Rob Pike, in 1991: Where will we be ten years from now? CRT's will be a thing of the past, multimedia will no longer be a buzzword, pen-based and voice input will be everywhere, and university students will still be editing with emacs. As a disclaimer, this blogpost was written in VIM.

The RDU area is really hopping these days with technology groups and events. BarCampRDU just happened last month, along with Ignite Raleigh which I sadly missed. Just recently I discovered there is a Triangle GTUG, one of many GTUGs (Google Technology User Group), and an RDU Wavelets group on Meetup.com. And to cut off any complaints, yes, there are plenty of older and more established groups in the area also, like TriZPUG, TriJUG, TriPUG, TriLUG.

A great report from America 2050 (via INFRASTRUCTURIST) lays out the case for high-speed rail. The interesting part is how they explicitly call out and use mega regions as part of their analysis. They also include this map, which shows the current mega-regions: That map says a lot, including why we like it here so much in Raleigh, not only are we part of one of those mega regions, but are also rapidly growing, as the Piedmont Atlantic mega region moves to connect up with the BosWash, creating William Gibson's BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis).

I'll be presenting on Wave at the NYC GTUG tomorrow evening. If you want to attend you'll have to move quick, there's only a handful of open spots left.

I give a lot of presentations and Slide:ology is one of the best books I've read on the subject. One of the things that I learned was setting up a grid system in your presentation software using snap lines, which not only gives you a much cleaner layout on the page but it also ensures that the elements you place on the slides are consistent from page to page, which is less distracting for the audience.

Do you own your email address? How about your web address? These things, like your telephone number, identify you and need to be something you have control over. How you do that is by owning a domain name. If your email address ends in comcast.com, bellsouth.net, msn.com, or aol.com or something similar then you don't own that part of your identity and you don't have as much control over it as you would believe.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has published his talk he gave at PyCon Argentina and PyCon Brazil 2009. A really good write-up, I would like to just pick one small part out: Even worse, tools like WSGI and Rack do nothing to help inter-language inter-operability. I’d really like to write parts of my application in Python, parts in Clojure, parts in Ruby, and even parts in Perl. Things like web proxies, SOA, ROA, and language VMs help, here, but since gateways aren’t APIs there’s only so far we can go.

Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, has a blog at the NYTimes and has published one blog post in a series that looks at President Obama's high-speed rail plan. The article in question, "Running the Numbers on High-Speed Trains" in theory does a simple analysis on the President's high-speed rail plan, because, you know, numbers don't lie. As you could expect from a fresh-water economist the entire analysis is load of bunk, staring with the premise of using an imaginary 240 mile link between Dallas and Houston, which avoids using any of the proposed routes which have been studied and approved for high-speed rail, but instead connecting two cities with some of the worst suburban sprawl in the United States.

Of all the things that the internet enables, I think one of most interesting is new currency. Traditionally the purview of nation-states, I'm not sure what the rise of new currency means. Fundamentally money is a signal, so something important is going on here. Mochi Coins Gamers who buy MochiCoins can spend them in any game that uses the Coins API, anywhere on the web. L$ Once you go inworld, you'll may wish to explore shopping sites or other services that ask for payment of a Linden™ dollar.

Huge thanks to the organizers of BarCamp RDU, this year, like all years, it was a well run event that was a lot of fun to attend. The proceedings have been well covered in the Proletariat Stream Media: Twitter and Flickr. Special thanks to Bill Higgins and Dave Johnson who helped out from the audience in demoing Wave during my presentation.

At BarCampRDU Bill Higgins and John Ryding gave a presentation on server-side Javascript experiments they had done with the Jazz platform. Two observations that struck me during the presentation: V8 was 10 times faster for them than Rhino, and that includes the dreaded JNI latency. The idea that server-side JS may be a way to build AJAX applications and address the "empty window" problem.

So I asked on twitter: So what technology should young developers be forced to use, just so they know how good they have it today? You people are just downright mean. Here are the answers I got: tpherndon: XML Schemas storming: A paper encyclopedia. I think they'd be flabbergasted that we used to find information that way. jtauber: edlin? iein: server side javascript on netscape enterprise server connected to an informix instance that crashes all the time edsu: lynx cwood: Windows hahnrobert: BASIC on Atari 800XL computers jtauber: on the hardware side: DIP switches for configuration jtauber: MS-DOS memory management (EMS and XMS) jtauber: finding files online using archie cutlass: well, they have to use javascript .

Indegestion, acid reflux, heartburn, sour stomach, GERD, etc. etc. Is it telling that we have more names for it than Eskimos have for snow?

I recently got a copy of Camtasia and have been producing screencasts with it and now two of them are available on Google Developer's Channel on YouTube. Camtasia is really easy to use and comes with a nice set of screencasts that explain how to use it. You would hope that would be true for software for producing screencasts. The autozoom feature is nice, but setting up keyframes is so easy I don't really mind when it gets the proportions wrong.

Health Bill Clears Hurdle and Hints at Consensus: Democrats also agree that Congress should create some type of government insurance plan or nonprofit cooperative, which would compete with private insurers. Mr. Obama says the public plan would keep insurers honest, but Republicans say it could eventually drive private insurers from the market, leaving consumers with fewer choices. First, there's this thing where insurance companies are under the mistaken assumption that they are owed a business model.

Version 0.5 of httplib2 has been released, now with Python 3 support thanks to Mark. Added Python 3 support Fixed the following bugs: #12 - Cache-Control: only-if-cached incorrectly does request if item not in cache #39 - Deprecation warnings in Python 2.6 #54 - Http.request fails accesing Google account via http proxy #56 - Block on response.read() for HEAD requests. #57 - Timeout ignore for Python 2.6 #58 - Fixed parsing of Cache-Control: header to make it more robust Also fixed a deprecation warning that appeared between Python 3.

Is everyone using Clutter? Can't seem to go to a session without it getting mentioned. Scriptable JSON based layout and animation file support. Does the use of JSON for windowing configuration mark the beginning of the markup apocalypse? The mark-opalypse The upside is that the San Jose Convention center is larger than the historic Portland location for OSCON. The downside is that the San Jose Convention center is larger than the historic Portland location for OSCON.

Lynne and I have been watching old seasons of 24 on DVD, a guilty pleasure at best, I kept getting this feeling that I'd seen this series before, but I couldn't quite figure it out, until I realized that 24 is Star Trek: Jack Bauer is Captain Kirk Chloe is Spock CTU is the enterprise Jack always leads the away missions. The Federal Government is the Federation Chloe can fix anything by reversing a matrix filter, just like any problem could be solved on Star Trek by reversing the transmitter array.

Alex Payne has an interesting article on feed readers entitled: "Fever and the Future of Feed Readers" which is well worth a read. It got me thinking about my subscriptions and how they've changed over time. Recently I've found myself cutting subscriptions and am now down to less than 50, and of those, 25 are for 'things' and not people; monitoring the health of some of my systems, the children's school, Tae Kwon Do school, etc.

I will be at OSCON next week giving a tutorial on Monday on Google App Engine and will also be attending the Google Wave Hackathon and Federation Days on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I'll be back at OSCON roaming the halls and spending some time staffing the Google booth. See you there! Remember that thing about me not working on Wave? That's changed. On a tangential note, I won't be doing my Design Patterns talk that I did at PyCon, but it looks like the subject material will still be covered.