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.

Sam Ruby and Tim Bray have read Microsoft's Web3S specification and offered their analyses: Sam Ruby: I took a look at “Web Structured, Schema’d & Searchable”, and found Structure, but was unable to find the Web, Schema, or Search. Tim Bray: Um... LDAP? It's interesting that nobody seems to get the name right. Is it Web3S, WebS3, W3S, ...? (Office Open XML has the same problem v. "OpenOffice XML". Either they don't learn, or the confusion is deliberate.

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. But Leeenux?

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.