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.

Re*Move, a blog of The Movement Design Bureau, one of my favorite new to me blogs has a short piece on Curitiba: Lerner had a plan though, and that was to make the bus system a really viable alternative to the car, which was duly achieved by the implementation of a world-class system, which runs both in concentric rings around the city, and crosses through it, is simply coded by colour to identify routes, and uses cylindrical 'tubes' as bus stops.

Caden, the four year old, runs into the room, "Look Mommy, I did the Rubik's Cube." "Really?" "Yes," she says, proudly holding up the cube and showing that indeed one side has been solved. "Wow, you did that all on your own?" "Yes." "Really?" "Well," she says looking down a little, "Reilly helped me move one of the stickers." Redefining the problem can be a very strategic solution. Posted by Justin Watt on 2007-11-18 Now try explaining why doing that may make it insoluble, i.

Thanks to Brendan Taylor mimeparse now comes in Ruby in addition to the original Python flavor.

I'm in NYC this week. Maybe I'll catch a strike while I'm in town.

I've spent a little more time poking around D and I really like what I see. My appreciation is influenced by the languages posture, which is a pragmatic focus on being a productive programming language. Like I mentioned previously closures were just added. Here is an example of a numerical derivative: import std.stdio; alias double delegate(double) fn; fn derivative(fn f, double dx) { double deriv(double x) { return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx; }; return &deriv; } void main() { double xcubed(double x) { return x*x*x; } fn f = &xcubed; auto df = derivative(f, 0.

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. It is a higher level language than C++, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system API's and with hardware.

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?