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 descriptor for a social network profile page can identify the location of the user's address book as well as accounts on other sites.

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.

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.