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.

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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, "

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.

Mark Pilgrim: Welcome to "What's Next in HTML," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHAT Working Group. Wait... what happened to This Week in HTML5? Hell, what happened to HTML5? Well, nothing. It took over five years to create, but it's in Last Call now. In other news: $ hg pull pulling from https://go.googlecode.com/hg/ searching for changes adding changesets adding manifests adding file changes added 632 changesets with 2498 changes to 1100 files No doubt it's been a while since I did a pull, but really, it looks like someone could write a 'This Week in Go' column.

Six bugs have already been filed against rst2rfc, so I'm going to take that as a good sign. The source has been moved into the repostory and I've created a mailing list for discussions. If you have patches, please put them up on codereview.appspot.com and make sure to inlucude me (joe@bitworking.org) as a reviewer.

A while back I asked for suggestions on how to use 4 500GB drives to build a backup machine. It took me a while, but two weeks ago I started to build up that system, and the first thing I discovered was that the drives were SATA but the old Dell box wasn't. I started to hunt around for a SATA box I could buy when it dawned on me that I was building a centralized backup system for the house.

Because, you know, I don't need to know about lxml preserving the case of my doctype every single time I run piccolo. import warnings from html5lib.constants import DataLossWarning warnings.simplefilter("ignore", DataLossWarning) from lxml import etree

Triangle Game Conference: Triangle Game Conference is currently accepting submissions to the 2010 Triangle Game Conference (TGC). All submissions must be received no later than close of business Friday, January 15, 2009. I've already submitted a proposal, and so has my son Christopher. Even if I'm not speaking I'll still attend. Hope to see you there!

I was thrilled to see work begin on WebFinger, particularly caught by the very simple premise of John Panzer in his description of the problem: The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses? He breaks it down further by noting that the email address is a powerful personal identifier. That strikes me as the core of what is needed, that is, a way to go from an email address to an HTTP URI.

Version 0.6.0 of httplib2 has been released today. The following issues have been addressed: #51 - Failure to handle server legitimately closing connection before request body is fully sent #77 - Duplicated caching test #65 - Transform _normalize_headers into a method of Http class #45 - Vary header #73 - All files in Mercurial are executable #81 - Have a useful .hgignore #78 - Add release tags to the Mercurial repository #67 - HEAD requests cause next request to be retried Mostly a bug fix release, the big enhancement is the addition of proper Vary: header handling.

WS-REST will take place on 26 April 2010, co-located with the WWW2010 conference, at the Raleigh Convention Center. The Call for Papers ends on 8 Feb 2010, so you have plenty of time to get your submissions together. I hope to see you there. Disclosure: I am on the Program Committee.

XRD RDF This document defines XRD, a simple generic format for describing resources. Resource descriptor documents provide machine-readable information about resources (resource metadata) for the purpose of promoting interoperability, and assist in interacting with unknown resources that support known interfaces. For example, a web page about an upcoming meeting can provide in its descriptor document the location of the meeting organizer's free/busy information to potentially negotiate a different time.

The Economist: Some good things will follow from this. There will be fewer smart Alecs who think they know it all pouring into companies. There has been a bear market in management bullshit since the credit crunch began, but so far this has been on the demand side—managers have been too intent on staying in work to talk much jargon. In 2010 the decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit at source.

Noam Chomsky: So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them.

A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing: He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood. Google Fusion Tables API What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online.

rst2rfc - Because making humans edit XML is sadistic. Rst2rfc.py is a command-line tool written in Python that uses docutils and converts ReStructuredText input into XML suitable for consumption by xml2rfc. Currently the code lives as a part of the wave-protocol project, but if you have issues please report them via the issue tracker on http://code.google.com/p/rst2rfc/. The code, as of today, is not robust. Actually, at the slightest provocation it will halt and burst into flames.