I love all the stories about the search for water and possibly life on Mars and the new discoveries of more earth-like extrasolar planets, but I just think there's a bit of a perspective problem when it comes to presuming that being closer to earth-like is better when it comes to the search for life. Yes, the only known sample point we have of life is that existing on our own planet (for now), but that doesn't mean that our planet is optimal for the formation or survival of life.

I missed this book when it was first published, but picked it up recently and was really impressed. While the title would have you believe it was focused on the internet, in actuality only the last chapter discusses the parallels between the telegraph and the internet, while the remainder of the book is actually a well written history of the telegraph, which bodes well for the endurance of this book; instead of coloring the whole book with the perspective of the internet as it exists today, it is left as a straight-forward history that will probably take on fresh meanings and perspectives as the internet grows and our relationship to it evolves.

The latest draft of the multipart/related extension for atompub is now available. And in case you missed it on the mailing list, this spec will be proceeding on the standards track.

Clueless corporate member of mainstream media fails to grasp internet; cuts nose off to spite face; film at eleven. The Associated Press: The Associated Press is the bastion of the people's right to know around the world. With a long history of involvement in FOI issues and actions, AP is an industry leader in "open government issues." Unless, of course, you're one of those dirty hippie bloggers.

My new favorite blog is The Big Picture. My last 'new favorite blog' was back in February, but I'm not sure what the customary time between 'new favorites' is.

I've been seeing URI Template implementations but not working at keeping a formal list of them, then it dawned on me that I don't really need to do that work myself. I've created a wiki page to track such implementations, please feel free to add to the list.

Yesterday we announced draft-gregorio-atompub-multipart-00. By "we" I mean Google, and by "announced" I mean that the internet-draft got published last month and I finally got around to writing a blog post this week. As usual the discussion should take place on the atom-protocol mailing list. One thing I didn't mention in the announcement is that the source for the draft is hosted on Google Code Project Hosting. Not only does that give me Subversion, and the ability to host files (like the HTML version of the spec), but also the Issue Tracker which I will use to track open issues with the spec.

Well, that was a little longer blogging hiatus than I had planned, due to a combination of being busy at work and working on a piece of software that I hope to announce in the near future.

So by now everyone should have seen the SquirrelFish announcement. And MagLev. And you've see Steve Yegge's presentation, "Dynamic Languages Strike Back". And you've been following the discussion about the relative merits of stack versus register based VMs. As an aside, note that the Java VM is stack based and the Dalvik VM on Android is register based. All of those things on their own are interesting, but what's more important is that we're talking about them all at the same time.

Christopher, my 13 year old, has been playing with Flash for quite a while and has produced his first game: Gravity Mouse. It's a really neat concept and has already gotten 28 reviews and received a score of 2.89/5.0 on Newgrounds. I'm really proud of him. Of course, this is what he was doing when he should have been working on his C++ homework, but I think I'll cut him some slack in this case.

I'm not following HTML5, so this was pleasantly surprising news: The last few weeks there has substantive discussion on the HTML WG mailing list (public-html) and the Math WG public dicussion mailing list (www-math) regarding embedding non-HTML languages in the text/html serialization of HTML focusing mostly on MathML and SVG. It will be nice when the majority of the web has access to both SVG and MathML.

Brian Redfern Just look at the Css Zen Garden website to see a great demo of the power of xhtml at work. Excuse me? CSS Zen Garden was about - you know - CSS. It's now 404. Posted by James on 2008-04-07 re 404: probably because he's now aware that the CSS Zen Garden isn't XHTML (might it look like XHTML, it's served as text/html, so...) Posted by Thomas Broyer on 2008-04-07 I suppose the only thing better than a 404, in this case, would be a YSoD.

The latest draft of the URI Template spec is available: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-gregorio-uritemplate-03.txt As usual you can find the HTML, diffs from the previous version, and an updated URI Template explainer web service here: http://bitworking.org/projects/URI-Templates/ I folded in much of the feedback on the 02 draft. Here are the notes from the revision history: Added more examples. Introduced error conditions and defined their handling. Changed listjoin to list. Changed -append to -suffix, and allowed -prefix and -suffix to accept list variables.

Cliff Click, chief JVM architect at Azul Systems as quoted in InfoWorld: As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don't find the million-line Perl program That line in particular has elicited some reactions, including this from chromatic: Second, the reason that there aren’t many million-line Perl programs is that the people who are capable of writing and managing million-line Perl programs have better ways to organize their projects than glomming a million lines of Java into a single shared-everything instance.

Official Google Data APIs Blog: We've always encouraged other developers to adopt Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and the extensions that Google has created on top of those standards, but we realized the issue of patents may have held back some adopters. Well, those concerns end today as we are giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of those extensions.

So let me get this straight, you can use hydrogen sulfide (the toxic part of sewer gas) to induce suspended animation in mice, and someone's actually regrown a fingertip after applying extracellular matrix made from pig bladders. That's just so Harry Potter.

One of things that's been most puzzling about Bush is his reaction to failure, that maddening wacky grin and jaunty manner as the entire country, if not the entire planet, careens towards the abyss - Iraq, climate change, torture, Katrina, warrantless surveillance, and two recessions - just to name a few issues. This article, "Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions", does a great job of explaining the psychology behind his behavior.

DeWitt Clinton: ...a number of interesting relationships were still hidden inside my private Google Reader subscription list. This short guide demonstrates how I extract that information and publish it publicly via plain HTML decorated with XFN markup. Sweet, I didn't know you could do that. The secret sauce is the new options that appear once you've tagged a bunch of feeds and then made that group of tagged items 'public'.

AppClientTest has been updated again. Every warning or error generated now contains a link to the section of the specification that is being violated. I also have incorporated Mike Samuel's Javascript Code Prettifier so that all the XML requests and responses are easier to read. Finally, the request method and URI are also present in the report for every request. Here is an example report if you want to see these enhancements in action.

Of all the responses to Joel Spolsky's tortured pantomime of impartiality, Henri's is the best, and Mark's is the funniest. General Manager for the Internet Explorer team explained that IE8 will still also render pages in an IE7 compatibility mode but that this mode will not be the default as they had previously announced. The decision to enable this mode will be left up to the developer of the website being visited, using an http header/meta tag.