I mentioned a while a ago that I thought Atom would be a good format for search results. I also mentioned in the past that I thought SOAP was overkill for the Google API and that a REST based alternative would offer many advantages, either in the form that Paul Prescod proposed, or in the formulation I had put forward. Well, that's all fine and good for theory. Here is the practice.

I love tidy. I need tidy. What I really really want is a simple wrapper around tidy that will let me use it through Python. It's not that the current set of wrappers are bad, it's just that they didn't meet my target requirements. What are my target requirements? Easy to build, well not necessarily easy, but not a lot of dependecies, nothing beyond Python, TidyLib, and maybe SWIG.

Meet my daughter Caden: This is a picture of her at approximately four months old. She is seven and a half months old now and will be nine to ten months old by the time we travel to China to pick her up. Adorable! And congratulations. :) Posted by RE: Meet Caden Gregorio on 2003-11-21 Congratulations! It won't be long, now!! Posted by Eric Vitiello on 2003-11-21 Beautiful little girl.

The Principle of Sufficient Irritation Atom was a hot topic of conversation at ApacheCon, including the projects origin and motivations. While I was there I thought of a good analogy to a great Philip K. Dick story, "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford". As it turns out, I wasn't the only one to get this idea, as Danny Ayers wrote about it back in June.

Today I am live from ApacheCon 2003. I will be presenting later today. Pictures and text as time and battery life permits. The day started at 4:40AM when I woke up for the first time, not being used to to west coast time. The timing was perfect I got to call and talk to Lynne and the kids just before they went off to school. I woke again at 6 and finally gave up when I woke for the third time at 6:30.

In working on the authentiction proposal for the Atom API, one of the underlying assumptions made was that access to the full power of .htaccess files in general and Digest authentiction in particular was rare. So do me a favor, if you are currently hosted on a system using Apache leave a comment with the name of your hosting provider and what overrides you have turned on in your account.

Yesterday I talked a bit about converting all my documents into HTML and then running a search engine over that. I also lamented that it would be easier if all the search engines were part of the Well-Formed Web. What I mean by that is using multiple search engines and combining the results would be much easier if they all were able to format their results in XML. I was still kicking that idea around today when I started thinking about what would be the best format to use for search results.

Recently I ranted about the Longhorn, and relished in Clay Shirky's pointed barbs at the Semantic Web. Both of these topics deserve a little more elaboration before I finish. RDF Some are suprised at the strength of my reaction when I talk about the Semantic Web. This has more to do with history than any strong feelings about the actual technology and goals of the project. The biggest source of irritation with the whole Semantic Web effort comes not from the project or it's goals, but with the behaviour of its ardent supporters.

In the long run, the waterfall model will be seen as a odd historical curiosity. Although many view iterative and incremental development as a modern practice, its application dates as far back as the mid-1950s. Prominent software-engineering thought leaders from each succeeding decade supported IID practices, and many large projects used them successfully. Abstract of the paper Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History, published in IEEE Computer.

My oldest son Christopher moved into his new bedroom several months ago. It's been cramped quarters in there, so over the last couple weekends we built him a new bed and desk, in the process creating much more space. As you can see the one piece of furniture, the top bunk of a low height bunk bed, dominates the room. The project was to build a bed into the wall, around the same height as the old bed, and then in the newly opened up space to add a desk.

Some people are absolutely gushing about the latest vaporware from Microsoft. Enjoy the fantasy while it lasts because it will be a very long time before any of this sees the light of day, and even then it will be years more before it's stable enough to use in a production environment. Let's look at this diagram of Longhorn. Focus on the lower third of the diagram, the part in white labelled "

Clay Shirky has a great new essay The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview that gives a funny and at the same time brutal critique the Semantic Web. This is perhaps perhaps the high water mark of presenting trivial problems as worthy of Semantic intervention: a program that can conclude that 102 is greater than 100 is labeled smart. Artificial Intelligence, here we come. I'd like to note that I've covered this topic before but from a slightly different angle in Meaning, Semantics and RDF.

The current revision of the AtomAPI is contains quite a few changes from previous revisions. All of those changes have been talked about seperately, but when put together represent a fairly large change to the API. Here is Quick Reference for the AtomAPI which also highlights those changes. The URIs in the draft AtomAPI RFC are not normative, they are examples. The draft RFC isn't about specifying the form of the URLs that are to be used.

Ole Eichhorn has some great observations on Longhorn and all the hype surrounding Microsoft's latest vaporware annoucements. It is a long article covering a lot of territory and he has some choice quotes on software and software development: If you list the most "important" applications today, you'll find that zero of them run on .NET (and zero of them run on Java), despite the fact that .NET has been out for three years, and Java much longer.

Back to more thoughts on search. Sam Ruby mentioned a simpler kind of navigation based on the type of flow you see on this page from the Python documentation. Note the bar across the top with left, up, and right arrows, as well as special purpose links. Of course the body of this page has a number of implicit "down" arrows. If we could make this information machine readable, every Atom file would potentially be a directory and an introspection file.

At least for now, RESTLog is the number one entry in the Google Directory Category Computers > Programming > Internet > Web Services > REST

Is it me or does OpenOffice 1.1 load a lot faster when you install it without Java? Libxml2 is a great XML library written in C that includes support for XPath, XPointer and XInclude implementations, DOM and SAX like interfaces. Version 2.6.1 is out, just 9 days after 2.6.0 was released. [via xmlhack] It's been a while since I've posted anything on CSS. Right now for me it's at the point of just being a tool.

No, not own in an IP sense, but in a property sense. There are thin clients that you can use to maintain your weblog. Some of these clients maintain copies of your posts that also reside on the server. Which one is definitive? I.e.: Does the client or the server own your posts? Ideally the distinction should be hidden from the user, who would prefer to think of there being only one post that manifests itself in different places.

I've been discussing search as being the most angst filled facet. After having tossed around a couple ideas, here is a concrete proposal for how to change the spec in the next revision. While I'm at it let's slip in another proposal for the 'createEntry' facet too. First, a quick review, the Introspection file lists all the facets that an implementation of the AtomAPI implements. <?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?> <introspection xmlns="

Today I had an enlightening conversation with Sam Ruby about the strengths and weaknesses of various authentication schemes. The end conclusion seems to be that either you sign/digest the body of all your requests and responses, or you are open to man-in-the-middle attacks. Which does raise the question, what level of security are you comfortable with? jcgregorio yeah, unless I am seriously mis-reading WSSE, it offers little to no protection at least compared to Digest