Brian Beckman: The Physics in Games - Real-Time Simulation Explained is a channel 9 video that I found via jon Udell. The meat of the interview comes at about an hour into the interview when Brian starts to talk about Sticks and Stones physics as opposed to how game physics is typically done today. Jon Udell observes: We’ve heard it before, we’ll hear it again: a network of many simple parts trumps one big complex monolith.

Let's RESTify DayTrader: DayTrader is benchmark application built around the paradigm of an online stock trading system. Originally developed by IBM as the Trade Performance Benchmark Sample, DayTrader was donated to the Apache Geronimo community in 2005. The application allows users to login, view their portfolio, lookup stock quotes, and buy or sell stock shares. Why build a RESTful web service for DayTrader? Because I frequently hear that REST can't be applied to complex situations.

From the comments, Winter has some good questions and observations about the APP. I was surprised to see the Media Collection model as the preferred approach in some cases and was wondering if I was missing something. It's not preferred, but there is a dividing line. An Atom Entry is a good representation of a 'document'; it has things like title, author, id, etc. There are all things you see on every real world document, whether it be a book, a magazine, a form at the DMV, or a dollar bill.

Dare Obasanjo: I actually haven't found a production implementation of APP ... Uhm, yeah, I've been meaning to mention that; there are no production implementations of the APP. As a matter of fact, there are no implementations of the APP at all. Period. That's because the spec isn't finalized, and part of that finalization process will be the assignment of a URI for the "app:" namespace, which implies that every single implementation today has the wrong namespace for Service and Category documents.

Dare Obasanjo has come up with a number of issues he has with the Atom Publishing Protocol. I am led to wonder about the timing of his complaints as the APP is close to getting an RFC number. What spurred this sudden bout of sour grapes?: For this reason, we will likely standardize on a different RESTful protocol which I'll discuss in a later post. Ah, so if these issues just turn out to be misunderstandings on your part then Microsoft will just use the APP and not roll out its own protocol?

Linux Command Line Tips: (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are obsolete) I apparently missed a memo. I have a faint recollection of some noise a while back about making ip (provided by iproute2) the interface to ifconfig and route. As far as I can see, that's just more fodder for the Unix rosetta stone someone has kindly compiled. I also remember how even NT had standard route(8) syntax.

Six Apart: The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.

Bill de hÓra: Starting today I'm working at Newbay. Congrats, and best of luck!

Everybody's atwitter about WADL, a description file for REST services, and since it's supposed to be RESTful I regularly get questioned about it. For this post I'm going to experiment and adopt Stephen O'Grady's Q&A style. My thanks to Patrick Mueller and Dave Johnson for volunteering to be guinea pigs for my arguments, and thanks to #redmonk for the use of their channel where we initially held the discussion. Q: Does REST need a description document?

The Apex Learning Center is Lynne's latest project. It's a business that offers classes and enrichment for children and adults, with classes in mathmatics, computers, chinese and reading. Much of the initial impetus for the school came from Christopher, the 13-year old, because he wanted to learn how to write games in Flash and as we looked around the area we didn't find any reasonably priced non-camp classes. We started to ask around and found a lot of interest in the Flash class and also interest from parents in prepatory classes in mathematics and reading.

"... I did really need and love the beauty of GET and friends."" Can I get a witness? No.

Assaf Arkin: One of my pet peeves about Java is [t]he choice to separate itself and live in a bubble, isolated from the operating system. One of these days, in the spirit of "Alice in Wonderland", I'm going to write a childrens book about the two worlds of Sea-land (C-land) and Javum (JVM). Maybe you can just write a sequel to Steve Yegge's wonderfully written story "The Kingdom of Nouns"

while some people think a screencast is a good demo, I personally like the pastebin, and besides, that's something I can really use. This is just a standard Robaccia project with a single model-view named 'bin'. The files that are actually changed are the first four files in the pastebin, just to ensure self-referential integrity. If you want to run this on our own you'll need to install pygments, the very powerful and well written syntax highlighting library.

My wife is starting a business, something I will blog more about in the future. The important part, for this story, is that all the web based things fell to me, and I turned to Google Apps. The startup process was amazing, in just two hours we went from zero to having our own domain name, a web site, email, chat, docs, and calendaring. There's just two employees in the business today, but we can add up to 200, and all for no costs beyond the $10 for the domain name registration.

Bobby Woolf: A lot of what it boils down to for me is that independently-declared and strongly-typed interfaces are a good thing. [Emphasis mine.] Sorry, you lost me right there. Here's the full article if you don't understand the image. I want to believe. I swear, I do. Help me! Consider an API as complex as the Flickr API. How do you "do this in REST" without somehow describing the structure of some of the data returned?

Matt Mullenweg: We're releasing the DB class we use for WordPress.com to the world. Amoung other things, it supports: * Replication * Failover * Redundant (public/private) networks * Local and remote datacenters * Partitioning * Different tables on different DBs * Advanced stats for profiling * More...? Which is very cool, but it does beg the question: which of those bullet items belong in your data store and not just as a class layered on top of an RDBMS?

No clone of Rails is complete unless you do a screencast. Here is the cookbook demo in Robaccia. See the original post if you want to build such a system for your own favorite programming language. As usual, all the source is available for the Python version. I love screencasts. :) Thanks Joe. Always enjoy learning how others work their machinery as much as, or often more than, the content.

Neil Henry: As a result, newspapers such as The Chronicle must make staff cuts to survive -- and increasingly it is highly skilled professional journalists committed to seeking the truth and reporting it, independently and without fear or favor, who must go. Derek Willis has a fine rebuttal to these histrionics. The only thing I can add is that I might have more sympathy, but unfortunately I can count the number of "

The 15th, and hopefully last draft of the APP is now available. If I understand the process correctly it is now out of the WG's hands and our Area Director Lisa Dusseault does the shepherding through the rest of the process in the IESG. If all goes well, at some point in the future, the APP will appear as an RFC. You can watch the process here. Hmm, it sure would be useful if that was available as a feed.

Last time I talked about the creation of Robaccia I got to the point of a working framework and just waved my hands and said you could keep going and "just" add conventions. I have pointed out that "just" is a dangerous word, so let's walk through the rest of the steps to building a Rails/Django-like web framework. Update: Just so there's no confusion, the title of this post comes from The Complicator's Gloves.