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.

I have the latest and greatest version of Mercurial on my laptop but the other machines I want to 'push' to over ssh are either a shared host without Mercurial installed or are pinned to a release of a distro that has a very old version of Mercurial. This means that I had to $ make install-home, which leaves me with a problem, which is that the installed Mercurial files won't be on my Python path when I ssh in.

Wow, the local area is really hopping these days, check out the 14 upcoming conferences, camps, workshops and events. Here's some video from the just passed RTP Startup Weekend, we've got coworking sites popping up, and of course a blog to cover it all. I wish I lived in the RTP...beautiful place...plenty of job opportunities... Posted by SDC on 2008-07-31

Stormy Peters: We're making good progress - there were a lot of amazing women at OSCON - but there's still a long ways to - I was the only woman at the GNOME mobile meeting. In every session I sat through I looked around and tried to imagine what the audience would look like if all the white men were asked to leave the room. It was depressing. Nothing against white men, I'm one myself, but all of the best teams I've worked on have been diverse along lots of axes.

DjangoCon is the first official international Django conference. It aims to bring together the community and provide a wide range of sessions, panels, lightning talks and showcases of Django usage within various businesses. The first DjangoCon will be on September 6-7, 2008 in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex. I'll see you there.

So enough time has passed that I believe twitter is more than a fad :) I tweet: http://twitter.com/jcgregorio. Next up: Skype. Hope you find it to be fun :-) Posted by Bill Higgins on 2008-07-30 Really out in front of that adoption wave, aren't we? Posted by Mark on 2008-07-30

Ben Laurie: A more minor objection to the IETF that I hope the OWF will solve similarly to the ASF is that it is actually too inclusive. Anyone is allowed to join a working group and have as much say as anyone else. This means that any fool with time on their hands can completely derail the process for as long as they feel like. That's a Social Denial of Service Attack, and it can be handled by a good WG chair and "

Being a parent has it's ups and downs. Up Three of the four children at a sleep-over. Down A midnight call because someone can't sleep without a very specific stuffed animal. Luckily it's a short walk to the neighbor's house. Up All three make it through the night, which is a first for one of them. Down The eight year old throwing up that morning because, shockingly, you cannot subsist on gatorade and popcorn for dinner and then only get five hours of sleep.

Well another OSCON has come and gone, a total blur of mind bending hallway conversations with an occasional session thrown in. This year I ran into a lot of people I haven't seen in years, and as usual met many more. While 2008 may not go down in history as the Year of the Linux Desktop, I believe in the open source world it will go down as the year of the toddler.

A video introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol: If you have trouble seeing the text in the video you can click through to YouTube and watch the high resolution version. Hi Joe, This was relaly useful, thanks. I'm just getting to grips with these technologies and short tutorials like this are great. Question, when you say media I think of video and audio. However does what you said about media apply to other binary formats such as .

When Jeff Atwood's latest article Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal crossed my desk I knew what the reaction would be and recorded it in del.icio.us: Expect the relational database zealots to crawl out of the woodwork on this one. Comments will include, "you suck", "use postgres", this article is harmful", and "I used to think you were smart Jeff..." It's 24 hours later, how did I do? you suck This is why this article is wrong, Jeff.

I just updated my Projects page. breaking up my monolithic listing of projects into "Specifications", "Software" and "Planets". I also added a new section - "Presentations" - for all my old presentations.

15 years ago: HTML was designed to be simple. Folks are supposed to be able to whack out HTML with a text editor -- no rocket science required. ... I suggest that it should be the responsibility of the _server_ to produce valid HTML. Of course the client should be robust in the face of errors. But I suggest that when a client and a server differ on their interpretation of a document, the client is at fault if the document is valid, and the server is at fault if the document is not.

President Bush: Good afternoon. Across the country, Americans are concerned about the high price of gasoline. Every one of our citizens who drives to work, or takes a family vacation, or runs a small business is feeling the squeeze of rising prices at the pump. To reduce pressure on prices we must continue to implement good conservation policies, Like raising CAFE standards, which I have staunchly opposed during my entire administration.

Via Bill: Mark Levison: "I've started a page on the Scrum Alliance wiki to document Agile/Scrum Failures. The failures are not of the process itself but of the humans associated with the project." I can see the point in the rest of Mark's post about tracking failures, but that statement comes dangerously close to the No true Scotsman Fallacy. This is a similar trap that the believers in the Free Market Fairy fall into when they claim that the reason that the Free Markey Fairy hasn't cured all of our woes is that we don't have a "