I posted a couple days ago about megadata data stores. As an aside, I intentionally chose a really awful name, "megadata", since I know I'm bad at naming. Come on, I named one piece of software the Italian word for trash. I was hoping that someone would come up with a better name for me. Unfortunately, it appears that 'megadata' is sticking. I'm sorry. Anyway, I got a lot of good comments, but for some reason the discussion veered off into RDF, which I don't see as providing a solution.

There will be an Atom Publishing Protocol Interop Event at Google April 16th and 17th, see the wiki for more details. The price of admission is a client and/or server implementation to test against. I'll have both my Python client and server implementations. See you there. Yes, two full days of testing. Yes, we'll have to figure out what to do Monday evening. Yes, Byrne has already suggested a game of werewolf.

Ok, so the first thing I learned from ETech is that not only can I not live-blog, I can't even blog tidbits through the day. I had been to ETech last year and presumed that it was just intense because I was only there for 36 hours, and that there was no way that that intensity could be sustained for four days. I was wrong. Before going on I'd like to take a little tanget and talk about my undergraduate education.

I know what babelfish told me, but could a native speaker of French tell me what's going on on this page? Thanks! Hi Joe, What do you want to know exactly? This is some tutored work for students. Each group of students has to rewrite the examples given in the first two sections (and yes, it really looks like Robaccia; but it says Cette introduction s'inspire très fortement de l'article Why so many Python web frameworks?

My 12 year old just showed me how to install custom brushes in Gimp. Does the product you use when you're 12 influence the product you use when you're 22? This is the first sign of old age :-) More seriously, kids are not afraid of computers and technology anymore. My 4-year old daughter and 2-year old son routinely use the computer, satellite TV, DVD player, etc. like most kids of their age.

My typing skills, and ability to stay focused, don't permit me to live blog ETech, but I will occasionally share some tidbits I pick up the sessions. Longer writeups will require more digesting. [Updated periodically throughout the day.] Werner Vogels gave a presentation on EC2, S3 and SQS. One thing I learned is that there are no bandwidth charges when you use S3 from EC2. etech07

I'll be moderating a BOF for the Atom Publishing Protocol at ETech tomorrow, Tuesday March 27. I'll be there! Posted by Edward O'Connor on 2007-03-26 No, wait, I won't be there. :/ Previous dinner plans. Posted by Edward O'Connor on 2007-03-27

cavorite: Pudge is a documentation system for Python that generates documentation files from docstrings and uses Restructured Text syntax. You can see a running example in Python Paste. Maybe you could give it a try. Pudge does look promising. I was able to successfully pull the code from subversion, and after a small patch ;) to setup.py, I was able to install it: Index: setup.py =================================================================== --- setup.py (revision 134) +++ setup.

ETags, or entity-tags, are an important part of HTTP, being a critical part of caching, and also used in "conditional" requests. So what is an etag? Entity tag The ETag response-header field value, an entity tag, provides for an "opaque" cache validator. That's not very helpful, is it? The easiest way to think of an etag is as an MD5 or SHA1 hash of all the bytes in a representation.

Well, to be precise, SocialText launched an appliance a little while back, now they have a Managed Service Appliance. So a customer can buy a wiki in a box, have that data behind their firewall, but still outsource the maintenance of that box back to SocialText. Think of all those other services out there that enterprises would never use because they don't want to lose control of their data, this seems like an interesting approach.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss: I completely agree with Brian that you can’t trust any advocate who doesn’t know enough to find stuff to hate. Given that I spend a lot of time advocating Python, writing down what I hate seems a good exercise. I'm flattered to see httplib2 listed as one of the libraries Jacob would want in the standard library. I agree almost completely with his list, though I would have folded #4 and #5 together into a single request for abstract base classes.

Congrats to Mark who started at Google today.

Found via my referrer logs, Cheeserater, a Django based application that lets you rate Python packages listed in the cheeseshop. Oddly, selector, which has a rather sparse cheeseshop entry, doesn't show up in a search. Sadly, my first impulse was to get an account and vote down setuptools. I wish I had the bandwidth to try to help, but I don't. Instead, I'll just repeat my advice: If you are maintaining a package that uses setuptools for install, please provide a distuils alternative.

REST REST provides a set of architectural constraints that, when applied as a whole, emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. GFS We treat component failures as the norm rather than the exception, optimize for huge files that are mostly appended to (perhaps concurrently) and then read (usually sequen- tially), and both extend and relax the standard file system interface to improve the overall system.

Martin Fowler: The rationale for not using transactions was that they harm performance at the sort of scale that eBay deals with. There are different rules at different scales.

When putting together a table to describe your REST service, and believe me, I've been seeing a lot of these tables recently, there needs to be a distinction between the server view and the client view. For example, here is our table for the employee service from my worked example of how to create a RESTful protocol: Table 1: Employee Web Service Resource URI Method Representation Description Employee List /employees/ GET JSON (emp list) Retrieve the list of employees POST JSON (employee) Create a new employee Employee /employees/{employee-id} GET JSON (employee) Retrieve an employee PUT JSON (employee) Update an employee DELETE - Remove an employee The important point is that this is the server's view of the service, the table is a guide to the implementor of the service on how to structure the URIs.

Number of devices in my house with an IP address: My work laptop My old Dell latop Lynne's computer Christopher's computer Kid's downstairs computer Kid's upstairs computer Backup server DSL Modem/Router Downstairs Wi-Fi Access Point Upstairs Wi-Fi Access Point IP Phone Wii Slingbox Cellphone Cellphone Nintendo DS PSP I still have to hook up the TiVos. How many in your house? To see where I am going with this, try counting the number of electric motors in your house.

Why did I just drop $15 on a 5 year old album? Good UI. Oh yeah, and good music, but I wouldn't have really known that without the UI. None of this explains why I never heard of Andrew W. K. before yesterday, yet today heard one of his songs on the radio twice, off that same five year old album. Andrew W.K.'s music is okay, but the website really sucks.

The Atom Publishing Protocol has entered Last Call. There were days when I doubted we'd ever make it this far. But is it ready for RFC status yet, you think? I believe there has been so many issues brought up lately that it should be pushed back and worked on for at least one more month. Do you disagree? Posted by Asbjørn Ulsberg on 2007-03-14 Asbjørn, I disagree. If you look carefully at the mailing list you will see that the 'issues' fall into two main categories:

Morten Frederiksen [via Sam]: Starting out with Sam’s tarify.cgi and Joe Gregorio’s sparklines as working examples I have managed to create a simple Python-script for generating an Atom feed: bzr-feed. You can of course subscribe to the changes! Excellent! I've added a feed for 1812 using bzr-feed. I love the fact that you can subscribe to the changes in bzr-feed because the project itself is in bzr and uses bzr-feed.