Dave's pictures from Dartmouth summarize perfectly why I left there. It is mid-May and there only the first beginnings of leaves on the trees in Hanover, which makes me think it must be a milder spring than normal. I remember sitting at one graduation ceremony at Colby-Sawyer College in the first week of June and there being less leaves on the trees than in Dave's pictures. Just miserablly cold weather for far too much of the year, and yes, I am allowed to complain, since I did do something about it.

Recently inspired by Danny Ayer's comments on XHTML and Xanadu I need to talk about levels of abstraction. Let's work with computers and work up the levels of abstration. At the very lowest level you have electrical signals moving through circuits. Now, in the good old days it was +5V for a logical 1 and 0V for a logical 0, I don't know what voltage the latest processors run at, but to keep heating down they have been running at lower and lower voltages.

Ever dropped a comment on a site and wished you could go back and fix that typo, or maybe the next morning you regret the use of the 'bollocks', either way what you want is editable comments, which Bulu, the software that runs this site, now supports. Now some sites have solved this problem by having you log into the site to post a comment. It works, but when most people are presented with the option of 'registering' with a site, or not leaving a comment, the usually choose the latter.

Stigmergy, communicating through the environment, plays a major role in organizing ant colony behaviour. Most of that stigmeric communication is done through scents, and most of the examples of stigmeric communication I mention in Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web are examples where the scent is in the static physical environment, that is, in the mud in the walls of the nest and on the ground on an ant trail. Now researchers at The Gordon Lab at Stanford have discovered that ants performing differing tasks smell differently, and that the ant behaviour changes in the face of collections of ants with particular scents.

I was installing Bulu on a new machine and kept coming up with an Internal Server Error when trying to run the script. Now I have previously installed this under Windows and Linux so I was sure I had the permissions correct. Little did I know that the server I was installing on had suExec turned on. Turns out my permissions were too liberal and that is what was generating the error.

We're back from vacation. And a fine one it was. Still digging through a mountain of e-mail and other messages. Just have time for a quick note, that is Tim's comments on CSS reminds me of a project that I though of, but will never have time to do. The idea is to create a Python filter for CSS. You write pure, valid CSS. The Python module serves up the CSS to the browser, but not before tweaking it to accomodate the quirks of that browser.

Vacation. There will be no e-mail's responded to, no comments filled, no arguments re-joined, not a peep from me for the next week. Vacation. For the few of you that have my cellphone number, that, I will have with me.

To quote the man himself: Bowing to demand, or maybe just as an experiment, we've hand rolled an RSS feed for this site. It appears to validate. Let us know if you have any problems with it. This is great for several reasons. First, because I really like Zeldman's writing. Second, because I thought he would never do it (I'm apparently not the only one). And lastly, because just the day before he published a long and breezy entry on why RSS just wasn't right for his type of content and that he would never supply an RSS feed.

We appear to be creeping towards Xanadu. Not that idyllic, beautiful place, but instead Xanadu the Ted Nelson project. And that's not a good thing. Now, Clay Shirky has laid down the reasons the web is so successful in his essay In Praise of Evolvable Systems. The key phrase I want to point out today is: Furthermore, the Web's almost babyish SGML syntax, so far from any serious computational framework (Where are the conditionals?

Here's the raw data of an HTTP GET, an e-mail, and a MIME encoded picture. Tell me if you see any patterns. First, here is the raw source of a short e-mail. Note that it is also the format that it is kept on my harddrive, as the Mozilla mail client uses the mbox format. From - Tue Apr 15 21:22:51 2003 X-UIDL: 3e9bf91300000055 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 02000000 Return-Path: <jo.

Please pardon the dust while I re-arrange some content on the site. It has become rather bothersome to have a /news and a /story installation of Bulu, and now that I have a single-post-per-page CMS working I find I don't need a seperate blog for stories. So those stories are moving up to /news and a .htaccess has been put in place to redirect requests to their new home. Expect the same changes over at The Well-Formed Web

Bulu 0.93 has now been deployed across all my sites. It sports two new features. The first is the ability to dislay only an excerpt on the main page. (A feature I have come to appreciate on Tim Bray's blog.) The other new feature is the URL generation. The older versions of Bulu generated incrementing numeric ids for the posts. That makes for extremely forgettable URLs so the new version creates an item URL using a munged up version of the items title.

If you remember Tom Lehrer, you'll love this Flash version of The Elements![Via The Shifted Librarian] Very cool Flash animation that reminds me of a story. As an undergraduate I took a team taught honors class on Democracy and Capitalism. The role I played as the only conservative student in the class will remain a story for another day. One day during class one of the instructors, to make a point, broke out in song, in particular "

The names of my client and server implementations of RESTLog have changed, preserving the name RESTLog to only refer to the specification. Now, if you're curious, I did not pick the name Bulu after one of the langauges of the people of Cameroon. Instead, it is a made-up word that my oldest son, now nine years old, used when he was two. Oddly enough, we have never figured out what 'bulu' meant.

For some historical perspective on what a SARS pandemic could be like if it is not contained, the influenza pandemic of 1918 is a good place to start. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351.

I really like Python. The more I work with the language the more I like it. It has a nice clean syntax and a very nice set of standard libraries. In particular it has a wide range of web libraries, from low-level sockets, to cgi processing, to a library for connecting to an IMAP server, it has it all. It even has three libraries for pulling content off the web, httplib, urllib and urllib2.

Spring has finally arrived, with thundershowers today. The rain was nice because it washed away a lot of the pollen. Unless you live in the area you just can't imaging how much pollen is in the air and on the ground. Today before the storm the wind picked up and the pollen was being blown into drifts on the front porch. After the rain, it collected in the street. Puddles of yellow goo a 1/4 inch thick.

The giant sucking sound you hear is another person being sucked up by Microsoft. The furrygoat is the latest victim. Congrats Steve!

ECMA is updating ECMAScript (JavaScript to you and me), with enhancements for XML [via Sam Ruby]. E4X is based on BEAs extensions to ECMAScript in BEA WebLogic Workshop. The BEA article points out the akwardness and verbosity of DOM for manipulating XML, which is something I am fond of harping on. Then it goes on to explain the extensions to ECMAScript for manipulating XML, the here I would like to emphasize the word extensions, as they are not just adding in a new API, but instead are adding in new syntax to the core language for XML.

Ken MacLeod has an updated version of XmlToDictBySAX.py that includes a neat technique for working with namespaces. His code uses James Clark's namespace notation for referring to element names, which is a lot more elegant and robust than my original implementation. In Clark's notation the indirect reference to the namespace URI are mapped to a direct reference. For example: <cars:part xmlns:cars="http://www.cars.com/xml"/> maps to an element name of: {http://www.cars.com/xml}part The idea is to referer to the element by the name {uri}name which avoids the problem of picking different prefixes for the same namespace.