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2 years ago: Unidentified Stationary Objects #2

4 years ago: Bonus Independence Day Tonight's Episode

8 years ago: I'm going to the fabulous Pricewatch to look at...

9 years ago: I was mentioned on fire's automsg by ilyah for bringing...

[No comments] : Wait, MST3K is now ripping off Uncle Morty's Dub Shack?!

[No comments] Right Ho, Jeeves: On Project Gutenberg.

[No comments] RESTful Consulting: After finishing the Ruby Cookbook I did a tiny bit of consulting, cashing in on my alleged expertise. Not a whole lot since I was working on another book at the time. Now that that book is finished, my Viable Paradise submission is in, and the vacation/Foo Camp brouhaha is now a pleasant memory, I'm starting to feel around for REST-related consulting jobs. I don't really know much of a market there is for this stuff, but given the market for free advice I suspect there's something.

I'm also talking to a couple companies about full-time positions. I'm not going to make any decisions for at least a couple weeks, so if you have an idea for what I should do next, please email me. I'd really like to apply the stuff I learned while writing RWS, but if you want to give me a job crashing giant robots into each other I probably won't say no.

[Comments] (3) : The Transformers movie is about to come out, and it's looking like a fiasco. How did this happen? Perhaps NYCB's fake 2003 interview with producer Tom DeSanto will shed some light on the matter. Or perhaps not, since, as previously stipulated, I made the whole thing up.

NYCB: So, in a live-action context how do you plan to deal with the fact that there are effectively no humans in the Transformers universe?

TDS: Well, there are humans, but nobody cares about them. They just fix things and get into trouble. So I'm going to introduce a new human character, Humie the Human. He's someone the audience can relate to.

PS: would it be possible to program a Wii to act as a theremin?

[No comments] : I was going to tell Ben Pollack about this, but it turns out he was involved. Giovanni Corriga is porting the RESTful Web Services examples to Squeak Smalltalk.

[No comments] : Photo mania continues with pictures from our Prelinger trip. Don't miss the ephemera boxes, the candy industry trade magazine, the Jargon File, the dedication for Wake Up Alone and Like It!, and of course Pornography.

Update: The continuation itself continues with Foo Camp pictures. Witness the chaotic schedule board, the chaos to write on said board, remaindered books that nobody wanted, lightning talks, the gasifier car, etc. etc. etc. I'm tired of 1) adding comments to all these pictures, and 2) posting highlights from them, so that's all for now.

[Comments] (1) Random photos: After some experimentation I've set up F-Spot to manage my photos. It generates scaled-down thumbnail galleries suitable for rsyncing to crummy.com, so hopefully that's what you'll see in the future. I've put up three galleries I created while testing.

[Comments] (1) : Right now it seems like a Foo Camp withdrawal dream, but I have photographic proof, so I'm pretty sure it happened. Last (ie. Tuesday) night I ate dinner with John McCarthy and an astronaut. Specifically Janice Voss, whose lecture about mapping and being in space I'd listened to online. This happened because our old neighbor Susan McCarthy of Becoming a Tiger fame is John McCarthy's daughter. I also met Susan's half-brother Tim.

The highlight for me was telling John about REST, but John had apparently been talking to Janice about science fiction, and everyone at the table was a fan, so that was the dominant topic of conversation. Janice had a big list printed on pink paper with the books she's read and what she'd thought of them, a necessary measure equivalent to my Pocket Wisherman when you've read so many books that the pressing question in the bookstore is which ones you haven't read.

Janice also stole the show with her story of taking the Foundation trilogy on the Space Shuttle as a personal item and reading it by Earthlight, during a day when the mission has been completed but they can't land yet (she used a term of art for this which I immediately forgot).

I have a huge number of interesting pictures from Prelinger, Foo Camp, and a trip I took with Susan to a Pacifica tide pool. I took really high-quality pictures and now the problem is putting up download-quality pictures for you guys without having two different systems.

As an experiment I uploaded my video of playful seals to Google Video. Video quality suffered quite a bit, but you can see some seal-shaped objects frolicking around. Jake, also check out the David Thorpe-esque postcard I saw in Susan's house.

[Comments] (2) I Got Hit By A Junk Car: I got email from a guy who wanted to know if he could subscribe to only my technical entries and skip the stuff about awesome dinosaurs and my boring life. Well, you can subscribe to a specific category, and although I don't use categories as much as I used to, I have been filing REST entires under "rest", which is probably what you want to subscribe to. (Here's the RSS feed.) And in fact you might want to do that now because I'm going to talk about the sensory overload experience that is Foo Camp.

The bizarre thing about Foo Camp is that you are constantly meeting interesting people. It never stops. Five minutes before Fitz and I left, we met Molly Wheeler, who works at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. I thought this was awesome because I love old books and manuscripts. Fitz thought it was awesome because he is a couple steps removed from a bunch of ancient manuscripts that are, for reasons too complicated to go into here, rotting in boxes.

I was afraid I would spend all my time with the few people I already knew, but that didn't happen, possibly due to huge overcompensation on my part. After a few minutes of conversation I felt my conversant was getting disturbingly close to being someone I knew, and I started feeling uncomfortable talking to them. As Robert said on the way back to San Francisco, "I think I'm going to need two or three days of not talking to anybody, just to process everything."

