Brendan covers some really exciting announcements about the Tamarin project, which aims to: implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. The Tamarin virtual machine will be used by Mozilla within SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine within Adobe® Flash® Player.

I have moved the httplib2 project off of SourceForge and onto Google Project Hosting. There are a lot of reasons for the move. First is just the scale of the project; httplib2 isn't a big project and SourceForge just has way too many knobs; it presents a very large dashboard for such a small project. Also as httplib2 becomes more stable the majority of the work will shift into documentation and that will be made easier by the wiki.

Two of the sites below are driven off flat files, the third is driven off of a database. Can you spot the difference? One of these things is not like the other Now this is not to pick on Mark, or WordPress, or MySQL. The reason I picked Mark, Sam, and myself is that we are all hosted at cornerhost, and yet only one of us is having a problem, and that problem stems from N = 1 thinking.

Ares (n.) Greek Mythology The ancient Greek god of war. (n.) Pet A Golden Retriever puppy. Ares awwww. Posted by Dan Connolly on 2007-07-31

After many bumps and diversions, including a late flight, and a flood in the hotel room I was supposed to have reserved, I am finally as OSCon. Here are the slides for my presentation I will be giving this afternoon. Given my historical record at conferences I can safely predict you probably won't hear anything else from me until Friday. In slide 29 (http://bitworking.org/projects/oscon2007/html/29.html) the left angle bracket of the closing [title] element is escaped, so it shows up as & lt; (I couldn't quite figure out how to defeat the escaping to make this show up right.

Here is the IETF announcement that The Atom Publishing Protocol is a Proposed Standard. w00t! Tim shares his thoughts on what it all means. As for myself it's been almost five years since I published RESTLog. Five years. And this is only the end of the beginning.

W3C: The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0. EXI is a very compact representation for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Information Set that is intended to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources. Using a relatively simple algorithm and a small set of data types, it reliably produces efficient encodings of XML event streams. You can call it anything you want, but that's Binary XML.

There are two rules for any change in technology. The first is that there will be a dedicated core, those that are heavily invested, either monetarily or professionally, in the status quo, and they will resist any change. Take for example Java and XML, two technologies that are both in transition. Elliotte Rusty Harold seems to be lashing out against any changes in his domains of expertise, first taking those who would add closures to Java to task, and then spending quite a bit of time on [rest-discuss] trashing JSON.

The underlying assumption, which I whole heartedly agree with, of Joe Armstrong's algorithms is that any system that is scalable, fault-tolerant, and upgradable is composed of N nodes, where N > 1. The problem with current data storage systems, with rare exception, is that they are all "one box native" applications, i.e. from a world where N = 1. From Berkeley DB to MySQL, they were all designed initially to sit on one box.

I am fascinated with the amount of work that Google seems to be investing in the 700 MHz band, and how little attention it has garnered to date. I think ponying up $4.6 billion will change that. From the Google Blog: Why $4.6 billion? While we think that a robust and competitive auction based on these four principles will likely produce much higher bids, and we are eager to see a diverse set of bidders competing, $4.

It was a nice surprise to see that Apex, NC came in at 14 on Money's Top 100 Places to Live. Funny to see both Holly Springs and Apex on the list, and not Cary or Raleigh. But honestly, I'd prefer to see none of these on any lists. We already know it's a good place to live. Until we start using impact fees or transfer taxes to help cover infrastructure required by all the new people coming in, problems like poor transportation options and overcrowded schools will only get worse.

Bill de hÓra: My sense of it is that on Java, too many web frameworks - think JSF, or Struts 1.x - consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The difference between "for the web" and "of the web". Like Java is the only one? ASP.NET sure seems like it works around the web to me... Posted by Mike Schinkel on 2007-07-19 Yup. Mike - Java certainly isn't the only one.

Steven Citron-Pousty Stephen Reinhardt has a write up of a presentation by Aaron Boodman on Google Gears. Didn’t start out to enable offline synch - instead was just to make AJAX apps better. For example he wrote an app that could encrypt data on the client but then NOT let the server decrypt. You need to store the key on the client to decrypt again but cookie would not be a good place to store it.

Project Zero is a project in IBM that I've been working with over the past year. Project Zero is an incubator project started within IBM that is focused on the agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and executing applications based on popular Web technologies. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

I have previously pointed out that there is nothing magical about Ruby or Rails. John Lam: Steve decided to do what any other frustrated programmer would do: he ported Rails to JavaScript. Line by line. In 6 months. I'm just glad I didn't have to put in the 2,000 hours of coding myself to prove the point. I will note that I don't agree with Steve's assertion that JavaScript is the Next Big Language, as I disagree with the entire premise of the question itself.

I took a couple of days off work and we drove down to Florida to visit family in "The Villages", a 55+ golf cart community that currently has about 50,000 residents. That is not a typo. Check out the wikipedia entries On Monday we went out to feed the ducks at a nearby pond, but well fed by everyone else, they weren't interested in our bread. Instead the bread was attacked from below by the fish in the pond, which wasn't very interesting, that is, until a local heron came over and started feasting on the fish we'd attracted.

Christopher, the 13 year old, has been playing with Pivot for about four months and has done some really cool things given the very simple controls it gives you. This is his latest animation: My 12-yr old was asking me about stick figuring drawing a few weeks ago. He's giving Pivot a shot right now ... Posted by Patrick Mueller on 2007-06-24 Looks really great. Posted by Mi on 2007-06-25

Steve Yegge: If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work. The rest of the article is pure Stevey. This post hit close to home since I didn't take a compiler class as an undergraduate so the summer before I started graduate school I bought the Dragon Book, read it, and then wrote a small compiler.

We recently bought a couple HP All-In-One printers, including the HP L7580, which is a nice networked printer. No plugging into a computer and then sharing it with the rest of the computers in the house, you just plug it straight into the network, which is pretty nice for printer that only costs about $300. None of that is remarkable. What is remarkable was that I was able to get my Ubuntu laptop printing before my wife's Windows desktop.

The W3C, you know, that group that "develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential", recently published its Web of Services for Enterprise Computing Workshop Report: At the Web Services workshop in 2001, the approach of having a stack of solutions was appealing and we decided to spin up lots of groups to build these specifications. Four paragraphs later: However, the road to paradise has also been littered with the Web/REST vs.