why: I’m not suggesting that one-liners are the heart of all programming. But they can be the hook to get someone exploring. A single line of code simply shows that a language can be focused. And it lets a beginner get comfortable with the basic atoms.

The problem with "social media" sites is that they're like bars, even if they become the next Studio 54, they will all, eventually, become the next Studio 54.

Like Tim, I just finished reading William Gibson's Spook Country. Filled with those trademark riverstone-smooth sentences and spiked with a cynicism that can only come from two terms of a Bush presidency it's less science fiction and more a mark and sweep dump of the unevenly distributed future that's already here. Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.

It's all about the construction. [ For the impatient, the executive summary is that I'm starting at Google at the end of the month. I won't be relocating. I'll provide more details as I learn them, and as I learn what I can, and can't, share. ] My first job was working at Tecan U.S. writing software for spectrophotometers and liquid handling robots. At the time Lynne and I lived in North Raleigh and my commute took me around the north west part of the Raleigh belt-line.

Michael Coté: It seems to me that people building LAMP, Ruby, django, or other applications think of themselves more as building web applications with whatever technology tools they need to use: web services, cron jobs, MySQL, ruby, PHP, python, maybe some Java: whatever. What matters is getting the web application working. People who using Java see themselves primarily as building Java applications that happen to have a “view” (as we OO head-jobs would call it) that’s the web.

A new internet-draft of URI Templates is now available. An HTML version of the specification and diffs from the previous version are also available there. As usual the discussion is taking place on the W3C URI mailing list. Kudos to Mark for getting this version up and out to the printers.

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.