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.

For the first time in my life I downloaded music off the internet legally. Let me qualify that statement: I've never downloaded music illegally. I've never used iTunes, or any other DRM-laden "service" to buy music. For the first time in my life I can download music off the internet legally using Amazon's new MP3 service. I've been waiting for this day for a long time. While I know that there are plenty of independent music sites out there I've never had luck navigating their interfaces or getting good recommendations out of them.

Derek Sivers: I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom. As I've said before, Rails deserves a lot of credit for moving the bar for web frameworks, but there's nothing magical there that ties the ideas in Rails to the Ruby language.

Rob Pike: The decade that moved menus and windows from the research lab to more than ten million PC’s, that changed computer graphics from an esoteric specialty to a commonplace, has barely advanced the state of the art in user interfaces. A case can be made that the state of the art is even backsliding: the hardware and software resources required to support an X terminal are embarrassing, yet the text editor of choice in universities on such terminals continues to be a character based editor such as vi or emacs, both holdovers from the 1970’s.

Sam Ruby: ... I see a future in lightweight threads without locks or semaphores. I think Newsqueak might be an instantiation of that future. (And no, this isn't a smalltalk deriviative; Newsqueak has nothing to do with Squeak.)

Unlike some people, I just couldn't resist getting a Honda Civic Hybrid. On top of the $5,000 incentive that Google offers for the purchase of a fuel efficient vehicle there was also the "green loan" program at the credit union which reduced our loan a whole point. Not only does this car get 49 mpg in the city and 51 mpg on the highway, we also bought the satellite navigation package with voice recognition.

Our copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys arrived and the kids have enjoyed it. Our first project we did out of the book was the battery: Ten alternating layers of quarters, aluminum foil, and construction paper soaked in vinegar and salt got us five volts and enough power to light the LED. Note that if you leave the battery assembled overnight you get to give a little lesson in electroplating the next morning.

Russell Beattie has written the post on the demise of Java that I'd wish I'd written myself: I like Jonathan Schwartz a lot, but I think that unless some drastic changes are made to Java, the move to JAVA as Sun's ticker symbol is going to be as relevant as changing it to COBOL. I'm using Java less and less as time goes by, not more - the heyday of the language and platform has come and gone, and IMHO, unless some drastic steps are taken, it's going to continue to fade from relevance with increasing speed.

Jonathan Schwartz: JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet... Maybe you meant "intranet"? My internet is composed of browsers and LAMP stacks, where LAMP = (Linux, Apache/Lighty, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), and none of those pieces, not even the browsers, are written in Java. I agree he meant "intranet" :) Posted by Tomasz Gorski on 2007-08-24

Myrtle Bearch, SC

Aaron's write up of Sci Foo 2007 sounds like what I want the ETech conference to be.

Charles Pierce [via sogrady]: It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.