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Megadata and NoSQL
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.
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GData Python Client V3
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.
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LaunchBox Digital Deadline
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.
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Gamenclature
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.
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Distributed Extensibility
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.
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Google Font API
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.
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draft-gregorio-uritemplate-04
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.
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Patented FUD
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.
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PyCon - Threading is not a model
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.
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Triangle Game Conference
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!
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Profile Config
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.
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Buzz
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.
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Valentine's Day
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.
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Joel-in-a-box
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.
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NASA
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.
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Let a thousand flowers bloom
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Winter Storm
I was in California earlier this week, but on Lynne's advice I moved up my return flight as the threat of snow grew. The snow began to fall on the cab ride home, leaving me just an hour or two window to test the generator and refill all the gas tanks. That was Friday night. It's now Sunday and we are full into the North Carolina system of snow removal, "
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mimeparse.go
I just checked in a port of mimeparse to Go.
The list of supported languages for mimeparse is now: Erlang, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, and Go.
The Go code size is a little larger than the original Python, 187 lines of code for Go versus 123 for Python. Now 27 of those added lines are lines just containing a single '}', so the difference isn't even that large.