corigin.com

Over the course of the year, in browser tabs, bookmarks, and
del.icio.us, I’ve built
up a huge list of things that I felt I should write about, at least
at the time I saw them. Well,
dammit, I’m not gonna let 2007 end without at least making a try. Here
goes. Categorized, even.

XML

Jelliffe
on the awfulness of XML Schemas.

CMSMCQ has a klog.
Which is to say, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen has a blog that he calls a “klog”
for reasons described
here. Michael and I
wrote
the XML 1.0 specification; he’s smart and writes well.

The eleven-act OOXML high opera
trundles
on.

Ruby and Rails

Ola Bini on
JtestR;
code in Java, test in Ruby. Sounds like a step forward.

Reg Braithwaite on why
Ruby needs to be self-extending. Not the first time this point has been
made.

Oh, and
Ruby
1.9 is out.

I’ve written before about Rails and ETags and how they’re important and
Rails probably can’t Solve The Whole Problem, but could do better, and while I
haven’t gone deep (because I’m not actually running any Rails at the
moment) it
seems that Assaf Arkin’s
if_modified
probably does do better. If so, it’s important

Dave Thomas:
Pipelines Using Fibers in Ruby 1.9.
Oh my goodness gracious.

Programming

A nice
commencement address by Bruce Eckel.

You’d think that regular expression processing would be a closed book after
all these years.
You’d be wrong.

_why, in
This Hack Was Not Properly Planned,
says “You could blame Stallman, but I just don’t think that gives entropy
enough credit.” and a whole lot of other wise and surprising things too.

The Web

Ka-Ping Yee explains
Why PHP should never be
taught. Ouf. And then follows up with with
Why PHP should never be
taught, Part II.

I contributed to the
Architecture of the World Wide Web
document, and mostly I’m proud of that work. On the other hand, it may be
true that, as
Noah
Mendelson suggests, its advice that data formats version themselves is,
well, wrong. I spent some years of my life helping design
The Atom Syndication Format,
which emphatically does not do versioning, and I agree with
that decision. Hmmm.

There’s this guy named Bob Aman whom I’ve only met once, but I’m a
fan. He’s maniacally determined that Ruby shall have the world’s best
URI-handling library, so he’s building it, and it’s called
adressable, which is
a good name. I was sitting on the floor talking to the RSpec guys at the last
RubyConf and Bob plunked himself down and started wondering out loud about the
best way to manage his many thousands of test cases. Someone who’ll write
thousands of test-cases for URI wrangling is totally OK by me.

From
gloriajw at
devchix,
RESTful Thoughts on a Web 2.0 Python Project.
Mmm, very very tasty, one of the better why-REST statements ever.

Things Open

GlassFish, the Open-Source instantiation of the Sun Java Application
Server, has gone from boring and corporate to kind of interesting. As witness
its
showing up
in Debian, with the Maven dependency amputated. Gotta like that. As far
as I know, Sun didn’t even know this was happening. Gotta like that.

There’s an internal Sun mailing list I’m on that’s concerned with
government technology policy, and I keep seeing stories go by about
governments liking Open Source and Open Data Formats, often confusing the two
laughably, but still, it’s a real trend. One particularly tasty example is
Arve Bersvendsen’s
Norway mandates open formats.

Hardware

I exist at the airy, arm-waving level of the Web Tier. Descend
twenty-three levels of indirection and you end up with silicon and the people
who build it. There’s some
serious
churn happening in that world.

User Interfaces

The famous Tog explains in parts
1,
2, and
3,
why the mouse is always faster than the keyboard. He’s wrong. Why is left as
an exercise for the reader.

…more

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