Sam Ruby presents REST+SOAP. Paul Prescod makes some comments.

Paul also has some worthwhile (and well reasoned) short opinion pieces on his page, like his thoughts on the role of gov’t, financial inequality, and moral equivalence.

He also has a little piece entitled Why I Promote Python, and he elaborates on his complexity complaint in a followup, Is Perl Difficult? Of course we all know the answer to that question. Still, while Perl is complex and in some cases bizarre (and probably not particluarly accessible), for people who program it day in and day out, Perl does translate into actual power and saved programming time. Worth the trade-off? I don’t know.

PHP Benchmark tests – along the lines of Jeff Greenberg’s Javascript Optimization tests. Note, that some of these tests aren’t quite as thorough as they might be. For example, I ran some tests a while back on single quote vs double quote speed and came to very different conclusions (there was a significant penalty for using double quotes and I changed my coding style accordingly. Perhaps this has changed since then). My results are appended as a comment/correction at the bottom of the page to Nathan Wallace’s PHP: Hacker’s Paradise article.

Hyatt write about tabbed browsing’s usefulness not as MDI, but as a tool for grouping/organization, which is especially true with the advent of bookmarking groups of tab. Now, of course, one of the problems that this suffers is that the longer you browse, the more likely that your tabs will start getting mixed around and disorganized (especially a pain when you’re trying to bookmark groups of tabs). I think the best way to solve this problem is not through more interface clutter at the context-menu or main browser chrome, but to have a separate ‘tab manager’ window that allows reparenting of tabs. I’ve submitted this as an RFE (159853). Hmm, I wonder if this suggestion will get me flamed by mpt. Lord knows he sure loves tabbed browsing sooo much.

Perhaps this could be done as a separate XUL project, although the reparenting aspect of it could get pretty hairy. Speaking of XUL, Ian Oeschger mentioned Bugxula at the Mozilla BOF session at OSCON. While having a XUL interface to Bugzilla is an improvement, I don’t think it’s going to solve the fundamental usability problem with Bugzilla. It just slows to a crawl too much when people are grinding away on complex queries/reports. I still think that there should be a better search interface on static pages when people just want to search/view bugs. I think that’d fix a lot of the problems with so many duplicate bugs (as it’s such a PITA to search). As a bonus, Bugzilla probably also wouldn’t have to worry so much when it gets linked from /.

New to me:

• DJ’s Weblog – D. J. Adams is a Jabber/XML hacker, he spoke at OSCON, but I didn’t make it to his sesion
• Simon Willison’s Weblog – web devloper oriented, neat links
• techno weenie – same

In other news, just doing some random Google searching, and this site has finally taken the top spot for leonard lin from my (inactive) resume page. I’m currently first for random foo and randomfoo (apologies to random foo pictures) and ranked 4th for foo. All this of course is rather pointless, but I need to do something w/ my time while I wait for audio to process.

I am Googlebot. I control the Earth. – Paul Ford writes about Google and the Semantic Web. Also good: Internet Culture Review, and ReichOS, the latter which has unfortunatele, become increasingly relevant and likely:

Networks, because they can track your motions, can just as easily be used as tools to manipulate and control individuals, to abridge freedoms, to catch people. It’s important, to me, to remember that the decentralized nature of the Internet is a side-effect of its technical and design goals, not an innate feature placed there so that 20-somethings can build data havens off Singapore. The freedoms allowed by this medium were an accident, a by-product of the needs of the government and the defense industry. A calculated move, a well-placed bill in the US House and Senate with European support, a sniffing and monitoring system plugged into all our wires, all put together “for the good of the people” by government and industry, could abridge our sudden, surprising networked freedoms – to publish as we see fit, to read what we will, from many parts of the world, to use the network protocols we choose – in moments, and those freedoms need never come back.

People used to say that the Internet would re-route around these changes. I think empircal evidence has by and large silenced most of those voices. It’s not a lost cause, but the best time to act is yesterday. Now will have to do, I suppose.

More audio:

• About.com: Compressors/Gates
• How Compressors Work
• Headwize: The Collected Grado Headphone Mods
• Tangible Technology: Audio Basics
• Googe Groups Search: microphones for recording lectures

I was following one of Aaron’s links and got to a post Peterme made a month ago about the term blog entering the OED. I missed that he’s apparently also going to be writing a book on blogs. Which is good, since he coined the term. 😉 While I don’t get too involved in this whole new vs old blogger thing, it does irk me a little when latecomers come in and act like they invented the thing. Well, that happens with every

Random: Doing audio recording and clean up now has sparked my inner audio-engineer nerd. I did some searching, and apparently, with some readily avaliable parts from Digi-Key, it’s possible to build some good and cheap mics. Here’s a 1994 post from the DAT-Heads mailing list on making a stealth microphone from a mic capsule, resistor and capacitor. Who knew it was that easy? (Multimedia Bluffer’s Guide to Microphones is a good round-up of microphone types and terminology)

Random #2: I’ve abandoned my silly ideas of getting a new car, especially since I’d be paying almost as much on insurance as on car payments. Looking around at used cars, it looks like I can get a ’96-’98 VW GTI VR6 for $6000-8000. I could practically pay for that out of pocket (I’ve been saving pennies in the cookie jar). That’s cool!

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the most athletic guy ever. In fact, I don’t even like most sports, and definitely get bored watching most of them and I don’t hold the highest of opinions for most of these professional athletes. Having said that, I have been following Cycling News a little. (big spoiler warning on the ending, right?)

Earlier this month in The New Yorker entitled The Long Ride. It’s a great read and does a lot to convey who Lance Armstrong is and what drives him. For me, it really resonates and an amazing and awe inspiring story.

People (myself included sometimes) like to bag on /., but despite the amount of crap on there, the fact remains that a lot of worthwhile stuff gets said, like Dr. Awktagon’s points on the US Govt’s support of Microsoft in Peru:

In his June letter, Hamilton said that while the United States doesn’t oppose the development of open-source software, it prefers to support a free market where the quality of the product can determine the issue.

This makes no sense, on many levels! First of all, any company can supply open-source software. In no way does this create any barrier to any company. Even Microsoft can submit software for this purpose.

To me this quote is the same as: “Hamilton said that while the United States doesn’t oppose the development of green army tanks, it prefers to support a free market where the quality of the product can determine the color.” Makes no sense! Anyone can write open-source software.

Microsoft is a monopoly, an illegal one at that, so hearing them talk about free markets is damn funny.

On another level, open-source software is closer to a situation where there are no copyrights, in other words, a true free market. Copyright monopolies are exactly that, monopolies. If you need your software serviced, you have to call exactly one company for permission (or even to have the work done). You have more freedom with open-source than proprietary software. Governments should be supporting freedom!

Of course, I’m not surprised. Microsoft did the same thing in Mexico. Free markets, my ass. Microsoft is just buying their way in and taking advantage of poorer countries.

One of the cool things about OSCON was seeing so many people using Mozilla. I haven’t run formal analysis on it, but random tailing definitely showed a larger percentage of Gecko based browsers hitting my site than usual during last week.