I was tagged by Peter Lacy. Here are five things you probably don't know about me: I have four - count them, four - children. I can dumbbell bench-press 200 lbs. (There's just not a lot of opportunity to share that in casual conversation without sounding like a meat head.) At a previous job I wrote a complete Windows C++ STL-based GUI library which will never see the light of day since that division no longer exists.

This bug is now closed and httplib2 now has support for IRIs. The code for doing such a transformation lives in its own file with unit tests in case you want that functionality outside of httplib2. This is currently in trunk and will appear in the next release. As an aside you will notice the first half of the file is a data structure, the second half is the algorithm, and the third half is the unit tests.

This one is making the rounds again. Mark Frauenfelder: Let's assume the friction in the wheel bearings is negligible. Why not get rid of gravity and inertia while you're at it?

A nice set of slides from Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett on the evolving architecture of eBay. Lot's of interesting stuff in there, particularly on scaling their databases: No business logic in database No stored procedures Only very simple triggers (default value population) . Move CPU-intensive work to applications Referential Integrity Joins Sorting By the time you get to slide 28 you realize they've evolved their very own BigTable [video][paper].

DeWitt Clinton: I just wasted the second of two weekend days spending more time setting up development tools and programming environments than I did accomplishing what I set out to do in the first place. Specifically, I once again wrestled Eclipse and WTP and Maven and Junit and Subclipse and Hibernate and Spring [and, and, and...] into partial submission. In other industries I've worked in 'tooling' is a separate cost tracked for each product.

Jon Udell: My last day at InfoWorld will be Friday Dec 15. On Jan 15, after a month-long sabbatical, I'll become a Microsoft employee. While on vacation I got some kidding from my father-in-law about joining "The Evil Empire". No, he wasn't talking about Microsoft, in his day that title fell to IBM. Times change and over the next few years I expect that mantle to shift again from Microsoft to Google.

Just got back from a two week vacation, so if you tried to reach me please be patient while I dig out from under the backlog. The entire trip went very smoothly and was very relaxing, which was surprising since Austin severly twisted his ankle just days before we left and spent most of the trip in a wheelchair. Here are some pictures from the trip. Yes, that's me at the top of that rock wall.

James Tauber points to a pitch perception test you can take online and get results in six minutes. This was good as it gave me an objective measurement of something I already knew. I scored 61% on the test, which put me in the 11th percentile.

I recently pointed to a cool thing Jon Udell did with my sparklines generator. In that article Jon asks: How can more people be empowered to do such redesigns, for print and for the web? My answer is based on my opinion that any solution needs to be Document Centric. I believe an online spreadsheet is an excellent starting point for building a mashup fabric: a document into which a range of online services can be combined.

My planet that I constructed for the town of Apex has worked out so well that I've put togther planets for all the towns of Wake County, NC. Apex Cary Fuquay-Varina Garner Holly Springs Knightdale Morrisville Raleigh Rolesville Wake Forest Wendell Zebulon

In reaction to The S stands for Simple, Nelson Minar has some very choice quotes. These are all the more pertinent since Nelson has hands-on experience with real world deployments of SOAP services: As someone who bears some past responsibility for well used SOAP services (Google's APIs for search and AdWords) let me say now I'd never choose to use SOAP and WSDL again. I was wrong. .

The WSGI based URI path parsing specification that used to be referred to as wsgi.url_vars is now specified as wsgiorg.routing_args and has now stabilized, with an implementation in selector. I have now updated wsgicollection to be conformant, but falling back to the old selector.vars if the new style environment variable is not present. Yes, this stuff is moving rather fast and loose, and I keep feeling the urge to yell "

[mariuz] ps: don't know why they didn't choosed the java vm (quite stable IMHO) and invented yet another wheel There is no perfect Pepsi, there are only perfect Pepsis.

The meme spreads, a wsgicollection inspired Collection Implementation for CherryPy 2.2.

Inspired by DeWitt but having to incorporate my work in other areas, I'm happy to introduce Apex, NC, aggregated news about my town.

This page is undefined, would you like to create WikiCalcCommunity? So I downloaded wikiCalc and after doing the usual Perl/CPAN/Sacrificial-Chicken Dance I finally got it mostly up and running. One of the reasons I wanted to give it a try was to see if I could get it to include sparklines via my sparklines web service. I tried using the wikiCalc function wkcHTTP() but all the permutations I try keep failing.

As you can see from the following graph the hype around Ruby on Rails is beginning to fade: What you see in that graph I pulled off Google Trends is a plot of "Ruby on Rails" in blue verus Django in red. I put in Django just for reference, the important point is that Rails peaked somewhere in the middle of 2006 and is now declining. Not only is the 'popularity' of Rails declining we are already starting to see the rise of a backlash.

I recently read Bruce Tate's Beyond Java in which he explores the idea of which language will rise supreme after Java. He ends up talking a lot about languages like Ruby and Python, and while that's nice to hear someone give these languages their due, I'm left wondering if the question is even valid. That is to say, I'm wondering if the core idea that there was one language which 'won', and the obvious implication that all the other languages 'lost', is true.

When I see the very cool things Jon Udell has done with my sparklines code I simultaneously feel elated and frustrated. Elated that someone can do cool stuff and possibly make a difference using code I wrote. Frustrated that our tools today are so crude that it takes very specialized knowledge to blend all these technologies together. The ability to create those graphs needs to be in the hands of everyone, not just those of us practiced in a very narrow set of arcana.

Tim Berners-Lee has announced the chartering of a completely new HTML Working Group. This is huge news; a complete departure from the "HTML is dead, XHTML is the only thing we are working on" stance of the past few years. There are quite a few people including those participating in the WHAT WG that deserve a good deal of credit for putting the ship back on course and Tim gives them the credit they are due.