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.

Oh yeah, if you visit this site you'll see I now have one of those link blog thingies on the left hand side of the page, powered by del.icio.us. How bloggy. Next thing you know I'll be posting cat pictures.

Sourceforge now supports Subversion. This isn't new, I blogged about it back in February. What is still unfolding is the impact of that change, and one aspect of subversion that is plum full of potential is also one of its best kept secrets, svn:externals. svn:externals Subversion supports setting properties on files and directories, bits of information about the file. You can store any information you want there for your own use.

Ian Hickson claims that the Content-Type: header is dead. I think it may be time to retire the Content-Type header, putting to sleep the myth that it is in any way authoritative, and instead have well-defined content-sniffing rules for Web content. Of course, this is after stating: IE in particular is well known for ignoring the Content-Type header, despite this having been the source of security bugs in the past.

Joel has another great essay up: The Development Abstraction Layer. Programmers need a Subversion repository. Getting a Subversion repository means you need a network, and a server, which has to be bought, installed, backed up, and provisioned with uninterruptible power, and that server generates a lot of heat, which means it need to be in a room with an extra air conditioner, and that air conditioner needs access to the outside of the building, which means installing an 80 pound fan unit on the wall outside the building, which makes the building owners nervous, so they need to bring their engineer around, to negotiate where the air conditioner unit will go (decision: on the outside wall, up here on the 18th floor, at the most inconvenient place possible), and the building gets their lawyers involved, because we're going to have to sign away our firstborn to be allowed to do this, and then the air conditioning installer guys show up with rigging gear that wouldn't be out of place in a Barbie play-set, which makes our construction foreman nervous, and he doesn't allow them to climb out of the 18th floor window in a Mattel harness made out of 1/2"

Mark is back.

Alpha 1 of Python 2.5 has been released. Simon Willison covers the highlights.

The Web API Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of The XMLHttpRequest Object. Given the list of authors the fact that it isn't much different than the XMLHttpRequest section in the WhatWG Web Apps specification is of no surprise.

From CSAIL: C-Store is a read-optimized relational DBMS that contrasts sharply with most current systems, which are write-optimized. Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding and packing of objects into storage including main memory during query processing, storing an overlapping collection of column-oriented projections, rather than the current fare of tables and indexes, a non-traditional implementation of transactions which includes high availability and snapshot isolation for read-only transactions, and the extensive use of bitmap indexes to complement B-tree structures.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Except for the web standards that the project lead happens to personally dislike.

Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings is going to Last Call as a Proposed Standard. Oh no. I'm not a 64 bigot, and it's not that Base16 and Base32 are bad, it's just that they're new and I'm afraid of the inevitable, which is, I'll predict right now, that shortly after this becomes a Proposed Standard someone will complain that Atom is horribly broken because it only accepts Base64. Mark my words.

My latest column for The RESTful Web, httplib2: HTTP Persistence and Authentication, is up on XML.com. In the article I cover HTTP compression, of which httplib2 supports both "compress" and "gzip". I remember reading that "deflate" was to be avoided but couldn't remember the reason. Walter Underwood wrote me to point out a post on google groups that explains the small set of compression algorithms that were interopable with browsers circa 2003.

It appears that the IETF is now hosting Jabber based rooms for each of the working groups. For example, the Atom chat is xmpp:atompub@rooms.jabber.ietf.org. Rooms are listed at the top of each working groups status page. Note that these are logged, and all your contributions are subject to the rules of RFC 3978 and RFC 3979.

If you follow web services, then you may have heard of REST. REST is an architectural style that can be used to guide the construction of web services. Recently, there have been attempts to create such services that have met with mixed success. This article outlines a series of steps you can follow in creating your protocol--guidance that will help you get all the benefits that REST has to offer, while avoiding common pitfalls.

Thanks to Thomas Broyer preliminary support for the experimental HMACDigest has been added to httplib2.

So Don Box has unintentionally coined terms for a couple different kinds of REST. Lo-REST Just using GET and POST like HTML does today. Hi-REST Using all four methods (GET, PUT, POST and DELETE) like the Atom Publishing Protocol. By why stop there? How about an intermediate level that just uses three methods? Somewhere-in-the-middle-REST Using just three methods (GET, PUT, and DELETE). And remember, just using one method can still be RESTful if you use it correctly.