D is a programming language from Digital Mars. D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. From the Overview: D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language.

Windows Live Writer is now available as a free download. Notable because it has support for the Atom Publishing Protocol. Even more notable is that this entry was created with Live Writer. My hand written blogging software that exports a generic AtomPub interface works with Live Writer right out of the box. Kudos to Joe Cheng and the rest of the Live Writer team. My hand written blogging software that exports a generic AtomPub interface works with Live Writer right out of the box.

There is no GPhone. That is, there isn't a Google branded handset. There is Android. From the Open Handset Alliance: Android is built on the open Linux Kernel. Furthermore, it utilizes a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment. Android will be open source; it can be liberally extended to incorporate new cutting edge technologies as they emerge. The license is Apache 2.

We were playing with Play-Doh and the kids challenged me to make a model of Ares. I struggled with it until I struck upon modelling what you actually see when faced with a four month old golden retriever puppy. Ares Clay Model

Several months ago I was starting to get fairly frustrated with myself - I wasn't able to work in long shifts and didn't seem to be able to concentrate as well I used to. I tried various things such as altering my diet, my exercise routine, any my sleeping, but nothing seemed to help. On top of it all I had inexplicably cut down on my book reading. It was starting to really grate on me until a few weeks ago when I was reading a book and one of kids interrupted me - I looked up, answered their question, and turned back to find the page was a blurry mess.

I am shocked, just shocked, to find out that the main stream media is falling down on the job of covering the 2008 election. From the Project for Excellence in Journalism [via Krugman] : In the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, the media had already winnowed the race to mostly five candidates and offered Americans relatively little information about their records or what they would do if elected, according to a comprehensive new study of the election coverage across the media.

First Post! Well not really, but it is my first post on the Official Google Data APIs Blog.

Version 0.4.0 of httplib2 is now available. This release includes bug fixes and support for proxies. The proxy support is only enabled if you have Socksipy installed. The big change to current users is that force_exception_to_status_code now defaults to False. It was previously True, but that turned out to be confusing default behaviour for new users.

IESG Secretary: The Atom Publishing Format and Protocol WG (atompub) in the Application Area has concluded. The IESG contact persons are Lisa Dusseault and Chris Newman. The AtomPub WG was chartered to work on two items: the syndication format in RFC4287, and the publishing protocol in RFC5023. Implementations of these specs have been shown to work together and interoperate well to support publishing and syndication of text content and media resources.

See Shelley for the context. HA! Absolutely loved it. OK, plus one to Joe. Posted by Shelley on 2007-10-19 I found this post on W3. I also like the new logo! Thanks for sharing Joe. Cheers Posted by Tom on 2007-10-23

Roy Fielding: I want templates to be easy for a computer to read and easy for a computer to generate from that reading a fully-descriptive page of information in the user's favorite language. For example, define a web service that inputs a template and outputs the readable description according to the Accept-Language received. http://example.com/explain_template?{URItemplate} I bet Joe could write one of those in an hour -- Who am I to refuse a challenge from Roy Fielding?

NYTimes The DBacesslayer aka DBSlayer aka Släyer (as we like to call it when we're feeling ironically heavy metal) is a lightweight database abstraction layer suitable for high-load websites where you need the scalable advantages of connection pooling. Written in C for speed, DBSlayer talks to clients via JSON over HTTP, meaning it's simple to monitor and can swiftly interoperate with any web framework you choose. Wow, lots of things to note in there:

I just put forward a proposal on the W3C uri mailing list that I hope will move the discussion on URI Templates forward. The proposal comes with working code and I believe solves the percent-encoding issues we've had to date. Do you think it's possible to use an URI Template for matching? That's something that'd be cool to have, to standardize things like RoR's routes or selector/wsgidispatch. Alfresco's already doing it with the current draft's syntax (00 or 01) for their Web Scripts "

YAMAMOTO Yohei and some of his co-workers at Ricoh and Ricoh Software have translated RFC 5023 into Japanese. Very cool.

It amuses me to no end that the number one selling MP3 on Amazon's MP3 Music Download service is 1234 by Feist - the background music for the new iPod commercials. It's been the number one song since the store opened two weeks ago.

The Atom Publishing Protocol has finally been published as RFC 5023. Whew. Just about a month shy of five years since the first publication of RESTLog. What a long strange trip it's been. RFC's don't have dedication sections. If they did I would have dedicated it to my loving wife who has endured my strange - and mostly unpaid - obsession for the past five years. This post will have to do.

In case you were wondering where the new GOP logo came from. gawd, i thought you had made that up...spittake! Posted by gena on 2007-10-06

Werner Vogels: In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability. Let me repeat this before it gets misunderstood: Dynamo is an internal-only tool.

Werner Vogels points out Michael Stonebraker may still be working under an N = 1 mindset: I like this challenge, given that 50X is likely to be able to make impact, where 2-4X in general can be easily compensated for by the next generation hardware. But something bugs me about the challenge and also about some of the demonstrations in the papers; 50X is still focused on scaling-up, just as many of the current database systems do, instead of scaling out, which is what the world really needs.

Judge Ann Aiken of the Oregon Federal District Court ruled that two provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), "50 U.S.C. §§ 1804 and 1823, as amended by the Patriot Act, are unconstitutional because they violate the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution." Her decision is a refreshing reminder of the power and uniqueness of our constitution, and a hard slap down to the administration that proposed the legislation and the weak-kneed congress that rubber-stamped it.