I have, for various reasons to be revealed at a later date, been looking good and hard at HTTP authentication such as RFC 2617 and such. The situation is really quite apalling and at times I feel like I've wandered into a bad pardoy of Monty Python's The Cheese Shop Sketch. (a customer walks in the door.) Customer: Good Morning. Owner: Good morning, Sir. Welcome to the National HTTP Authentication and Cookie Emporium!

Draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-07 is now available. (It may take a bit for the .txt version to appear.

Not that I'm rooting for the demise of SVG, but I'm quite suprised by the quick uptake of its direct competitor, the canvas element. Here, for example, is the beginning of a canvas implementation for IE: Emil: Using VML, in combination with behaviors, it should therefor be possible to emulate a subset of SVG or Canvas in IE. That's the idea I got a few days ago when working on a basic drawing abstraction, and according to Google a few others have thought along those lines as well.

Joel comes down on the current status quo in CS education: Joel Spolsky: All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea.

Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree and cElementTree appear to be headed for inclusion into the Python standard library.

The only difference between The Colbert Report and The O'Reilly Factor is that one of them is on Comedy Central and the other one should be.

My latest article, Catching Up with the Atom Publishing Protocol, is now up on XML.com.

Miguel de Icaza: I envision a system in which we can remotely manipulate desktop applications through HTTP. The same idea that I pitched a few years ago on top of CORBA. The difference this time is that writing the client code is trivial, unlike the previous attempt where writing the client code to talk to a CORBA server was very difficult. Update: Matthew Barger wrote to point out a presentation he gave at an O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference back in 2003: "

So Google launched Google Base, and John Battelle points back to Paul Ford's article August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web. There's only one little problem with pointing back to Paul's essay in the light of Google Base and that problem is that Paul was wrong. The entire point of Paul's speculative essay is that "Google Marketplace", as Paul named it, was driven by RDF and the Semantic Web.

You know you have problems if you're churning out tortured language like this: The group's objective is to define an alternative encoding of the XML Information Set that addresses the requirements identified in the work of the XML Binary Characterization Working Group, while maintaining the existing interoperability between XML specifications. Of course you have to use tortured language to avoid stating the obvious, which is, the W3C is going ahead with Binary XML.

Here are the slides for the presentation I did at XML 2005 yesterday. rest atom atomstore opensearch xml2005

From the wikipedia article on Denial-of-service attacks: A denial-of-service attack (also, DoS attack) is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system. In particular, one vector of attack to pay attention to is consumption of computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or CPU time

The latest draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol is now available: http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-06.html.

Mark Pilgrim is currently "not blogging" in How-To form: http://howto.diveintomark.org/. Blogging is so last year, now it's about finding new ways to not blog. Me? I'm gonna start not blogging in IETF Internet-Draft form.

Adam Bosworth: It is wrong. The belief that some imam has that he has the right to snuff out someone's life through a Fatwa because of their apostasy or heresy is wrong. The belief that terrorists have that they have the right to kill and maim and burn innocent people because they are angry at injustice is wrong. The belief that some governments have that they have the right to kill and wound their own citizens when they protest peaceably is wrong.

And now we begin the next chapter in which Pooh discovers that five months after the first time Google turned on GWA that standards still matter. HERE is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

Ok, color me weird but I am an absolute sucker for urban planning. Raleigh is currently working on a massive downtown development plan that includes a new convention center, hotels and other amenities. Instead of wading through the government sites myself I leave that to the fine folks at Raleighing who do an excellent job of keeping me informed. Check out the virtual tour of the not yet constructed convention center.

Stanford on iTunes. Download Faculty lectures, interviews, music and sports. For free. Nice. [ Via nat]

The latest draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol is now available: draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-05. This is the first draft with my new co-editor Bill de HÓra and I'd like to publicly thank him for his work on this draft and for volunteering for the thankless job of working with me going forward. Huge congrats. I didn't realize you two were working so heavily on the publishing side. Is it just me or is the publishing protocol not getting nearly as much attention as the format?

Chris Dent, who now works for Socialtext (how did I miss that?), writes: These troubles matter little and will be solved: Late last night when I was editing, creating and deleting pages within a Socialtext workspace with both Perl and Python test clients, scales were scraped from my eyes, walls fell down, and objects once distant on the horizon were brought into clear relief. Sure, there are lots of Weblog APIs, but none in my experience has the comfy feel had by Atom in the wild.