I had excellent conversations with people I'd really wanted to meet, like Bryan O'Sullivan, Scott Berkun, Carl Malamud (note to self: write separate entry), Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who encouraged me to make a submission to Viable Paradise, which I will do when I get home), Matt Webb (previously mentioned as holder of world's most awesome job), and Brewster Kahle.

New paragraph. I was boring Brewster about how the Internet Archive is great as a huge storage unit for individual files, and okay as a way to find individual files, but very bad when it comes to automatically processing or transforming large amounts of raw data. You have to find and download all that data, process it locally, and only then can you upload your derivative works back to the Archive. I'll have more to say about this later, but at this point in the conversation we were mercifully distracted by a junk pickup with a junk gasifier in the bed.

Someone (probably owner John Rinaldi, though he's not on the Foo Camp guest list) showed us how it worked, filled it up with walnut shells, and started burning off the hydrogen and carbon monoxide to heat up the system. After a brief run-in with security (there was no nearby fire extinguisher), probably-John-Rinaldi fired up the engine and started directing the hydrogen and carbon monoxide into it. Then he started driving around. Brewster and I and several other people crowded in and it was a lot like taking a ride in a junky 1975 GMC pickup, except with a slight odor of walnut. The driver claimed a ratio of 20 pounds of walnut shells to 1 gallon of fuel, and a price of $20/ton for walnut shells, and all those 2*10xes give a fuel price of $0.20 a gallon. You do have to keep shovelling them in, though.

More later.

[No comments] Water bottle siege engine: I didn't see anyone else doing this at Foo Camp, so I kept the detente, but now I can reveal the deadly secret behind the overly complicated free water bottle we were given. In the wrong hands, it becomes a catapult, capable of lobbing little balls of paper over two feet. This 2-second video smuggled out of my digital camera tells the story.

[No comments] : In a presentation by Scott Berkun; he just mentioned The Ten Books on Architecture, which he calls the first pattern language book. Plus, I'm sitting next to Andy Baio. It's the same name-dropping I was doing when I was visiting friends in San Francisco, except you've got a better chance of knowing who the people are!

[Comments] (2) "I'd blog that.": At Camp FOO, which is less like Camp Snoopy than I was led to believe. I give a talk at 1:00 and hopefully some people will show up. I've met many people including Lucas Carlson.

This entry is like the weird diary-like postcards my father used to write to himself.

[Comments] (1) Awesome Day: Today Adam and I walked the GG Bridge, and ate at Greens, and Chez Panisse (cafe), and saw Mike Daisey do a monologue. I don't even know how all this awesome stuff happened. At first I had a superstition that this awesome day meant a very terrible day was in my future. Then I decided that it was actually meant to cancel out some very terrible day in my past. Then I decided that kind of thinking was counterproductive, and got out the dental floss.

[No comments] Do You Have to Let It Prelinger?: Yesterday I went with Adam and Alexei to the Prelinger Archives, which were generally deemed awesome. I took lots of pictures (coming when I get back), which is good as I haven't found any pictures online that give a feel for the experience of finding all sorts of bizarre books and magazines. There are some that give you a feel for the library stacks, and now that I see the photos others have taken I think the world needs some close-ups of the bookshelves to convey the browsing experience.

[Comments] (1) : Ah, delicious Mission burritos.

A while ago I saw that someone wrote a paper/article/something called something like "The Object Model of the World Wide Web". It may have been someone's WSEC position paper. I want to rip off that title for a talk I want to give at Foo Camp, but I can't find the original to give proper credit. Does anyone else remember this?

: I'm taking a little California vacation before Foo Camp. So far I've visited Ed, Manoj, Andrew & Claudia, and now I'm staying with Rachel & Jeremy. These names mean nothing to you! It is like a soup of names where the broth is your own despair!

My asteroid mining story was rejected from Strange Horizons, at the same time I finished a story for submission to Viable Paradise which I'm really happy about. This gives me the idea that I should try to get the new story published and send the rejected one in for VP.

General Purpose Writing Tip: Replace "ironically" with "interestingly".

: Until just a few days ago I thought that the two-handed sword so common in fantasy games was a sword with a hilt on the end of each blade, such that you could either hold each hilt to get more leverage when blocking, or swing it around like a regular sword. I never explicitly examined this idea and said "Yes, this makes sense," but it looks pretty silly now that I've ascertained that a two-handed sword is just a regular sword that's so friggin' huge you need two hands to operate it. Avoiding this kind of misunderstanding may be an advantage of newer, more graphics-intensive fantasy games.

: From a search request:

What did the tamale say when it reached the end of the tightrope? joke

I don't get it.

[Comments] (4) : John le Carré should write a novelization of Spy vs. Spy.

The Other Unicode Eye Chart: When I saw Joey Hess's Unicode Eye Chart I was bemused and charmed by this plucky Unicode eye chart. I also thought back to the days of my youth, when for quite some time I was able to deny the optometrist his due by memorizing the eye chart while the optometrist was talking to my mother or something. Eventually I was found out and I got glasses. But it would have been tricker for me to get away with it if the eye chart had been constantly changing.

