The UK economy leaps out of recession, like a grasshopper trying to jump on Jupiter, triggering a mass hallucinatory episode amongst real estate agents whom, I can only guess, come to the incorrect conclusion that “0.1%” is somehow a fraction representing “1 percent”, and consequently re-list all their properties using a multiple of that figure.

Optimism abounds. :-]

There’s finally a German version in progress:
code.google.com/p/swfk-de/

Here’s a news group discussion about SWFK being used (at least in part) for a course on teaching Python:
archives.seul.org/schoolforge/…/msg00041.html

And finally, the book also made the list of beginner’s tools on the sugarlabs wiki:
wiki.sugarlabs.org/…/Resources

Chuffed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6811239/Businessman-jailed-for-attacking-intruder—who-goes-free.html

Quote:

It’s difficult to believe that this outcome reflects the thinking of the public, or the interests of justice.

I would say not difficult… more like impossible.

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2009/11/mandelson-censors-jeremy-clarkson.html

Perhaps I’ll throw myself a party when I hit 20K…

Gotham City instead of Liberty City.

Imagine glide flight from the top of a skyscraper, rather than just a few storeys up on a gargoyle. Tracking criminals from building to building. Remote driving the Batcar or Batwing for a pickup. Using the “real” Batcave facilities to investigate crimes.

The possibilities are endless…

…and I want that game!

And I thought having to sit through multiple viewings of The Wiggles was bad…

This is not the only change. After much internal cogitation, I’ve decided to dump the forum, and use Google Groups for further discussion on all my projects. Along with moving the hosting of those projects elsewhere. In short, this blog now becomes more of a blog. The distinction makes sense in my head anyway.

While the old forum messages can still be found here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/forum, check below for where you should submit comments from now on.

YAK for WordPress
The main project page will now be at WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yak-for-wordpress/.
General discussion will now be held at: http://groups.google.com/group/yak-discuss.
Bug reports can be posted to: http://groups.google.com/group/yak-bugs.

stomp.py
The main project page is at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/stomppy/.
The discussion group can be found here: http://groups.google.com/group/stomppy.

Proton Template Engine
The project page is at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/proton-te/.

Snake Wrangling for Kids
The project page is still here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/.
The discussion group is here: http://groups.google.com/group/swfk

More to come…

http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac/getamac/2009/apple-mvp-elimination-us-20090512_480x272.mov

Awesome.

Neither pages were attracting a huge amount of comment traffic, but even the small number of comments was becoming unmanageable.

On the SWFK front, it looks like the French translation is approaching completion — the current draft looks brilliant (arguably better than the original). Michel has done an excellent job. This is the first translation, and I’m keen to see more…

That said, we don’t live in a perfect world — and even if I can’t envisage why a properly designed RESTful application might require access to a distributed transaction, I can certainly envisage the environment where such an application might evolve. I’ve worked in a few of them. Places where interdepartmental barriers are as solid as the Great Wall; bastions of archaic technology where “one might provide a pseudo-RESTful interface, but one certainly won’t be re-architecting one’s legacy system in the buzzword language of the day”.

But, I think there’s a certain amount of smoke and mirrors in the JBossTS article “Transactional support for JAX RS based applications“:

Certainly it is worth pointing out that if a system cannot be made reliable then it can be of only limited utility. That said it is a worthwhile exercise to show how a REST based system can be made reliable.

Lack of distributed transactions would hardly seem to make a REST based system “unreliable” and, as a consequence, of “only limited utility”. Imagine a hotel booking facility — perhaps a booking resource, which internally might be constructed from a number of components, all governed (again internally) by transaction demarcation. Does the fact that the booking resource is coarse-grained and does not require an external transaction make it less reliable than a number of fine-grained resources which do? On the contrary. The latter sounds more like a WS-* api than a RESTful architecture, nothing to do with reliability.

