I am heading back to Chicago on a business trip at the beginning of February. Hopefully this time the trip will go better than my last whirl-wind tour. I hope to at least have time to visit the Museum of Science and Industry which has come highly recommended. The original photograph that I used to mock up my wintery walk in Chicago is from Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, 1902-1933, part of the American Memory section of the Library of Congress.

What's the epitome of poor ad placement? I think it's the Zoloft ad I saw tonight while watching Brave New World on the Sci-Fi channel.

I have always liked this short story by Spider Robinson. Very apt in light of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft ruling. [via Boing-Boing]

I must seek out Giant Robot, hopefully they carry it at the local borders. [via William Gibson] The robot picture on the web page reminds me of "Robot Parade" off TMBG's "No!"

The Supreme Court has rejected our challenge to the Sonny Bono Law. [Lawrence Lessig] Ok. Sadness for today. But tomorrow we rev up the spitfire vitriol needed to roll this thing back in the legislature, eh?

Sam Ruby has found a simpler method of implementing Mark Pilgrim's Automatic Linkbacks by following the ant trail back through his referrer logs to the calling web page and finally into the RSS file via the link tag. Oooh, the stigmeric power of the Well-Formed Web.

Remember the furor over NPR and their idiotic linking policy? After meeting with their lawyers they decided to soften their language a little. Today I happened to notice the whole linking form has been has been removed from the site.

Needless to say Mark is upset about XHTML 2.0. Of course he shouldn't complain too loudly lest he get drafted as a technical expert by the committee. What I find most puzzling is the lack of movement on XForms. As of now it looks like the only place it will make an appearance is in XHTML 2.0. I would really like to see an XHTML+SVG+MathML+XForms profile. test Posted by joe on 2007-01-12 This is a test

An amusing observation. I was reading the TrackBack specification and came across something that I hadn't really thought about before. Here is the mime-type of the stuff sent to the server when you do POST from a web form: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Do you see that? application/x-www-form-urlencoded Yes, x for experimental. I think by now that format is little beyond experimental. Hey, I thought it was amusing.

That is to say that all the URLs on this site are cool, with cool being defined by Tim Berners-Lee in his article Cool URIs don't change. See the detailed description of how this was accomplished on The Well-Formed Web.

It's true, it's true. I've been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and have, of course, accepted. [Dave Winer] Congrats Dave!

Oh yes, Dilbert is covering Extreme Programming.

The problem with MetaData.

Today on [rest-discuss] Roy Fielding debunked the REST implies opaque URIs legend.

Taking up Mark's request for small world stories. My wife Lynne and I both graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University. While as an undergraduate I was good friends with Dee Sweet who had the strange title of co-president of the Biology club. Co-president. Who the hell has co-presidents! Anyway I never met the co-president, only saw him through a door way one day when he dropped off some papers at Dee's apartment.

And I thought UDDI had reached a low point when somebody from Microsoft floated the idea of using it to register RSS feeds. Now this proposal forXRIs appears. Timothy Appnel summed up the situation well with "Please Put UDDI Out Of Its Misery".

Welcome to the new and improved BitWorking! Well not really new and improved as much as migrated. I am now using Pamphlet and my Python implementation of the RESTLog API to manage this site.

The RESTLog interface is defined in Table 1. The table lists the URLs, the verbs that can act on those locations, the mime-type of the content and a description of the results of that action. N.B. The URL RESTLog.cgi is used as a placeholder for the implementations real URL. For example, the real URL could easily be http://bitworking/RESTLog.py or http://WellFormedWeb/news. The RESTLog interface does not define what the URL is, instead it defines the actions that are allowed on that URL and the format of the responses.

or how we all became ants building a nest we can't even see. Weblogs, Neighborhoods, and Google Weblogs, Neighborhoods, and Google are all phenomena of the World-Wide Web. All of these are fairly new and they are all very powerful. Weblogs are successfully taking on large publishers on their fact checking. A minor shift in Googles ranking algorithms creates huge ripples. Warchalking swept through the web and onto street corners in a matter of days.

RESTLog is the name of the application that runs this site. RESTLog is a weblog application that tries to follow the REST architectural style. The RESTLog application has a client and a server side. The client side is a .NET application written in C#, while the server side application is written in Python. Note that the this application isn't tied to either of these programming environments. Either side could be replaced with a component written in another language and the system would work just fine.