News You Can Bruise for 2007 February

(4) Thu Feb 01 2007 22:14 Drafted: The REST book draft is done! Don't get your hopes up quite yet; by my estimate there's still about a month of work to do. But we're getting there.

Update: Just to be clear, the month of work is work Sam and I have to do. Then there's a couple months of work O'Reilly has to do, on top of that.

(3) Fri Feb 02 2007 17:59: We just saw a Good Eats where Alton Brown invented the cornballs from Arrested Development. (Recipe not up yet.)

(7) Sat Feb 03 2007 17:26 MoMA: Hadn't been to the MoMA before because I dislike paying $20 to go to a museum. I missed the "Dada at MoMA" exhibit because of that. Anyway, Andy came up with a scheme to get us in for free, and today we went together. Man, a lot of that stuff was lousy. There should be tighter standards for terms of art like "embedded". But the top floor made up for it with a Paul Klee room, some Picasso, and the first Duchamp I've seen in person. The Duchamp plaque gave the standard (false) story of Three Standard Stoppages (contra), but I've long since given up on expecting New York museums to change their signage in response to Stephen Jay Gould articles.

Also, you know Alberto Giacometti? He did those hideous (not in a good way) bumpy sculptures of really elongated figures. I hate those suckers, and they're in every single museum (Andy commented on this as well). And yet, MoMA has what's probably my favorite sculpture of all time, The Palace at 4 A.M., and it turns out that was done by Alberto Giacometti! The mind boggles!

TPa4AM is much cooler in person than in a dinky black-and-white photograph reproduced in an art book you saw in high school. I always thought it was a metal sculpture, but it's wood, which is great. And—let's be clear—it's got a pterodactyl.

PS: The Persistence of Memory is tiny! How did Dali cram all that graham, where graham=detail?

Mon Feb 05 2007 09:54 Ancient megafauna or Margaret Dumont-esque socialite?: Vanderhoofius.

(3) Tue Feb 06 2007 19:50 Search Request Poetry: Here's one I call "poetry that you can read right now":

A certain web searcher petitioned
For a limerick to be commissioned
Its design would allow
You to read it right now
Please register for the full poem.

(1) Thu Feb 08 2007 13:18 Like a crocus through the earth: While fixing up a sample client yesterday I saw that the REST book is now on Amazon. The new, grammatical name is RESTful Web Services (or possibly the incorrectly-capitalized Restful Web Services). Anyway, you ask: is the May 1 publishing date an accurate date? To which I say: MAYBE. Back to work.

(7) Fri Feb 09 2007 09:36: I want to put an appendix in the REST book that lists a bunch of public RESTful web services. These are real services, or real products that create services when installed, and not models for services or service toolkits. So Rails and the Atom Publishing Protocol would not be on this list, but specific instances of the APP (like the Google Calendar web service) would, and a piece of weblog software that supported the APP would as well. Here are the ones I remember mentioning in the book:

Google Calendar and the rest of the Google property web services
Yahoo!'s search services
eBay's REST API (?)
Amazon S3
The Blinksale API

Tell me about the others in comments.

Update: I know now about this list of APP services.

Fri Feb 09 2007 20:01 That resource really held the service together:

Sumana, reading my outline: "Don't Bogart the Benefits of REST"? Is the Dude going to make an appearance in this book?
Leonard: No...
Sumana: Why not?

(1) Fri Feb 09 2007 20:36: I thought I'd finished another SF story last night, one short enough to submit to Strange Horizons, but Sumana read it and revealed that it needs to go back in the shop. It turns out my "exposition through sidelong glances" technique falls apart in stories shorter than about 5000 words, leaving readers mystified. So back to the worldbuilding board.

(3) Fri Feb 09 2007 21:29: If you read the cool blogs you may have seen this offer for free sourdough starter. That's my family's sourdough starter and I highly recommend it. I have my share in the freezer right now and I should probably do something with it.

Mon Feb 12 2007 00:01: Sumana quote: "J2EE: designed by committee, and used by committee."

Mon Feb 12 2007 22:32 Titles: I haven't read any of these books, but recently the new Gutenberg texts have had really interesting titles:

(3) Tue Feb 13 2007 12:32 Paranoia: I just got spam with the subject hello from mallory.

Thu Feb 15 2007 17:41: "Automat" Sells Toys to Youngsters! Youngsters riot in streets! via Kevan.

Fri Feb 16 2007 22:01: Cube! The fun cannot be halted! I enjoy that video because it's Aqua Teen Hunger Force style humor that Sumana doesn't want to throw across the room.

