LaunchBox Digital closes in 8 days, so if you are in the RTP area and are a startup, or want to launch a startup, get your act together and submit your application. Check out the FAQ for more details.

Videogame nomenclature seems to be slipping into my kids everyday speach. Two examples: Reilly was watching a preview for Men in Black and was impressed with the guns: Woah, how did they get all those cool items? Later he was playing cards at the kitchen table with his sister: Pause the game, I'll be right back.

XML namespaces are designed to provide distributed extensibility using URIs. Distributed extensibility means that multiple people, or organizations, can extend an XML format with out any communication between them, and if they follow the rules they will avoid syntactic collisions. That statement shouldn't be controversial, it's a statement of fact, the definition of distributed extensibility. The problem is that everyone seems to accept the underlying assumption that distributed extensibilty is a desirable property.

One of the many cool things launched at Google IO was the Google Font API. I'm now using that and a quick refresh should get you all the content here in a combination of Cantarell and Inconsolata. I like that fact that typographically my site will render more and more consistently over time. I love the fact that Google just released 18* open fonts. * Actually three of the fonts were not just released; the Droid Fonts have been out for a while.

The latest URI Template draft is now available: draft-gregorio-uritemplate-04. Warning that the syntax has changed substantially from -03 if you haven't been following along. As always, please direct feedback to the W3C URI mailing list.

Dave Winer: Unless Google also adds a disclaimer of all patents on all the new stuff, I'd be very careful about which ones we adopt. The Google Data Protocol Patent License: Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation (in whole or in part) of this specification.

Here are my slides (pdf) (OpenOffice) from my presentation "Threading is not a model" from PyCon. Be warned that they aren't very useful, there are no speaker notes and the slides themselves are pretty light on content, except for near the end of the deck where it gets into Stackless Python, Go and IO code examples. If you weren't actually in my talk you should wait for it to appear on pycon.

The schedule isn't up yet, but I just found out today that my submission got accepted for this year's Triangle Game Conference. The really great news is that Christopher's submission also got accepted. This will be the first time I've presented at the same conference as my son!

Posted here because I got hung up on this. If you add a link to your profile, but it doesn't show up when you try to force a recrawl, you need to make sure the "This is a profile page about me" checkbox is checked in your profile.

So, Buzz is finally out. We've been dogfooding it internally for a while and it's been great. One of the best aspects of Buzz is the use of open standards. It's just feeds. And if you want to hook up a new data source to Buzz, it is just a matter of adding a link/@rel='me'. That two way connection between your profile page and the source is the proof that it is a source that you truly own.

Thanks to Ade, the Python version of mimeparse now has pirate tests.

Four years ago today I decided I wanted to do something a little different for Valentine's Day, so I found some red card stock in the house and began cutting out hearts. Lots of hearts. 2 inches across, about 50 in total. I then began sticking them up around the house, not randomly, but in places where Lynne would find them as she went about her daily routine. One on the bathroom mirror, one on the shower door, one on the rear-view mirror of the van, etc.

At a previous employer we made tensile testing equipment. Now for tensile testing a material you cut it into a dogbone shape and then pull at each end of the dogbone, plotting out the change in length of the specimen against how much load is on the specimen. Once you have all that data you can plot stress-strain curves and learn all sorts of interesting things about said material. Now if you are developing a new material, or in general working in a laboratory setting, the amount of material to test isn't large, and the amount of work of preparing specimens and loading them into a tester and reading off the results falls into that's-what-we-have-interns-for.

Space.com: The NASA budget request, which actually included a slight budget boost up to $19 billion, would cut out the Constellation completely, extend the International Space Station's mission through at least 2020, and set aside $6 billion over five years to support commercial spacecraft development. It would also increase funding for fundamental research, Earth science and development programs for ground-breaking technology for space exploration. There's obviously a lot of hand-wringing about this, which is understandable, for many people it's an unthinkable change because NASA has been the sole provider of U.

http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/ http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/ http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/ http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule http://base.google.com/ns/1.0 http://base.google.com/ns/1.0 http://conversationsnetwork.org/rssNamespace-1.0/ http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0 http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1 http://feedsync.org/2007/feedsync http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007 http://geourl.org/rss/module/ http://hacks.benhammersley.com/rss/streaming/ http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/ http://media.tangent.org/rss/1.0/ http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/ http://my.theinfo.org/changed/1.0/rss/ http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/opensocial http://openid.net/xmlns/1.0 http://portablecontacts.net/ns/1.0 http://postneo.com/icbm http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ http://purl.org/dc/terms/ http://purl.org/net/rss1.1# http://purl.org/rss/1.0/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/aggregation/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/annotate/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/company http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/email/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/event/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/image/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/reference/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/richequiv/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/rss091# http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/search/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/servicestatus/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/subscription/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/taxonomy/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/threading/ http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/wiki/ http://purl.org/syndication/history/1.0 http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0 http://rssnamespace.org/feedburner/ext/1.0 http://schemas.google.com/acl/2007 http://schemas.google.com/codesearch/2006 http://schemas.google.com/g/2005 http://schemas.google.com/gCal/2005 http://schemas.google.com/gdata/batchbatch http://schemas.google.com/photos/2007 http://schemas.google.com/photos/exif/2007 http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006 http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006/extended http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/ http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ http://web.resource.org/cc/ http://webns.net/mvcb/ http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/ http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0 http://www.georss.org/georss http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005 http://www.opengis.net/gml http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2 http://www.opml.org/spec2 http://www.