Tue, 02 Jan 2007

B.B. is The King of the Blues.

I just came back from seeing B.B. King at the House of Blues in Disneyland. Wow. Wow. The thrill sure isn't gone away from B.B.

The only negative was that the HOB is standing-room only, but that's more then compensated for the fact that it's such a small venue - maybe 500 people in the bottom area. It's perfect for the call/response nature of the blues and the acoustics were great.

Anyone who gets everyone to sing along with You Are My Sunshine is something special. He mixes it all in with stories and segues into pieces like "Nobody Loves Me But My Mother". You can also tell how proud B.B. is of his recent Presidential Medal of Freedom award ("Freedom!") which he had on his lapel.

Fantastic.

Thu, 21 Dec 2006

Vacation? What's that?

In contrast to my winter vacation of two years ago, this year's 'vacation' has been largely unfulfilling. Rather, I really haven't had any time to relax as I've been just swamped with stuff.

"May we live in interesting times." is rumored to be a Chinese curse. I know what they mean.

However, a number of things of interest have happened recently that I thought would be good to highlight.

Our ICSE'07 submission was rejected, but we received a number of excellent and helpful reviews (thanks to our anonymous reviewers!). Since this is our first attempt at documenting the ideas we're playing with, we're not surprised that it got rejected (disappointed sure). None of the feedback was critical of the approach - but rather some of the details behind it (partly, limited to 10 pages makes this a really tough call to decide what goes in and what does not). Regardless, we've decided to publish what we submitted as a tech report and reorganize and cogitate some on the feedback to make it that much stronger and coherent of a story. You can read Harmonizing Architectural Dissonance in REST-based Architectures. It's meant to capture our thoughts as they were in August and September (when we wrote it) - but there are substantial differences and expansions since then. For those, you'll have to wait for the next talk or paper we give.

Google Code finally launched its download service (yay), so Serf now has an official release - Serf 0.1.0. Combined with trunk of Subversion (i.e. 1.5+), this is now the client that I use everyday with Subversion. Woo-hoo. A few downstream packagers are starting to pick it up - so serf may come to an OS near you. And, we're still needing to finish the discussion about switching Subversion's default to 1.5 (which we more or less agreed to do at the Subversion Summit in October).

Lastly, Apache's main web server ran out of disk space this morning (and who was it that wanted backups of Maven? boo-hiss). So, today, Paul (on his birthday! wow! he volunteered though on IRC, so...well...), finally got mod_mbox moved over to the T2000 we've been prepping for the last 3 months. Yay. Apache Mailing Lists archives are now moved and on a spiffy 32-way Niagara box. Thanks Paul! Woo-hoo! (We've got some core dumps we need to fix up, but getting it off that lousy Itanium is very very worth it.)

And, there's a big piece of news coming soon. Stay tuned.

Tue, 03 Oct 2006

It's time for change on the Web

In recent months, a number of ideas in my head have crystallized. The immediate benefit is I now know the precise direction I'm headed and my exit strategy (i.e. my dissertation topic). Since this direction has potential implications on the larger Web as we know it, the next step is to start evangelizing these ideas - infecting the larger world, if you will - in order to realize these changes outside my own horizon. In order to do that, I need to tip my hand a little bit and share where I'm going - and, consequently, where you might be going soon too.

What's the problem? What are my insights? What's my approach? What are the contributions? Dear reader, those answers can be summarized in my quad chart. This is a one-page document that I produced to my thesis committee to demonstrate that I do know where I'm going and I have a plan(TM).

I'll wait while you read it. It's short.

Next, if you want to read up on the history of architecture on the web, I recommend my survey of Architectural Styles of Extensible REST-based Applications (warning 65+ page PDF!).

Finally, let's conclude with an abstract of one of our papers currently under review:

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) guided the creation and expansion
of the modern web. What began as an internet-scale distributed
hypermedia system is now a vast sea of shared and interdependent
services. However, despite the expressive power of REST, not all of its
benefits are consistently realized by working systems. To resolve the
dissonance between the promise of REST and the difficulties experienced,
we sought insights from numerous architectures in both web and non-web
domains. Our investigation yields a set of extensions to REST, an
architectural style called Computational REST (CREST), that not only
offers additional design guidance, but pinpoints, in many cases, the
root cause of the apparent dissonance between style and implementation.
Furthermore, CREST explains emerging web architectures, such as mashups,
and points to novel computational structures in domains such as
distributed computation and multimedia streaming.

Every day, we're stumbling upon deeper ramifications of what we're working with. The latest concept we're toying with are the notion of temporality on the Web and rethinking our notion of content negotiation.

And, yes, I fully expect that these changes are going to find its way into future versions of the Apache HTTP Server. =)

Buckle up. It's going to be fun.

Sun, 13 Aug 2006

Game 118: Edinson deals

Volquez turned in a stellar performance last night, but Benoit almost blew it. What a scare.

Now, in my inbox this morning, Jamey had these words to say:

Our baseball history isn't Yankees history or Cardinals history or Cowboys
history, but its best moments still mean everything to a lot of us.  The
Rangers are four games back but a lot can change in a week, as we learned 10
Septembers ago, and they can certainly change over 44 games.

Wow.

Millwood vs. Hernandez tonight with the Rangers riding a 4 game winning streak. Then, a two game set against the Angels and then off to a weekend set against the Tigers. Now would be a good time to stay hot...

Mon, 07 Aug 2006

Game 112: Now starting for the Angels, Rob Drake.

Rob Drake inserted himself into the starting lineup for the Angels. Only one issue: he isn't on the Angels' 40-man roster. He also decreed that he could take it upon himself to also play Manager and remove the Rangers starting pitcher, Adam Eaton, after only two-thirds of an inning.

(I'll leave the Google searches to Jamey and the scathing commentary to the folks over at the LSB gameday thread.)

We left after 5 innnings and went off to see Talladega Nights instead. The laugher starring Will Ferrell was far better than the one featuring Rob Drake.

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