Python 2.5 has been released. I am now in the process of testing my libraries to make sure nothing has broken. So far httplib2 checks out fine. The one odd part is that the unit tests run two to three times faster under 2.5 than they did under 2.4. I know performance was one of the things highlighted in 2.5, but twice as fast? That's impressive. I plan on testing it out on some other machines just to be sure.

Back in March I released the command line Atom Publishing Protocol Test Suite, a utility that, when pointed at a Introspection Service document, would test the conformance of that APP implementation. That was good, and it seems to be inspiring others, but it's not really the best tool. There currently isn't a way to run just a one test, or a subset of tests, and it's not very interactive, just aim it at the Service document and fire it off.

Draft 10 of the Atom Publishing Protocol is now available: draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-10.

When asked about the plethora of web frameworks for Python the answer is often that it is way too easy to put together one in Python. That certainly seems plausible since there are so many libraries that implement the components of a web framework and if it's easy to plug those pieces together then maybe that lowers the bar of entry for new frameworks. So let's give it a shot, we'll pick some components and spend a couple hours seeing how far we can get building a web framework, which we'll call Robaccia.

Sam has done some amazing things with Venus, turning it into a feed processing platform. The really amazing part is at the bottom of the architecture document. Everything, absolutely everything, is turned into Atom, and not just Atom, but Atom with title, summary and content in XHTML. Let that sink in. Once it does then you then get to the filters: Furthermore, the design is that both filters and templates read from stdin and produce output using stdout.

I've had several conversations recently where it's become clear to me that some people view dynamic languages like Python and Ruby as just Java without the compile step. Yes, one of the advantages of a dynamic language is the ability to drop the compile from the edit/compile/run cycle, but there is much more to it than that. [Update: Some corrections. A first-class function isn't one that is just defined outside a class, but is an object itself.

Getting a cellphone for my 12 year old took a long time, so Caden and I went off to one corner to play pattycake. There was much twirling... To which I exclaimed: What are you doing? Are you twirling? There's no twirling in pattycake!

Sam Ruby has worked at IBM for 25 years and survived everything that goes along with that. I work for IBM for one day and he decides to move on. I'm just saying...

My latest article, Implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol, is now up on XML.com.

Half of the world's business data is in Excel. [Not really a quote, just paraphrasing.] We've all heard the same thing before, that stupid users are putting important data into spreadsheets and running their businesses with them. Here is a Slashdot article that was originally about errors in spreadsheets but one comment thread spirals into deriding people that put data into spreadsheets that really belong in databases. Oh, those stupid lazy users, if only they'd learn to put their data into normal form and enjoy all the benefits of a relational database.

Draft 09 of the Atom Publishing Protocol is now available: draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-09.

Version 0.2.0 of httplib2 is now available. This version adds support for a pluggable cache system, adds preliminary support for Google Authentication, experimental support for HMACDigest, and fixes a number of bugs.

Update (July 8): A huge thank you to everyone that has emailed, phoned, or linked to me over the past several weeks. Your offers of warm wishes, contracts, referrals, advice, and employment are greatly appreciated. I was contacted by really great people at a huge number of companies that are doing a whole range of cool things and that made it all the harder to decide when to stop the search and accept an offer.

A very nice writeup on httplib2, GData and the Atom Publishing Protocol by Jon Udell: The hero of the piece is Joe Gregorio, whose wonderful Sparkline service I highlighted a while back. Joe is also, and rather more notably, the author of both the Atom Publishing Protocol and Python's httplib2 library, two projects that came together to facilitate my transfer of calendar data (see script below). *Blush*. While I have been pushing for a RESTful publishing protocol for close to four years, I am an editor of the APP, which is really the result of a collaboration of a large group of very talented people in the Atompub Working Group.

Several people have asked if there was some way they could make donations after having used one of my libraries or services. For those people there is now a donation button at the bottom of the projects page.

I have updated the sparklines generator to accept a new parameter 'limits' that sets the minimum and maximum values for the data you pass into the service. That will allow you to break free of the old restriction that all of the data must fall between 0 and 100. As usual feel free to use the online generator, the web service, or download and run the code on your own site.

There's a BarCamp planned for the RDU area. Better sign up quick if you want a chance to attend since that wiki page has only existed since May 25th and 99 of the 150 slots are already taken. Too late. But add yourself to the wait queue since there are probably going to be some people dropping out as the time draws closer. BarCampRDU Saturday, July 22, 2006 (8:30 AM - 5:30 PM) at Red Hat Headquarters 1801 Varsity Drive (Yahoo!

Mark Pilgrim, noted long-time Apple fan, has recently switched to Linux which has predictably earned him the ire of the Apple zealots. With 90+ venom filled comments, and counting, there's enough material for an entire Ph.D. thesis in cult-like behavior tied up in that thread. BTW, just upgraded the laptop to Dapper (aka 6.06 LTS) and it works like a charm, and no, this is not a dual-boot: Linux is the only operating system installed.

Hey, it turns out flat files and SQL have different strengths and weaknesses and you need to consider that when choosing which one to use. Oh, and you can mix and match them within the same application. Who'da thunk it? Expect that comment thread to soon be overwhelmed with the SQL-is-the-one-true-way believers.

Google has released their very akwardly named Google Data APIs Protocol, which we'll just abbreviate to GData. GData is, for all intents and purposes, an Atom Store, that is, an Atom Publishing Protocol service mixed with OpenSearch. I haven't had time to write code against it yet, and I'm still reviewing the documentation, but it looks like what they have published is compliant to the latest version of the APP.