That's why I made The Other Unicode Eye Chart, with my patented "dynamically generated every 5 minutes" CPU load-saver. Now you can test your eyesight, your recall, and your browser's Unicode support, all at the same time. What do you think, sirs?

[Comments] (1) : I was planning not to write about REST on my weblog for a while, especially since all this week I'm writing about REST on the JavaRanch forum, but Jon Udell pointed me to a comment by Paul H. on Jon's weblog that throws down the REST gauntlet. The context is our assertion in RWS that web applications and web services should work on the same principles. I'm just going to quote the general flow of the comment:

[T]he authors' goal is stated as being one "to reunite the programmable web with the human web" ... The unstated assertion here then is that in order to meet the authors' stated goals, the majority of today's Web Applications will need to be re-architected and re-written in order to conform to a RESTful style! ... [T]he RESTful approach is essentially unproven outside of the read-only Web... doesn't this run counter to the often-voiced argument that REST builds upon what makes the web what it is today?

First off I want to say that my goal of uniting the programmable web with the human web is the lofty, inspirational kind of goal, not the kind that gets a budget and a schedule. "Dream" might have been a better word. But yes, it goes both ways: web applications should be more RESTful, and web services should be more weblike.

Now, on to the critique of web services vs. the web. My quick answer comes from Sam's and my InfoQ interview. Again, I'm just quoting the general flow:

InfoQ: Another argument often brought up is that the standard claim that REST's advantages have been proven by the Web's success is actually a wrong conclusion — the reason being that most of the Web's usage is actually non-RESTful.

LR: There's some truth to this. Earlier I said that most websites don't expose write operations RESTfully. But I think removing the non-RESTful parts of the Web would make the Web better, and wouldn't hurt its success—except in the same second-order way it would hurt the Web's success if web browsers were stricter about invalid HTML... I decided there were three important reasons [for the Web's success]: everything has an address, pages link to each other, and you can manipulate the web using only a web browser.

The first two correspond to important features of RESTful web services: addressability of resources by URI, and hypermedia-as-engine-of-application-state... Rather than promoting REST by pointing to the Web as a whole, I would point to the incredible usefulness of URIs and links, two features largely ignored by WS-*.

Longer answer. First, by number of requests the read-only web is most of the web. Even if REST only made sense for read-only web services, the success of the read-only web and the tools built around it would justify a (short) book.

Second, the read-only web is not just GET. It's also URIs, media types, links, and application forms. That's most of the web technologies, and they're used on the web as they are in RESTful web services. All that's missing are write operations and resource forms. Fittingly, there's significantly more controversy about these: see GET/POST vs. GET/POST/PUT/DELETE and do-we-need-WADL. In the interview I ask whether "architectures consciously designed with REST in mind will 'win' over architectures that are simple but only intermittently RESTful." Those other architectures are today's web application architectures.

How big is the gap between web applications and RESTful services? Well, here's a RESTful rule for web applications: POST to the same URI you GET. The URI designates an object, not an operation, and we have a special way of distinguishing between safe (GET) and unsafe (POST) operations on objects.

I don't think that all web applications should be rewritten to follow this rule, because in general I'm opposed to doing work. But when I write web applications in the future I'm certainly going to hew to that rule. It's a cleaner design. Even if you think that rule is a waste of time, you probably don't think following it will break the web—and following it makes a web application resource-oriented and RESTful.

It's true that the success of the web doesn't reflect success on every aspect of RESTful web services, but the overlap is pretty large, and the web's success certainly doesn't stem from any systematic repudiation of RESTful principles.

Things: Recursive islands. Iridium flares.

[Comments] (3) The Future: A Retrospective: I've started a new pseudo-weblog, called The Future: A Retrospective. It's based on a 1989 book of predictions about future consumer products. Every day I review another prediction and see what's happened to the people and technologies since 1989. Actually, that's what it looks like to you. In truth, most days I do absolutely nothing, and once in a while I fill in the backlog. Just like a webcomic!

I've seeded TF:AR with the first five items in the book, including the frickin' Smart House and one of my favorites, the Walking TV.

[Comments] (2) Computer Magic: Today I read a collection of Richard Brautigan. My mother told me about him when I was in high school and may have acquired me a copy of In Watermelon Sugar (I'm not sure how I got that) in college. Today I re-read IWS and enjoyed it a lot; it's got a Dwarf Fortress feel to it, with characters making statues of everyday objects and narrating their internal state. Trout Fishing in America wasn't as good, and the poetry was hit-and-miss. One hit was quite good, though: "Gee, You're So Beautiful That It's Starting To Rain". Not as good poetically is "At the California Institute of Technology", but it made me LOL, as the kids say (I believe I briefly turned into a cat).


This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Sunday, June 24 2007, 13:17:20 Nowhere Daylight Time and last built on Wednesday, July 04 2007, 08:40:49 Nowhere Daylight Time.

Crummy is © 1996-2007 Leonard Richardson. Unless otherwise noted, all text licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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