Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it's quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display.

It's time we stopped believing in the Free Market Fairy. To listen to the far right today, everyone from the movement conservatives to the lunatic fringe like Ron Paul, you can't get very far with out hearing about the Free Market Fairy. You know the one where you put your problem under the pillow and during the night the Free Market Fairy visits and your problem is solved the next morning.

I normally point to Michael Stonebraker as a source of information on what comes next after the RDBMS, but after reading this article on MapReduce I may have to rethink that. The very premise of the article is flawed: comparing MapReduce to a database is a category error, and the rest of the article goes down hill from there. I don't need to say much more than that as the article is pretty heavily panned in the comments.

It's six months later and we still don't need WADL.

Graham Glass mentioned opt-in vs. opt-out organ donation and I went looking for the North Carolina Drivers License forms because I was pretty sure North Carolina was an opt-out state, that is you had to check a box to not participate. I never found the forms, but I did find this Press Release: Governor Easley has signed a new law that will convert the existing heart symbol on the driver’s license to legal consent for organ and eye donation.

Do you know how many Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) clients and servers I've written? No? Neither do I, but it's a lot. At least five distinct versions of client code and all of them were written in Python. The reason I kept re-writing clients is that all of them sucked in one way or another and it was always easier to start from scratch. Of course, each time I'd learning a little more and they'd get incrementally better, but obviously not enough.

While we really need an Apollo Program for batteries, just a decent amount of research and development would be good. If there is a technology realm that could have a larger impact on today's society and yet has been less funded and had slower growth, I haven't seen it. Think about batteries, all the places you use them, and all the places they could be used. The critical limiting factor in my hybrid cars performance is the weight of that huge battery pack under the back seats.

I was talking to Mark when he pointed out TubaNews to me. An entire site dedicated to the Tuba. It's the Internet, so of course something like that exists. I hypothesized that given what I know about the Internet, and the normal mechanics of communities of passion, that there was probably a competing tuba site that we didn't know about, a competitor to TubaNews, one that came about because of some rift in the community.

Tim Bray fearlessly predicts the future: Rails will continue to grow at a dizzying speed, and Ruby will in consequence inevitably become one of the top two or three strategic choices for software developers. But at the same time, other frameworks and tool-sets are learning its lessons, so Rails will get some serious competition. Now you may remember that I made my own prediction about Rails: ...the important point is that Rails peaked somewhere in the middle of 2006 and is now declining.

Bruce Sterling: Some people still think that there's an "Islamo-fascist tyranny" somewhere that hates our freedoms and can organize Islam-dom into a coherent fascist state... There's just no way. Al Qaeda and the Taliban aren't true "fascists." Fascists can at least make trains run on time. Even Communists were better-organized. The mujihadeen have no organized army and no industrial policy and they don't know where to find any. Because God was supposed to handle all that for them.

This article on eWeek, with the hyperbolic title of "RIP: The Web 2.0 Office Suite", if you ignore the title, and all the content, actually has a rather interesting pie chart. Now I know nothing of the validity or methodology of the data gathered, but for the sake of argument let's presume it is correct. Mr. Wilcox tries to use the data to imply that on-line office suites are dead.

Steve Yegge: I'll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you begin with the assumption that you need to shrink your code base, you will eventually be forced to conclude that you cannot continue to use Java. Conversely, if you begin with the assumption that you must use Java, then you will eventually be forced to conclude that you will have millions of lines of code.

From The Huffington Post: While he never technically conducted a filibuster, according to aides, Dodd left the floor only once, to address a press gathering. He did, on occasion cede time to his Democratic colleagues. But even then, they say, he remained engaged in the debate. Now the bill isn't completely dead and will be re-introduced in January, but hopefully with the retroactive immunity removed. So how about the rest of the-folks-who-would-be-president?

Upon closer inspection it appears that SimpleDB is GETSful. Indeed. It's even stranger because they make it look like it's ReSTful. The front page docs have bits like "GET, PUT or DELETE" in addition to claiming to be a REST interface. Which all looks fine until you realize that "Amazon SimpleDB REST calls are made using HTTP GET requests" and the URIs look like this: https://sdb.amazonaws.com/?Action=PutAttributes It's too bad. I really thought for a minute that they guys building this really Got It.

Amazon has opened SimpleDB for beta testers. As you would expect the system is designed to scale and as such has dropped generic relational operations such as joins and transactions. What we're looking at here is another instantiation of megadata. And before you start beating your chest and exclaiming how "real" applications need joins and transactions please read "The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)"

I had this conversation with my mother-in-law this weekend just after she finished showing me the Home Media Features of her TiVo: "Would you believe that none of the music I bought from iTunes would work with it? None of it, because of that DRM." "You should buy your MP3s from Amazon." "Oh, I know about that, and I will, I'm never buying another thing from iTunes." Nobody cares about DRM until they have to, and then they care passionately.

Working on the URI Templating specification has made me realize that there is a pretty substantial hole in computer science theory: a lack of a theory of templating languages. For example, the current version of URI Templates is not Turing-complete, which excludes a whole bunch of possible attacks. In the specification I state: On the balance, the template processing is not Turing complete, thus avoiding a number of security issues, ala the billion-laughs attack of XML DTDs.

Google Press Release: Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, known as RE<C, will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies. RE<C is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas.

So as a practical use of D I tried re-writing my Python program I use to process my referrer logs in D. My first pass was pretty sloppy and I end up touching every character in the file at least twice and in some cases three times. I thought I'd definitely be in need of a re-write, but the version I got working can rip through a 6MB file in 0.

I've submitted the next version of the URI Templating specification, draft-gregorio-uritemplate-02.txt, but it won't be officially published until Dec 3rd because of the upcoming IETF meeting. I've gone ahead and released the HTML and TXT versions of the draft and will update the pointer to the TXT version once it is published as an internet-draft. As usual, the draft can be found here: http://bitworking.org/projects/URI-Templates/ This version adds the '-cmd' commands we've been talking about, w/o the '-sub' command.