Several jobs ago I worked at a company that made RFID readers. It was a fascinating technology and always seemed poised to take off, but in all the years that I worked there, and the time since, RFID tag readers haven't taken off, at least not in the way that everyone in the RFID industry expected. Of course, the company I worked for had revenue plans that incorporated a hockey-stick growth pattern, and that hockey-stick never materialized.

Stephen O'Grady: RedMonk Client? Give us a call and tell us what you need. If it seems like something our crowd would be interested in, we’ll stick it up on @monkjobs and if not we may know someone who fits the bill. If you want us instead to be on the lookout for a certain type of person, we’ll keep our eyes peeled for you.

Zefrank: digital natives have grown up in a landscape where access to information and influence has been flattened Clay Shirky: There are people horrified by this prospect, but the criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an "authoritative source" is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact. Authority, historically, gets bestowed on the gatekeepers of information, such as Britannica, universities, newspapers, etc.

I've created a new mercurial repository in httplib2 called async2. The goal is to address issues #5, #25, #44 and address these in a way that makes it possible to experiment with SPDY in httplib2, which would be difficult if not impossible with the current blocking IO implementation. The very rough goal is to create, or creatively reuse, a non-blocking async version of httplib, and then have httplib2 choose between the blocking or non-blocking version based on how the library is used.

Would XMPP have been necessary if HTTP worked like SPDY from the beginning?

Miguel de Icaza: Novell's Pulse: our on-site deployable Google Wave was announced today... Novell Pulse

CollabNet The CollabNet-sponsored Subversion project and The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that the award-winning Open Source project has formally submitted itself to the Apache Incubator in order to become part of the Foundation's efforts. Does the ASF realize that subversion isn't written in Java?

Google Wave Developer Blog: We are happy to announce that the developer instance of Google Wave is now available for experimental interoperability testing with other wave providers. This means that if you are interested in building a service that uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol, you can begin prototyping with a tool like FedOne against WaveSandbox.com.

If time permits for Halloween I like to try to build some sort of prop for our yearly haunted house. This year we moved the haunted house out of the shed and into the garage, and the prop I built was a jailed skeleton, rattling the bars to get out: The skeleton and chain come from our healthy stock of Halloween materials, but the rest of the system was built out of materials I had around the house.

sregex: Structural Regular Expressions in Python

An empirical comparison of seven programming languages: 80 implementations of the same set of requirements are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort required for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given pro- gramming problem, which regards string manipulation and search in a dictionary, “scripting languages” (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than “conventional lan- guages” (C, C++, Java).

Exhibit A: Jacob Kaplan-Moss Ryan Tomayko’s I like Unicorn because it’s Unix should be required reading for anyone doing anything involving networks or unixes these days. Like Ryan, I share a deep appreciation for the dark art of Unix system calls, and like Ryan I’m a bit dismayed to see them relegated to the dusty corners of our shiny dynamic languages. So I read I like Unicorn because it’s Unix with glee; it’s perhaps the cleanest, clearest explanation of how preforking socket servers work, and I enjoyed seeing Ruby’s twist on the old standard.

My upcoming travel plans include a trip to Baltimore, MD where I will be giving talk at LISA '09 with Daniel Berlin on Google Wave. The next day I will be attending Internet Summit 09 in Raleigh's new convention center.

WADL has been submitted to the W3C as a member submission. Sigh. Two years later and all the arguments against WADL still hold.

After spending four days in the cramped quarters of a cruise ship with 2,000 of my fellow vacationers, I can say that, as a species, humans are gassy.

Jaron Lanier: No, no, they're not. What's the difference between a bug and a variation or an imperfection? If you think about it, if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Besides sounding like a plot device for a Douglas Adams book, it's a great point.

A = Number of transistors in an Intel Core i7-920 Processor = 731,000,000 B = Number of transistors in a 20 MHz 386 = 275,000 C = A/B = 2,658 Start your reading list here.

Christopher's latest game is up on Kongregate: Gravity Mouse 2. And as of right now, his last game, Medieval Rampage 2, is on the front page as a Featured Game.

Dan Peterson: We've also been working to provide more documentation around the wave model, and so we've produced a draft specification for the wave conversation model... While Wave in general allows editing any sort of XML-like structure, the Wave Conversation Model describes the vocabulary that Wave uses to represent conversations, those things you actually interact with via the browser. As usual, please direct all feedback to the mailing list.

Last night Lynne and I went to the U2 concert, an impromptu celebration of the day we met 22 years ago. The concert was great, of course, aided by absolutely perfect weather for a concert in Carter-Finley Stadium. Our seats were really good considering we got them for $30 on the day of the concert. Did I mention this was impromptu? The 60,000 attendees themselves were spread over a huge range, from the drunken frat boys that sat behind us, to families that brought along their children, to older couples; I saw kids around the age of eight, to people in their 70's.