The ultimate destination of programming language evolution is lisp-without-parentheses. Update: To respond to some of the comments, the use of the term 'evolution' was meant to invoke the future, that is, while there are some languages like Python and Javascript that are close today, any language that changes over time will become more lisp like and that in the end they're all headed to lisp-like capabilities, but w/o the parenthesis.

deus ex machina (IPA: [ˈdeɪʌs ɛks ˈmakʰɪna] literally "god from the machine") A plot device in which a surprising or unexpected event occurs in a story's plot, often to resolve flaws or tie up loose ends in the narrative. Neoclassical literary criticism, from Corneille and John Dennis on, took it as a given that one mark of a bad play was the sudden invocation of extraordinary circumstance. Thus, the term "

Did nobody send these people a copy of Shirky's article? Ex-Rocky Mountain News staffers plan news Web site: With backing from three entrepreneurs, staffers of the recently shuttered Rocky Mountain News plan to start an online news publication if they can get 50,000 paying subscribers by April 23 — what would have been the News' 150th anniversary. Even after being laid off they still can't think the unthinkable.

I was just talking with a friend about the decline of newspapers, now Clay Shirky has published an excellent article on their downfall, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Some choice quotes: If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.

My site is now running on a shiny new server at cornerhost. Because of the transition my local install of Python 2.5 started to fail on the new architecture. It was a quick fix to download Python 2.5 and rebuild it from source and then install the extra libraries I needed, and it was also a good indication of how fast the new machines are: the build from scratch of Python went very fast.

So I just got back from a two day trip to Washington, DC. As a result I am now reading, well skimming, the DRAFT Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations. NIST announces the release of the Initial Public Draft (IPD) of Special Publication 800-53, Revision 3, Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations. This is the first major update of Special Publication 800-53 since its initial publication in December 2005.

Me in 2007: You certainly heard when Ruby book sales were growing 1500%, and 700%, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention that it has quietly dropped to 53%. I don't bring this up to poke fun at the Ruby folks, but as supporting evidence for my own thesis that there is no 'next' Java and there is no 'next' framework. Patrick Mueller responded: Yeah, that would be a sucky business to be in, when your growth rate is ONLY 53%/year.

[oauth] Another Charter Text Update OAuth allows a user to grant a third-party Web site or application access to their resources, without necessarily revealing their credentials, or even their identity. For example, a photo-sharing site that supports OAuth would allow its users to use a third-party printing Web site to access their private pictures, without gaining full control of the user account. OAuth consists of: * A mechanism for exchanging a user's credentials for a token-secret pair which can be used by a third party to access resources on their behalf.

It's good to see that some things (and people) never change.

My latest blog post, Back to the Future for Data Storage, is up on the Google App Engine Blog.

If you live in the RDU area and have experience in a subset of the following subjects please drop me a resume. C/C++ Java Web Browser Embedded Development

If you're interested in an App Engine hackathon in the RDU area please leave a note in the comments, or on the TriLUG mailing list, or the TriZPUG mailing list. Joe, I'm interested. Weekdays work better. Posted by MM on 2009-02-17 Cool. I am interested. Weekends suits for me. Posted by Saravana on 2009-02-17 Interested. Weekday or weekend, doesn't matter. Posted by Patrick Mueller on 2009-02-19 Interested. Weekdays or weekends for me too.

The 1.1.9 release of the App Engine SDK includes support for httplib, urllib and urllib2. This is great since httplib2 depends on httlib. So far I've only found one problem, which is that httplib2 presumes that httplib returns all headers in lower case, and have already committed a fix to httplib2 for that. The change is currently in trunk and will appear in the next release. Setting up is easy, just pull the httplib2 directory into your project.

Google Project Hosting just announced support for Web Hooks, which is the first time I've heard of them. Web Hooks, that is. Looks very interesting. You would think my first reaction would be "that would be so much better with Atom" since you could POST an Atom Entry, but it wasn't. I'm not 100% in agreement with Tim, but I'm a lot closer than I was a few years ago.

I've cleaned up the tests and pushed bloomnames onto BitBucket.

I've posted my slides (odp) (pdf) for the Intro to REST YouTube video. Also available off my projects page. Update: In OpenOffice be sure to view the slides from 'notes' tab, and in the PDF version the slides are repeated twice, the second time with the notes visible. Hi, Joe, great REST tutorial. I am preparing a course on the topic at the Technical University of Madrid and your slides and video provide a very good insight on REST and ATOM.

Giftag is a cool application put together by BestBuy using Google App Engine. On the Giftag blog the developers posted a great video interview on their impressions of App Engine and what it was like to develop on it. Disclaimer: Only slightly ego driven blogging as they called me out by name ;)

I will be at PyCon this year (my first, w00t!) and will be doing two sessions. The first is a tutorial, "Introduction to Google App Engine", and the second is my talk "The (lack of) design patterns in Python". If you've got specific things you'd like to see covered in the tutorial let me know in the comments or via email. And hopefully I'll see you there. Excellent! Hey, grab me in the hall (or organize a BoF) and let's chat about a RESTful JSON spec.

I've got two new articles up the App Engine site, one on Paging, and the other on Sharding Counters. The Sharding Counters article is fun because it highlights some of counter-intuitive solutions you apply when working with the kind of datastore that App Engine supplies. I worry that your paging article promotes the terrible (but seemingly standard and unquestioned) paging model of counting up from the present — the content on every page is constantly changing.

My Dopplr Annual Report for 2008 is available. Highlights include my CO2 consumption (0.6 Hummers) and my speed (about that of a duck).