Incidentally, last night I told Sumana a story to get her to go to sleep. The story turned into a heist movie in which cows robbed a convenience store with the help of the Mooninites. The movie was called "Ocean's 7-11" and it included the line "They've cleaned out the Twinkie safe! Now, the Ho-Hos! Even the Little Debbie Snack Cakes will not be spared!" It was a very exciting story and I was fairly disappointed when Sumana fell asleep and I was left with all this story-adrenaline in my bloodstream and no way to get it out. Who needs to remember dreams when pre-dream stories are probably better?

Tomorrow I have to do a bunch of WADL work.

Fri Feb 16 2007 22:35: This proto-REST article from 1996 is pretty interesting historically (via). Does anyone know of an earlier writeup of that kind of idea?

Sat Feb 17 2007 20:19: I keep thinking Wikisky is the name of a drink, but it's actually an attempt to make astronomical objects addressable. The Google Maps-like interface implies a very strange cosmology, but it's very cool. Try it with the SDDS images on.

(3) Sun Feb 18 2007 15:22 REST Reviewers: Need some more people to look over the REST book before it starts going through the O'Reilly publishing pipeline. I have specific questions for people skilled in Javascript, demolition, HTTP headers, XMDP, and explosives. But I also want people who know about RESTful web services to look over the theory, and people who are curious to read it and see if they learn anything.

Oh, also if you know of any useful REST documents besides the obvious ones and the ones here, let me know so I can put them into an appendix.

Update: send me email (leonardr at segfault dot org) if you're interested so I don't need to hunt down your email address.

Mon Feb 19 2007 23:09: Hey, the 2nd edition of Python in a Nutshell has a little section on Beautiful Soup. I didn't know that.

Wed Feb 21 2007 22:28: Two supernovas?

Sat Feb 24 2007 00:29 Mutual of Omaha's RESTful Kingdom: My excellent reviewer Aron Roberts found a very strange web service: the NEEScentral Web Services API. It's designed for earthquake engineers, a shadowy lot whose job is never fully defined—do they prevent, detect, or cause? The RESTful service gives resource-oriented access to an earthquake engineer's sinister "Project"s, which are full of "SensorLocationPlan"s and "Material"s and "SimilitudeLaw"s. I have no idea what the words mean in this context, but I understand the interface perfectly well.

Aron calls this "a well considered example of a discipline-specific API, far outside the more typical realms of computing, e-commerce, and social software." I'll add that it's odd to see a page full of jargon, half of which you understand and half of which is totally opaque.

Sat Feb 24 2007 20:20: Am I crazy, or is White Noise almost word-for-word a book Philip K. Dick would write?

(2) Sun Feb 25 2007 21:25: In the supermarket by my house there's this wall full of Polaroid photos of people. For over a year I had no idea what these photos were. Then today I realized 1) all these people are holding groceries, and 2) they all look unhappy. They're shoplifters who got caught.

(1) Mon Feb 26 2007 14:41 And you thought I was over it: MOLA! via Sumana.

(2) Tue Feb 27 2007 00:36 Kannada: Sumana and I are going to India soon so I'm trying to learn Kannada. I've never been very good at learning languages. Sumana tried to comfort me by saying that I'll know enough to impress people and then they'll switch to English. Except that's not why I'm trying to learn Kannada. Me: "I'm not afraid I'll be stranded in a foreign land with no way to impress people." Sumana: "Huh, I guess I kind of am."

We watched some Hanna-Barbera-esque cartoons narrated in Kannada, with Sumana translating. Sumana gets better at understanding a Kannada sentence the closer it comes to a complaint. She knows "very angry" and "become angry" and "this little whippersnapper's stopping me from doing something in my own house", but we had to look up "love". Oh, she also knows "bath" (snana).

Tue Feb 27 2007 12:25 Cooking Ruby Like The French Cook Ruby: The Ruby Cookbook has been translated into French. Rather than an idiomatic title they chose Ruby par l'exemple, which I'm actually glad of: I think the pedagogic power of the Cookbook has been undermarketed. Plus, it was translated by Eric Jacoboni, who did some review for the original Cookbook.

Speaking of idiomatic translations, the French translation for O'Reilly's "In A Nutshell" is "en concentré."

Tue Feb 27 2007 14:34: Sumana should enjoy this fake infomercial.

(2) Tue Feb 27 2007 19:20 Crutches: I've noticed crutches I use in my long-form nonfiction writing; for instance, in the Ruby Cookbook I relied very heavily on the semicolon, for no good reason. The "See Also" sections at the ends of recipes are full of semicolons when I should have just used periods. I actually got rid of those semicolons, but many of my edits were lost by the incompetent post office.

In the REST book my crutch is the phrase "for instance". For instance this, for instance that. Again it can usually just be cut. I think I got most of them.