The APIs Discovery Service launched today. This has been in the works for a while, but probably not a secret if you've been following checkins to the google-api-python-client library. The announcement went out on the Google Code blog, and has been covered in other venues. Two things to add that haven't been covered so far, the first is that if someone besides Google were to build an API that could be described by the Discovery format, then potentially some of these libraries would work with that API.

I'm going to propose a new URN namespace for acronyms, so as to avoid any conflicts in the future. urn:ietf:lol:omg:wtf:bbq

You've heard of Peak Oil, right? Well this weekend my wife and I realized that we just passed Peak Stuff.

Posted without comment. Delivered-To: joe.gregorio@gmail.com Received: by 10.42.154.72 with SMTP id p8cs148414icw; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Delivered-To: joe.gregorio@gmail.com Received: by 10.42.154.72 with SMTP id p8cs148414icw; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.90.91.16 with SMTP id o16mr28811agb.173.1297807400151; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <bewertung@beewo.de> Received: from mx10.webfaction.com (mail10.webfaction.com [174.121.221.166]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 8si8472588anr.133.2011.02.15.14.03.19; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: neutral (google.

What I said last year, now the W3C apparently agrees. In short the case that was presented for distributed extensibility was weak.

Negative externalities are the bane of a market economy. Those wider costs to products and services that aren’t included in the actual cost of a item can wreak major havoc on society and almost always result in years of litigation, lawmaking, and acrimony between businesses and government. So what exactly is an negative externality? Let’s start with the definition of externality from Wikipedia: In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices[1], incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit.

Would you like to work for Google from the Triangle area of North Carolina? Now is your chance, we are hiring Software Engineers. You can apply through the site or shoot me a resume. Update: To clarify, since the job description is a bit general, these are positions to work on Chrome.

Christopher's first iPhone game is now available, Between The Lines. It's been a busy year for him, as he also launched a Facebook application Agitated Ferret, and all the Flash based games he's developed for it, and finally he's joined a FIRST robotics team.

James Clark: It's "Yay", because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this. The fundamental problem is the mismatch between programming language data structures and the XML element/attribute data model of elements.

I've been a little self-conscious about our Christmas decorations this year. Because of a family vacation earlier this year we didn't get to put up Halloween decorations until the day before Halloween, and even then it was a pretty paltry showing. We also didn't get to run our haunted house, which was a big disappointment to the rest of the neighborhood. We had no idea we'd become such an institution, but we heard from many of the trick-or-treaters that they were looking forward to it.

The Google API Client for Python is now considered in Alpha, which means that while it may still blow up, destroy data, and eat small kittens, I will be more surprised by such results, and less likely to say that it's a known issue. Any and all feedback you have on the library will be greatly appreciated, either via the discussion group or the issue tracker. Just to reprise the current status, through the magic of discovery, the client library now supports the Buzz, Moderator, Latitude, Custom Search, Diactize, Translate, and Prediction APIs.

Stephen O'Grady: It is possible that we’ll see standardization of componentry around specific projects like Hadoop – although even that seems unlikely with the rampant proliferation of query, import and other ecosystem projects – but I do not expect to see a standard stack of software used to tackle generic Big Data problems, because there really aren’t many generic Big Data problems. Inconvenient as that might be from a vocabulary perspective.

We have some interesting mailing lists internally at Google and one of the great temptations when starting is to sign up for too many of them. Over the years I've learned my lesson and whittled that list down, but one of them stuck; I had gleaned some interesting nuggets from that list when I first started and was loathe to unsubscribe. I recently looked at that list again and began to question my committment and so performed an experiment, I created a log file, and whenever I learned something new or useful from that list that I hadn't heard from another source, I would jot it down in the log file.

gdata-python-client Last week version 2.0.12 was released mimeparse python The Python version of mimeparse is now 0.1.3. I should also be cuttting a httplib2 release soon, and a an alpha of the Google API Client for Python.

Email Display Scope: If you are building an installed application that uses OAuth, you may want to display the Email address of the user's Google Account. To do this, you will need to modify the scope(s) you request via OAuth to include the following Email Display Scope: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo#email A useful tidbit for which that site seems to be the only documentation.

The Google API Client for Python is a new project to implement a Python client for discovery based APIs, which is currently Moderator, Buzz and Latitude. I had pointed out the existence of the discovery document back in May, and the same caveats still apply, it is very early days and you should expect the format to change. On the other hand, having a discovery document as part of the web service itself greatly simplfies the code; the core code is in apiclient/discovery.

Hg-prompt, because the only annoyance of Mercurial Queues is accidentally pulling when you have queued patches applied. # Prompt stuff D=$'\e[00m' PINK=$'\e[01;35m' GREEN=$'\e[01;32m' ORANGE=$'\e[01;33m' hg_ps1() { hg prompt --angle-brackets "<on ${GREEN}<branch>${D}>\ < at ${GREEN}<bookmark>>${D}${PINK}<status>${D}\ < [${ORANGE}<patches|hide_unapplied>${D}]>" 2> /dev/null }

The introduction of a computer into a house or business meant the introduction of more stuff. Computer, monitor, cables, printer, etc. The whole "Paperless Office" thing was a sham, owning a computer meant even more paper than ever was printed and lying around. But recently that trend in our house has started to turn around. We're not actually moving in the other direction yet, but I do see things leveling off.

There are two things that have been bothering me for a while now. The first is that the only realistic way out of our current situation, barring a Japan-like lost decade, is to inflate our way out of the Great Recession, yet there isn't any movement in that direction. The other thing that has puzzled me has been the treatment of China as if it were an economic miracle, impervious to any rational market behavior.

Lynne has her Apex Math site up and running. Having done teaching and tutoring for years she has strong opinions on how math is taught in schools today, and how it should be changed to help the students and give them a positive attitude about math. She's now taken that experience and put it into a set curriculum for a whole range of grades and areas, from K-2 to Algebra.