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.

John Panzer: Today is my last day at AOL. I celebrated my binary millennial in February, and it's time to move on... to some exciting new things over at Google. Congrats!

If I ever go back into management one of the rules I'd enforce is "the dinner table rule"; that is, in a meeting, you can only use words you would use with your family at the dinner table. For example: I've never given my children an "action item". Finishing your meal is not a "deliverable". Dessert is not a "value add". Mashed potatoes and gravy do not have "synergy". And yet, despite the lack of such a rich vocabulary, we're still able to go around the table and hear about everyone's day, discuss what we're doing for the rest of the evening, and even plan for the future.

Dan Connolly: We are resolved, then, that the W3C's next-generation HTML specification be named "HTML 5" and to start review of the text of the HTML 5 and WF2 specifications, and we welcome Ian Hickson and Dave Hyatt as editors (while remaining open to the possibility of other editors in the future). Wow, that window isn't where it used to be.

Sam Ruby: That question was chosen as is identifies an HTTP header than happens to have a practical benefit AND requires one to pierce layers upon layers of “value-add” infrastructure to implement correctly. Deep etags give you more benefits.

Zohar Melamed just pointed me to his APP Plugin for Confluence. Check out the screen shot of it working with the APP Test Client. I've been following Zohars work and let me tell you it's great. As you know, his work is based on the well tested RomePropono Class so for the guys who are familiar with it, it will be easy to use/implement. Atom rocks! By the way, it seems that you are really really "

My birthday present this year was a new camera, the Canon PowerShot A630. Lynne and I are both happy with the A70, but it gets so much use that I'm rarely able to wrestle it from Lynne's hands when I go on travel. Given how much we like the A70, a new Canon model was the obvious choice and the A630 with 8 megapixels, a 4x zoom, a much faster picture speed, the cool swing-out LCD screen, and a nice price was a shoo-in.

I'm writing some HTTP client code that uses httplib2, and the following code has allowed me to create unit tests without creating a bunch of resources on the web to test against. It's a stub of httlib2.Http that reads its responses off the disk. I monkey-patch it in place for unit tests, and restore the original after I'm done, so as not to interfere with other unit tests that might run and require the original class.

I'll be speaking at OSCON this July on the Atom Publishing Protocol. This will be my very first OSCON, and I'm looking forward to it. Great! I'm glad to see APP continuing to pick up steam... Posted by Keith Fahlgren on 2007-05-08

Guido van Rossum: Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads. I obviously agree. I don't get it. There's nothing magic that makes process scheduling faster than thread scheduling — on most OS's, a process is just a bag of threads plus an address space (and some other globals), and the kernel schedules all threads of all processes against each other.

Shankar Ramaswamy: On the eve of Java One 2007, I for one have decided to move on from Java. I suspect I am somewhat late to the party - there has been a growing trend for some time of developers seeking greener pastures. Language popularity ebbs and flows. I wonder, in hindsight, what date the 'peak' for Java will be placed at.

It's all fun and games until you show up there yourself. :)

One year ago we started in on a project to convert our screened porch into a sunroom, add a patio, and add a shed. Well, one year has passed and we are finally nearing completion. The reason it's taken a year is a very long story that I will tell much much later, a story that includes ugly words like "bad checks", "bankruptcy", and "felon". But all that aside, we've made great progess, here are some before and after shots: The concrete patio is tinted, and the shed, which is to the right, has an eight foot overhang, which provides the shade.

Mark weighs in on the subject of Apollo and Silverlight. Did I mention that on Tuesday I seamlessly rolled out an upgrade to the sparklines generator?