So… hopefully it’s obvious I think it’s a bad idea. But if I were to write such an API, I think the 8-year old spec mentioned in the article falls short of the mark. Here’s my first-cut attempt at an alternative (which I still think falls a bit short of the mark, but is possibly an improvement):

<html>
<body>
	<dl>
		<dt>Transaction ID</dt>
			<dd id="transaction-id">12345a</dd>
		<dt>Status</dt>
			<dd id="transaction-status">ACTIVE</dd>
		<dt>Timeout</dt>
			<dd id="transaction-timeout">5000</dd>
	</dl>
	<ul id="participants">
		<li>
			<a href="/tc/12345a/participants/1">
				Participant 1
			</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="/tc/12345a/participants/2">
				Order
			</a>
		</li>
	<ul>
</body>
</html>

<html>
<title>Participant #2</title>
<body>
<dl>
    <dt>ID</dt>
        <dd>2</dd>
    <dt>Name</dt>
        <dd>Order</dd>
    <dt>URL</dt>
        <dd>
            <a href="http://internal.mydomain.com/someresource/123">Order</a>
        </dd>
</dl>
</body>
</html>

The resource identified by a participant URL will have the following semantics:

Basic usage might look something like the following:

POST /tc
Host: somedomain.com

timeout=5000

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://somedomain.com/tc/10a23v991
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

POST /res1?tx
Host: internaldept1.somedomain.com

<xml>some xml describing the resource</xml>

HTTP1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://internaldept1.somedomain.com/res1/100

PUT /res2/somename?tx
Host: internaldept2.somedomain.com

<xml>some xml describing the update,
perhaps including a reference to the previously
created resource</xml>

HTTP1.1 200 Ok
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://internaldept2.somedomain.com/res2/somename

POST /tc/10a23v991/participants
Host: somedomain.com

name=resource1&url=http://internaldept1.somedomain.com/res1/100

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://somedomain.com/tc/10a23v991/participants/a01abgv21
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

POST /tc/10a23v991/participants
Host: somedomain.com

name=resource2&url=http://internaldept2.somedomain.com/res2/somename

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://somedomain.com/tc/10a23v991/participants/a01abgv22
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

DELETE /tc/10a23v991?action=commit
Host: somedomain.com

HTTP/1.1 204 Committed and deleted
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

PUT /res1/100/tx/a01abgv21
Host: internaldept1.somedomain.com

action=prepare

PUT /res2/somename/tx/a01abgv22
Host: internaldept2.somedomain.com

action=prepare

PUT /res1/100/tx/a01abgv21
Host: internaldept1.somedomain.com

action=commit

PUT /res2/somename/tx/a01abgv22
Host: internaldept2.somedomain.com

action=commit

I left .htaccess writable, and something (maybe wp-super-cache…?) corrupted it. Of course, this left my blog completely inaccessible — and not sure how long for.

Mental note… do NOT do that again.

We apologise for this temporary interruption in our services. We’ll be back with you… well now, actually.

There are 3 forums for General Discussion, Suggestions and Bugs. Hopefully they’re more navigable than the previous comment system.

I’ve also begun the rather laborious process of moving comments on the YAK general discussion page into the forum (unfortunately there’s no straightforward, automated method). I’ll probably lose interest in the process long before I reach any great percentage of the 500 comments on that page, but please note comments are now closed on those pages — anything new should go directly in the forum.

I have no idea how that compares to ‘real’ books (i.e. stuff that is printed… or sold in fact), but it seems like a reasonably impressive number to me… at least, for an unmarketed, self-published effort.

Thanks for your support, and hopefully your kids are finding it useful.

British (shoe design [sic]) company, Jimmy Choo has told the north of Auckland gift seller website, Kookychoo.com, it must agree to give up its name by Tuesday, or face a lawsuit.

I have to admit, I find this kind of thing (the latter rather than the former), really annoying. Undoubtedly some kind of Freudian “David versus Goliath” kind of thing.

I have no problem with a company trying to protect its brand, but I have a big problem with the manner and terms by which they do so. In any case, let’s face it, the only reason one might associate the brand “Kookychoo” with “Jimmy Choo” is now because of this case.

That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating

Worse yet, Word appears to no longer support Thai language — meaning it’s not fit-for-purpose for my wife either. Unfortunately, we left the Office 2003 disk in storage, back in NZ, so we can’t rollback to the version of Office that did support Thai language.

Exactly why is Office such a cash cow for Microsoft? Because of muppets like me, obviously.