The first time I saw the new Chrylser 300 I hated it. The next time I saw it I was intrigued. The third time I saw it the Dick-Tracy-Muscle-Car-Terra-Plane shape had firmly wrapped it's tentacles around my lizard brain. I don't own one. Yet. I use a car service for some of my business trips (travel to the airport). The service I like best uses the 300 and it is a spectacular car for this purpose.

My latest column, Just Use Media Types?, has just been published on XML.com. Wow. Great article Joe. The code and narrative are both very useful. Here it is on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/url/0114dfaa42976518caf83dc614d3f8a1 I would have posted this on the XML.com page itself but they make you sign up. Another point: it's a good thing that you link to your xml.com articles from your blog, because I check your blog's feed more often than I do the xml.

We recently bought a Roomba. Here is Lynne's review of the little robotic floor cleaner: After changing all of our carpet over to gorgeous Bamboo Flooring I went to Target to get some type of convenient sweeper to use upstairs. I considered a broom; I looked at electric brooms; I looked at a carpet/floor sweeper type broom until Roomba caught my eye. Once upon a time I think I saw an ad for one of these things and I thought it was neat but I assumed it was too expensive.

Huge thanks to Karl Dubost, who has translated all my Restful Web articles on XML.com into French. I don't have words in either language to express how very cool that is.

I just finished reading Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The book is excellent not only for Levitt's intriguing analysis, and subsequent decimation, of many bits of "conventional wisdom", but also for Dubner's prose. The book covers topics as far ranging as cheating in Sumo wrestling to determining which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool. The book is easy to read and really makes you start thinking about peoples motivations in all sorts of everyday contexts.

Anil Dash: With all due respect to Matt and Meg, we've all had about a day or so to analyze the data on this and make our knee-jerk calls about how this will affect revenues. I'm sure it's somebody's full time job at Times Digital (I dunno who, but it's somebody) to run the numbers on this. That person's probably been playing with Excel for months to figure out exactly the implications of this.

Dan Bricklin points to a great article by Chris Daly, Are Bloggers Journalists? Let's ask Thomas Jefferson. Common Sense and other pamphlets like it were precisely the kind of political journalism that Jefferson had in mind when he insisted on a constitutional amendment in 1790 to protect press freedom -- anonymous, highly opinionated writing from diverse, independent sources. In historical terms, today's bloggers are much closer in spirit to the Revolutionary-era pamphleteers than today's giant, conglomerate mainstream media.

An interesting article on Technology Review, "Star Wars" Spawned a Galaxy of Technologies , which talks about the number of technologies George Lucas developed for the Star Wars movies and then sold off cheaply. While the article itself was good, what I found more interesting was that every time they mentioned money they gave the value in both dollars and euros. Well we have the Internet in Europe too yo u know :-) Sometimes we even read articles written in the US and its handy to have currency values that we understand.

I've always disliked Hungarian Notation, at least the kind that I originally learned, which mandated putting type specifiers at the beginning of each variable name. Now Joel explains the difference between Hugarian Apps Notation and Hungarian System Notation, and why one is good and the other bad. The source of the divergence comes from misunderstanding the use of the word 'type' in a paper by Charles Simonyi. This misinterpretation of Hungarian Notation as it moved from the Apps group to the rest of Microsoft and then beyond reminds me of the origins of the "

Dave Child does cheat sheets. He does them very well. So far he has ones for PHP, CSS and mod_rewrite. Warm up the laminator, baby. Thanks, Joe - compliments are always appreciated :) Posted by Dave Child on 2005-05-13 Thanks Joe. I don't know if you have seen the one about n3 and RDF. http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/v2.1/resource/html/id/94/ Posted by karl Dubost on 2005-05-14

Mark Pilgrim announces Dive Into Greasemonkey. It's what he does. Added to the "toread" pile. Also: is it just me, or are there some things that "Dive Into" should not prefix? I, for one, parse the title as "Dive into Grease..." and stop there, shuddering with aversion. Posted by Scott Parkerson on 2005-05-11 Jeffrey Zeldman has repeatedly commented that "dive into mark" has homoerotic overtones. Your mileage may vary. Posted by Mark on 2005-05-11 I'm waiting for Dive Into Naked Objects.

The latest draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol is now available. Normally we automatically produce diffs from the last version, but in this case the changes were so large that the tool we use lost its mind and produced nothing of value. Sorry about that.

Let me tell you a story. My son, my oldest son, had two bad habits. Had being the material word. His first bad habit was that he would sit at the dinner table with his legs and arms pulled into his shirt. This would stretch out his shirts in the front making him look like he was wearing maternity clothes. I have nothing against maternity clothes, but on an eight year old?

Congratulations to Dr. Rhona Free for winning the National 2004 CASE Professor of the Year. I took several classes with Dr. Free and they were all excellent, to the point that I was seriously tempted to switch to Economics as a major. I'm very glad to see her get the recognition that she deserves. And I'm also glad to see that she is still at Eastern, which is filled with great professors truly interested in teaching.

The new <canvas/> element, being standardized by the WhatWG, was just turned on in Mozilla. We are turning canvas on -- it's already on by now. Get over it. Nothing in a relatively new spec is set in concrete, but that does not prevent useful work from being built on it. This is how the Internet protocols, and then the web, were built. Welcome back to incremental innovation. The lull of six years of monopoly-induced stagnation is over.

Sparklines, as defined by Tufte, are intense, simple, word-sized graphics. Kind of like this: . I seemed to stumble across them at just the right time, as I have regression tests I am adding to on a daily basis. The result is a flood of information. I believe sparklines may be the answer to my information avalanche. All of my regression scripts are written in Python and the output of those scripts is HTML.

So Adobe is buying Macromedia. The deal combines Adobe's Acrobat, which enables users to create, view, share and print documents, with Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave software. [Guardian Unlimited] Great. So does this mean that every time I view a web page that utilizes Flash I'll get to see this: Heh :) , that's a good one. Indeed, that's one of the annoying things about the (formely known as) Acrobat Reader.

We are finally replacing the carpet in the second floor of the house with hardwood flooring. After looking around we settled on Bamboo, it was a good price and a nice light color. What's being replaced is "builder's carpet", the cheap carpet that our spec house got built with. One of the best parts of any project is the new tools. Since we're doing such a large area and it will take four or more weekends to do the whole project it is cheaper to buy the air compressor and nail gun than it is to rent them every weekend.

My latest XML.com column is up, Constructing or Traversing URIs?. "REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state." [Roy Fielding] Of the four interface constraints of REST, the last one, 'hypermedia as the engine of application state', is the least utilitzed. This article builds the concept from the ground up, and then applies it to the design of our Bookmark Web Service.

My wife Lynne recently Lasik Eye Surgery and was very happy with the results. Here's the story in her own words. Today was the day of my Lasik surgery procedure. Before I begin to discuss today's events let me share what led me to decide on Lasik. I started wearing glasses at age 15 and quickly switched to contacts because I didn't care for glasses. My eyesight would get a little worse each year.