I wonder if Phil Gramm will become the financial sector's Thomas Midgley, Jr. If you aren't familiar with Thomas Midgley, Jr., he's the chemist that invented both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. How's that for a legacy? From the wikipedia article: One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history." Phil Gramm isn't to far behind in terms global financial mass destruction.

Can you explain REST in under 15 minutes? I gave it a try: Very nice explanation indeed, Joe. Thank you very much. I should have tried to fully understand what REST represents some time ago, but always forgot to research, your video is a nice starting point. Now I'm heading to the "Further Reading" items. :) Posted by Gabriel Gilini on 2008-10-08 Great explanation, this will be a worthwhile post to link to for those needing a better understanding of the benefits of REST.

I have been absent for the majority of the past three weeks due to various family medical issues. Everyone is OK now and I'm back to work. Part of the time I was out was because I had surgery, a septoplasty and turbinate reduction. Let me tell you about that surgery. Oh, if you are squeamish you should stop reading now. Really, just stop now. You've been warned.

I'll be speaking at CloudConEast on Oct 17. I'll be talking about Google App Engine.

What happens when you're a Free Market Fairy true believer like Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok and the current financial meltdown represents a total repudiation of everything you believe? You descend into conspiracy theories: Finally, my own work (pdf) unearthed the real reasons for the separation in a titanic battle between the Morgans and Rockefellers. Would you like a tin-foil hat with that pdf? For a description of recent events that originates on the same planet that you and I live on, you can read this post on the Freakonomics blog.

Bloomberg: In the biggest reshaping of the financial industry since the Great Depression, two of Wall Street's most storied firms, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., headed toward extinction. The phrase "since the Great Depression" is just classic, you know, since all of this started when Free Market Fairy believers of all stripes decided to lift, what were they called again, oh yeah, "Depression-era regulations"

All the rain from Hanna gave us a good soaking and now we have an abundance of mushrooms. All of the mushrooms in this set on Flickr were shot within 20 feet of each other.

Roy Fielding comments on the OSCON presentation "Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub" by Evan Henshaw-Plath and Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Instead of a list of changed user ids or URIs, we can represent the state as a sparse bit array corresponding to all of Flickr’s users. I don’t know exactly how many users there are at Flickr, but let’s be generous and estimate it at one million. One million bits seems like a lot, but it is only 122kB in an uncompressed array.

Special thanks to Waldemar Osuch who translated the documentation for httplib2 from the old style LaTeX into the new Sphinx based documentation, which is a vast improvement over the old style in layout and formatting of the generated HTML documentation. You can see the old style documentation for comparison. Hello, I would just like to point out a minor mistake in the documentation for the Http.force_exception_to_status_code parameter. The docs indicate that the default is True, while in the code it seems to default to False.

Do I spy, with my little eye, an actual piece of journalism? Did an AP reported really go out and fact-check a political speech and not just write a he-said-she-said piece? Stunning if true, revolutionary if applied consistently. I'm not optimistic though. PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere.

Just finished "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand and I very much enjoyed it - a good read not because he gives any pat answers or solutions, but because he refuses to do so, outlining the problems, pointing at the apparent contradictions, and in the process exposing vast vistas in how we build and live in buildings that have yet to be explored or investigated. The Appendix is just a summary of all the questions raised in the book and it's ten pages long.

Christopher had a productive summer before high school started writing a total of eleven flash games, ten of them are on newgrounds and his most recent, a team effort with another person, is Mech Slayer.

This post from Jason Kottke on Miroslav Tichy reminded me of a presentation I gave about a year ago that I hadn't linked from my projects page yet. I've now updated it with a link to: MegaData - Lessons from large systems

Wow, that kicked off a great discussion around RESTful JSON with lots of comments and blog posts from Robert Sayre, Sam Ruby, Kris Zyp, and Robert Brewer. The one thing I've learned is that my blog comment system is not the place to have a long threaded discussion. That kind of discussion really belongs on a mailing list so I've created [restful-json].

DeWitt: @dehora Sorry, that should read: We haven't created an AtomPub *for* RPC yet. IMHO, that's the biggest gap today. What we seem to need is a data-oriented REST protocol. We already have document-oriented REST protocols covered with the Atom Publishing Protocol, but what if the information you want to convey is data, i.e. doesn't have the minimum meta-data to qualify as a document, such as an author, title, published data, and id.

Just finished reading How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, and Zombies. This book was really good, not quite fiction, not quite serious manual on robotics, it's a quick little read that could get a kid interested in robotics. The only downside is the three page chapter on 'fem-bots' where the author let's his chauvinism show through; cut out the reference to Love Dolls and you'd have a five star book.

William Gibson's first three novels take place in the Sprawl, aka BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a fictional future mega-city that extends from Boston down to Atlanta. Now we're about half way there today as BosWash already exists. I've now seen some recent signs that the southern extension is happening. The first and most obvious is the rapid growth in the Raleigh-Durham area; we've been adding 3,000 people a month for the last several years.

Tim O'Reilly A key test of whether an API is open is whether it is used to enable services that are not hosted by the API provider... Kevin Marks points out that the definition is too weak, a point which Tim concedes. Regardless, one aspect of REST that gets frequently overlooked is Code on Demand. From Roy's Thesis: In the code-on-demand style, a client component has access to a set of resources, but not the know-how on how to process them.

Tim has a nice article that begins to frame the discussion around Cloud Computing. I am not going to address the whole article, but only one aspect of it. Here are two quotations from that article that I want to focus on: So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized.

Registration for DjangoCon is now open. But they're being really annoying and only releasing 100 tickets at a time. If I was able to attend, I'd be very turned off by the whole deal because of that. Posted by Scott Johnson on 2008-07-31 Scott: that's because we only have 200 available, and we want to give folks in different time zones a chance without having to be up at all hours of the night.