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.

Why don't programming languages have spreadsheet data structures?

When I moved to this new blogging system I did so knowing that if I wanted comments I would have to do so 'on-the-glass', using a Javascript based commenting service. Here are my quick reviews of the three systems I tried. Note that I may have missed some features of each system, don't attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by not spending enough time in the admin interface.

Welcome to my new publishing system, piccolo-pub. This is just a simple script the runs over the files that makes up this site and produces the final HTML output. This means that all the content is now static HTML and serves very fast. It also means that for the short-term comments will be disabled. I am considering adding an on-the-glass commenting system, like Disqus or js-kit. If you have any experience with such systems please let me know in the comments.

Remember how some people at the Rocky Mountain News, unable to think the unthinkable, raced out to start an online news publication, believing they could get 50,000 paid subscribers? They did as well as could be expected, only signing up 3,000 subscribers by their self-imposed deadline. One tidbit that I hadn't picked up the last time I read about the Rocky was that back in February of this year they had just purchased and got running their brand new $65 million printing press.

Frank Rich in the New York Times nails the current rise in violence and hate-filled rhetoric: When a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most. ... What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season.

Color me shocked, but IBM has just rolled out a cloud computing offering. For the short year that I worked at IBM I argued many times for IBM to enter SaaS, but to no avail, so it's great to see them finally entering the field. Now this is IBM and those bureaucratic genes run deep, so don't expect to just whip out a credit card and start playing: Fill out a test drive enrollment form You will be contacted by an IBM CoD specialist to discuss the offer and agree to terms including a small activation fee of $99 and desired start date You will be issued instructions, a VPN ID and password to access an isolated cluster in the IBM CoD center for the agreed upon timeframe You can try the service up to 3 days I can only imagine the process if you want to actually sign up and do something.

An upfront disclaimer, I work for Google. I am not involved in Wave in any way and all of the things I discuss below are based on external documentation. Before getting into the specifics of the issues I found, I want to point out that I'm very excited by Wave, I believe it has tremendous potential. The team has also done a good job re-using existing technologies, and providing different protocols and APIs for the various ways you can interact with a wave server.

We got a gift in the mail of some Kansas City Steaks. The kids' reaction was "We got dry ice!"

The impetus for this post in part comes from a conversation I had at PyCon. A developer had admitted that in the past he had served up a high-traffic web page that was the same for every visitor, but then used a bit of Javascript to pull up the users information separately to customize the page, but he felt "dirty" doing it. That was pretty surprising to me because it's a perfect use of Javascript, and it highlights a misunderstanding about the role of Javascript in the web.

The video for my design patterns talk at PyCon 2009 has been posted: Which explains the success of lisp - minimal syntax, and a macro system powerful enough to build up additional syntax if necessary. Posted by Chris E on 2009-05-08

Medieval Rampage is Christopher's latest game, and has garnered more than 250,000 plays in its first 48 hours. It's nice to see the incredible amount of work he's put into it pay off. Update: Christopher has decided to upgrade from CS3 to CS4, but Adobe has changed the program and now being in high school no longer qualifies him for an educational discount. That little change may end up costing him an extra $500 to upgrade.

The Atom Publishing Protocol is a failure. Now that I've met by blogging-hyperbole-quotient for the day let's talk about standards, protocols, and technology. This is all the fodder I was going to throw together for a presentation I proposed for OSCon. Since that proposal got rejected I'm going to post it here. On the other hand, my App Engine tutorial got accepted, so I'll still see you at the conference.

I'm thrilled with all the of the initiatives that the Obama administration has put forward, but the Vision of High-Speed Rail in America is the one that's near and dear to my heart. I think it would be fantastic to be able to step on a train and be one stop from Charlotte and two stops from Washington, DC, three to PA, and four to NY. I also believe that the North Carolina area has a good plan in place that was very close to being funded and it looks like that could also move forward out of this plan.

A simple rope tied to a tree over a stream can still provide endless fun for kids. This spot in our neighborhood's greenway had over a dozen kids filter through it in the half hour that I spent there with Reilly and Caden. Caden didn't attempt the rope swing, but she did cross the stream multiple times using the fallen tree. This reminds me so much of "

A comment on reddit: So could we finally pull away the curtain and show how VisualAge is really Smalltalk underneath, kill off Java except as legacy callable libraries, and get back to working in Smalltalk like we were doing in 1995? An amazing amount about IBM can be explained by the Java/Smalltalk schism that took place almost 15 years ago, though internally you'd think it happened just last week.

It wasn't until I was travelling recently that I finally 'got' netbooks, and surprisingly the inspiration was my Android-based phone: G1 has totally replaced my laptop as a conference device #pycon My G1 was certainly more convenient, but I thought, if the screen were just a little larger and the keyboard a little bigger I'd be in heaven, then it dawned on me that a G1 with a larger screen and keyboard is a netbook.

After trying for several years I finally got a chance to attend PyCon. What a treat, the attendees, sessions, volunteers, etc. all intersected to create a great conference. Tutorial I started my time at the conference on Wednesday with my tutorial, "An Introduction to Google App Engine". The slide decks and code exercises for the tutorial are now available here: http://code.google.com/p/app-engine-tutorial/ Update: I've now added a zip download of all the materials to the project.