[DHH] REST, and general HTTP appreciation, is the star of Rails 1.2. The bulk of these features were originally introduced to the general public in my RailsConf keynote on the subject. Give that a play to get into the mindset of why REST matters for Rails.

You certainly heard when Ruby book sales were growing 1500%, and 700%, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention that it has quietly dropped to 53%. I don't bring this up to poke fun at the Ruby folks, but as supporting evidence for my own thesis that there is no 'next' Java and there is no 'next' framework. Yeah, that would be a sucky business to be in, when your growth rate is ONLY 53%/year.

There are days where I want to chuck it all and take up music. I'd like to play the cannon. I realize that would severly limit my repertoire to just two songs; "The 1812 Overture", and AC/DC's "For those about to rock", but I'm ok with that. Hyperspecialization is the new black. I always assumed Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" had cannon shots following its refrain. ("lie-la-lie *BOOM* lie-la-lie-lie, lie-la-lie"

[TDWTF]But I will leave you with this bit of advice: the next time you find yourself designing software, be wary of The Complicators; take a good, hard look at your first revision and just say to yourself, "gloves." I loved this too. Very poignant. Posted by Noah Slater on 2007-01-17

After a long hiatus comments are now re-enabled for BitWorking. The main reason they were removed was my inability to manage all the spam, and the introduction of 1812 has given me nice platform to build a control panel for managing my comments. Another spam handling strategy is that comments will only be accepted for five days after an entry had been published or updated. One aspect of the old commenting system that has survived into the new incarnation has been editable comments, but unlike the old system which allowed you to edit your comments forever, this new system has been limited to just five minutes.

In Chapter 10 of Douglas Adam's Life, the Universe, and Everything we meet the people of Krikkit whose home planet and sun are surrounded by a dust cloud that blocks their view of the rest of the universe, and in this scene they are flying their first spaceship out past the cloud: History was gathering itself to deliver another blow. Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkess.

We uncovered this river frog while digging trenches around our half-completed shed. Don't mind the half-completed, or the digging trenches, or the fact that there was enough water to support a River Frog. Let's just focus on the frog.

Simon Willison is leaving Yahoo! and going freelance, for all the right reasons. Congrats and best of luck.

There is now a proposal to use URI Templates in HTML 5.

A University of Calgary professor has recently published his magnum opus on procrastination, which includes, among other findings: Most people’s New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure Not suprising since I see this every year at the YMCA. For the first month the Y is crowded with 'Resolvers' - people who made it their new year resolution to work out more or to get in shape. By the end of February every one of them will be gone and we'll be back to the 'regulars'.

This is a screen shot of my logfiles, recording here for all posterity the sparklines web service crossing the auspicious milestone of one million hits a week. That's a web service, written in Python, running as a CGI application, under Apache, shelling out a million hits a week, on a shared host, and in no way even causing the server to breath hard.

[Simon Willison]: I added a colophon to my about page a few weeks ago; I’ve updated it and added a feed of the last few changelog messages checked in to Bazaar. Bazaar is written in Python, so I can pull data from it using the bzrlib module directly in my Django view ... Neat.

The source for 1812, the code that now runs this blog is now available. Note that I don't expect you to use it, the code is highly customized to my needs, but there may be cool bits you want to borrow. First the name: 1812. I listened to the 1812 Overture, repeatedly, while coding, so thus the name. Store Format The underlying datastore in 1812 is a flat file database that has one file per entry.

My lovely wife Lynne finally has a blog. After hearing "you should blog about [blank]" for the Nth time I gently mentioned that if she had her own blog, she wouldn't have to wait for me to write about [blank]. So now she's up and running on Blogger and has a bunch of posts up already, including reviews of Spoofee, Slingbox, Nintendo Wii , and ViaTalk. What she fails to mention in the Slingbox review is that it requires an ethernet connection.

I have been thinking about rewriting my blogging software for years now. I've even rewritten the underlying data store. More than once. Literally, written two fully working implementations before this one and threw them both away. Looks like the third time's a charm. Some features include: Converts all incoming summary and content into well-formed XHTML. Most of that was accomplised by borrowing code from Venus. That allows me to generate an Atom feed that has summary and content elements of type="

Draft 12 of the Atom Publishing Protocol is now available. With luck, this might be the version that goes to last call. As always, feedback to the [atom-protocol] mailing list.

My planets that I constructed for the towns in Wake County have been fun to read and easy to maintain. I know I've learned a lot about my own town and, by the traffic, it appears they are useful to other people too, so I've decided to expand my coverage to Mecklenburg County, which contains Charlotte.

What have I gotten myself into? When I first started looking at URI templates I was surprised no one had written a specifiction for them yet. It seemed so simple, "just" add {name} to the URI and then substitute with a value at a later time. After bashing my head against the wall for a couple weeks, here is a synopsis of the character encoding issues involved in doing URI and IRI Templates.

Just a few days before leaving on our last vacation Austin fell at school and severely sprained his ankle. In the course of the doctor visits we ended up with a CD containing the X-Rays of his ankle. A little poking around on the CD turned up a whole heap of Windows specific executables and DLLs and a few likely suspects for the X-Ray images themselves. It turns out they are stored in DCM format, which is an extension that seems to have no associations under Ubuntu but could be opened by The Gimp nevertheless.

When the number of hits on the sparklines web service topped 100,000 a week I started poking around in the logs. I discovered a couple things, including that my log statistics package wasn't giving me the whole story. Part of the problem may be that my sparklines web service returns an ETag with each response. That ETag allows each client to do a conditional GET request. If the image hasn't changed then the server just returns an HTTP status code of 304 with no response body, which can potentially save a lot of bandwidth.