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.

AP: President Bush is poised to veto legislation that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding — a technique that simulates drowning — and other harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects. Now we know what the W stands for. And it's done. May God have mercy on us all. Posted by Mark on 2008-03-09 Mark I agree with You, sometimes I think how this can "work" in real world... Posted by Jessica on 2008-03-13

Brad Fitzpatrick: I'm enjoying this rise. The sooner it gets to $5 or $10, the sooner people might care? Agreed. A doubling or tripling of the relative price of gas is inevitable, and is probably the best long-term thing that could happen to the country, fully realizing that in the short term it's going to be painful. I can appreciate the point of view, but theres a lot of not-very-wealthy people in northern states that rely on heating oil to stay alive during the winter.

IEBlog: Under the hood, an Activity uses a simple XML format called OpenService. Just implement an XML file that describes how your service works with URL templates. URL Template? Is that like a URI Template? OpenService Format Specification for Activities All variables are treated as required unless it [sic] the modifier "?" Rats, those aren't URI Templates. But thanks for picking a different name. Just for a little context, when discussing URI Templates the use of the trailing '?

I just checked in the last of some changes I've made to appclienttest to support testing. Yes, that's right, tests for appclienttest itself. This actually required a bunch of small changes through a lot of different code, but in the end I think it's a general solution that will be useful. The big problem with testing appclienttest is that it runs through a lot of different steps as it puts an AtomPub service through its paces.

Sam Ruby: Spend some time up front specifying the behaviors that you want to address. In the case of Atom, adding an entry, deleting an entry, adding a category to an entry, fixing a typo in the content are examples of common scenarios. Feel free to use the Atom wiki for this purpose. To move the discussion of PATCH forward I've posted some examples on the Atom Wiki. They're good examples because the highlight the problem with coming up with a PATCH format for Atom.

I've just checked in an updated version of the AppClientTest, a program for testing your AtomPub service. It has been updated to use the atompubbase module and also sports HTML output as an option. To make it easier to develop I've transcluded via svn:externals all the libraries you will need as long as you are running Python 2.5. You will need to install elementtree if you are on something older than 2.

The Guardian: Appetites whetted, Stiglitz and Bilmes dug deeper, and what they have discovered, after months of chasing often deliberately obscured accounts, is that in fact Bush's Iraqi adventure will cost America - just America - a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again. Yes, you too can create you own failed-state-terrorist-haven with nothing more than a lie and $3,000,000,000,000.

Byrne Reese: Anyways, today on my favorite Gawker blog I saw the new BSG Season 4 cast photos. I guess it's safe to come out and admit that io9 is my favorite new blog. Totally... although you have be careful of spoilers. I am stearing clear of any post about the new JJ Abrams Star Trek film for example... Posted by Byrne on 2008-02-23 I also like BSG Season 4 must be better then 3 :) btw.

The kids have been spending hours playing with Phun: The more I play with it, and watch them interact with it, the more I wonder why more user interfaces don't include physics. So that's how they built stone henge! It's truly marvelous that so much of the knowledge of mechanics can be so quickly represented and displayed. It will be such a great future to see a society where fully-working, three-dimensional machines can be designed in such a way as Phun.

Dare Obasanjo: Given that Joe works for Google on GData, I have assumed that Joe's post is Google's attempt to float a trial balloon before extending AtomPub in this way. As I explained in the comments on Dare's post, this is my personal blog and unless otherwise stated, my own thoughts and ideas. If I weren't just speaking for myself I would make that clear. Like I am about to do now.

I used to work with a Russian mechanical engineer named Yakov many years ago at MTS. On the my very first day of work Yakov came off the manufacturing floor where they were assembling for the first time a machine he had designed. He rummaged around and pulled a ball-peen hammer and hacksaw out of his filing cabinet. As he stomped back out to the manufacturing floor I head him mutter under his breath:

Enough of this so-called Social Software, what I want is Anti-Social Software, it isn't about my friends or my connections, it's all about me. Me. Me. Me. Introducing my Me page. Not that I'm really anti-social, the launch of Social Graph just got me thinking and I decided to gather as much of my public information available from various sites as I could, and put it on one page to see what it looks like.

Update 1: Wow, apparently using Atom as an example was a bad idea given the number of people with their knickers in a twist. Update 2: Fixed the URI Template to accomodate Sam's nose. Update 3: Good feedback from Tim Bray, Mark Nottingham, and Rob Sayre. There are times when you have a large representation of a resource and only want to edit a small part of that resource. Wikipedia is a good example, where many entries in the encyclopedia are very long and you don't want to wade through all that wiki markup to correct a typo in one sub-section.

Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former head of Royal Dutch Shell, has called for an EU ban on selling cars that get less than 35 M.P.G. Why? Because he doesn't believe in the Free Market Fairy: Moody-Stuart, who is currently chairman of the mining group Anglo American, says he is a great fan of the free market, "but like most things, they have a failing. Without regulation to channel their power, markets will not deliver things which are of no immediate benefit to the individual making his or her choice, even though they may be beneficial to society.