I'm seriously considering a switch to pyblosxom. While I really dig drupal, I'm running an old version and there are way too many features for me to play with and I'm always worried about security.

The blosxom model looks so attractive to me, and if I can get it in Python, so much the better...

Anybody with experience bad or good with pyblosxom, please email me.

The chart here is atrocious. If you don't look closely, you'd think Dean raised slightly more money than the other candidates. In fact, he raised MORE THAN THREE TIMES what the next candidate (Kerry) raised. One might also notice that it skews the comparison between Bush and the Democratic candidates.

There are four more graphs with similar skewing.

My copy of the picture (for posterity) is here.

I speechless. I've emailed the Dean Rapid Response team to correct it.

ATOM is the specification for syndicated content feeds.

One could say that creating a feed is the "splitting" of the original content from the blog, hence FISSION.

Putting the feeds together in an aggregator is therefore FUSION.

Hows that for slick wordsmithing.

Wow!

The Dean campaign announced the formation of an advisory panel for policy issues surrounding the Internet. And the list of members is impressive: Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, Dewayne Hendricks to name a few.

Its about time these issues got addressed seriously at the presidential level. I'm waiting for other campaigns now (of course, they'll have to pick from the rest of the experts - Dean's got many of the best already!).

09/11/01

There will never be a day like today.

Not for my parents, not for my grandparents, not for my daughter, and not
for my fellow generation of around-30-year olds.

Someone said that this was one of those days where you'd remember exactly
where you were, what you were doing, when you heard about the attacks on
the World Trade Centers. TV polls say that 87% of Americans think today is
the most tragic day in American history.

And while I sit here and struggle to comprehend the enormity of the day,
I'm struck by the sense that today is the beginning of a new era for

I proposed a radically simplified XRI resolution mechanism that relies only on HTTP, leveraging caching for efficiency, and providing a clear path for using a REST architecture to use XRIs. In other words, this resolution is RESTful, and could be used in a RESTful application.

I've gotten fairly positive feedback about it so far and I'm hoping its now within the comprehension of mere mortals. While I was really jazzed about DNS and especially DDDS, its become clear to me that the newness of using DNS for generic identifier resolution is proving to be an impediment to any serious review of the XRI resolution document.

Did you know that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) defines the HTTP protocol to operate on any type of URI? This opens a lot of possiblities how different identifier schemes can be used.

In my role as co-chair of the XRI effort, I do a lot of research into existing specifications. I want to reuse them. Specifically, I want to reuse HTTP since its probably the most widely implemented specification out there (except maybe TCP/IP).

The Realization

According to my reading of RFC 2616, the on-the-wire protocol can use any URI. For example, this is legal according to 2616:

In a modern GUI (lets take Windows), you should be able to right click on any window and be able to grab some rdf from any app (like an mp3 player and the rdf would be what song it is playing)and be able to paste that rdf into another app. What that "other app" does is independent of where you got the RDF - though of course, presumably some of that RDF that is recognized by the receiving application. Unrecognized RDF assertions would just be ignored.

And then maybe even the apps can let you configure how to map application-specific state into RDF (and back to application-specific state or functionality).

I turned 30 today.

It probably surprises a number of folks that I'm only 30.

I feel a lot older today.

Ok, on to the next 30 years of my life.

I don't think I have unreasonable requirements. I want an XML editor that does validation as I edit, that validates against XML Schema, and validates documents with elements and attributes from multiple namespaces. It should run on Windows.

I'm doing this for producing a document with SOAP 1.2 messages and various extension headers. I've had all sorts of problems with what used to be my favorite tool - XMLSpy. I just can't get it to reliably validate documents across mutiple schema.

Today, I found XRay2 from Architag. A free download (with registration). I'm still trying it out, but it does just what I need in an intuitive way. Load all the schema in the validator, and it builds a catalog from the declarations in the schema, and you can then build an XML document using all the namespaces defined in that catalog. Simple, intuitive, and just what I need.