Cool. Google has released the API for Contacts! I’ve actually been waiting for a decent programmatic way to interace with Contacts; I don’t use it as my primary contact list, but there is certainly a decent amount of info there, and it’ll make for a easy online backup of my data. Looking forward to playing with this. +1, Google! (I actually wanted 30boxes to step up here, but their contact data API still isn’t up to snuff.)

Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons creator, dies
— Wow…now I feel OLD. I still have my second set of D&D books (
a copy of the Basic Set blue book, albeit sans cover). D&D, AD&D, and the fast-growing RPG genre that resulted from it’s success was a HUGE part of my growing-up years, and I have continued to pen-and-paper RPG off and on to this day (some friends and I just started some gaming based on the competing Palladium system.)

By the time the AD&D 2nd edition rules were released, I’d moved on to play other systems, but D&D and first edition AD&D will always hold a special place in my heart. Farewell, Gary.

So I saw the announcement about Nine Inch Nail’s new album Ghosts sweep across the Twittersphere this morning. Checked it out…how can I NOT buy it straight from Trent Reznor himself for five bucks?? As 320kbps MP3s, no less (or FLAC for that matter, if I want to be completely audiophile nutty). Trent is true to his word…he said last year that he was looking forward to taking back his music and having a direct relationship with his fans. Outstanding!

Of course, NiN learned about the slashdot effect today. I didn’t bother immediately downloading the songs, and by the time I got home tonight, the servers were crushed; the site is temporarily down while the web monkeys slap on some more go-juice (maybe wiring into Amazon Web Services or something). But never fear; Trent’s already got my fiver, and I have my download link for later. Heck, I’ll just get it off of Bittorrent if I get antsy…it’s not like I haven’t already paid. I hope NiN makes a zillion bucks off this, and Trent sticks his thumb in the eye of every music exec that lets him get close enough to do it. Vive la Internet! Long live the tubes. Hopefully this will put another nail in the classic music industry coffin.

I’m not a fan of video DRM, but I grudgingly accept it in a couple of places, including Amazon Unbox. And this month, Unbox is giving away free BBC classics downloads, which makes trying out the service especially easy. The free downloads are all classic Shakespeare movies, and they’re only available on the weekends (though you have a month to watch them). This weekend is The Tempest. Worth checking out…happy Shakespeare festival!

(Note: in non-DRM related news, my Neuros OSD is AWESOME. I just realized while watching this that I hadn’t really given a review of it. I’ll have to make sure I do that soon. Even my wife likes it! *grin*)

So I’m grumbling a little bit, but not really. I’ve been watching this really interesting distributed document storage technology called CouchDb for several months now. I’ve wanted to start playing around with it, but I was taking the lazy route, and waiting for it to show up in my Debian repository; I remembered to check today, and boom! There it is. Joy.

Time for the grumble…CouchDb is built in friggin’ Erlang: a soft realtime, declarative, functional language designed for distributed systems and originally written by the telecom company Ericsson for telco-switches. Erlang was open sourced back in the late ’90s…but even geeks think this language is geeky. So *grumble*…but at the same time, a little woohoo! I haven’t really been on a language kick in quite awhile, so it could be quite fun. I don’t really need to learn Erlang to program against the db, of course; but why the heck not, eh?

And CouchDb itself looks amazing. It’s designed for distributed operation (with deterministic, versioned resolution in the case of merge conflicts), has clean atomic updates, can version indefinitely (ie, keep all changes to a document until you decide to compact the db and remove old versions), and has a adhoc schema model (add fields to a document on the fly). The thought of a completely custom contacts, notes, and todo db on a next-generation phone that automatically cleanly syncs to the cloud with proper merging, etc. makes me very happy.

Document databases like CouchDb make a lot of sense for semi-structured data. Don’t misunderstand…I like relational databases; in fact, I’m a professional DBA in my day job, and I have done database-backed web development since the mid-90s. But as tools like CouchDb, Amazon’s SimpleDB, and Thrudb (a similar service built on Facebook’s Thrift framework) continue to evolve, they allow us to explore other options more suitable to the document-db style, while maintaining the transactional reliability and robustness associated with RDBMSs. Lotus Notes was actually a great ahead of it’s time example of this technology, but suffered (IMO) primarily from lack of F/OSSness; this prevented it from gaining hard-core geek mindshare during the 90s and early 00s. As GNU/Linux and company gained traction, partial free software re-implementations were developed instead (hackers scratched their own itches). And now we’ve got CouchDb, and Notes runs in Eclipse. Geeks really do rule the world! *grin*

So I look forward to playing with CouchDb and exploring some new options for data storage. If I hit anything uber-exciting, I’ll make sure you all know first. *grin*

UPDATE: This thing is the freakin’ bomb. The Python CouchDb bindings are excellent, but they’ve got Hello World examples for about ten languages off of the main wiki page. I already have a use for this thing, too. Criminy! Too cool.

Note: I love Google. And I think Gmail rocks; I actually do use it for some mailing lists and unimportant stuff. But I’m wary of putting all my eggs in one basket (Google), and I’m VERY wary of the issues WRT 4th Amendment searches and privacy when one’s email isn’t really in one’s own possession. So I run my own IMAP mail server, in my own little house. They can come with their own little search warrants and serve ME, thank you very much.

But the downfall to that is search. You get USED to the power of the Google; archiving and tagging rather than saving to folders, and powerful search functionality at your fingertips. I knew there must be some tools for me to use, but I kept neglecting to do the *irony* search needed. But ah…thanks, muttwiki (I use mutt as my MUA) for links to mairix!

Da bomb. mairix has full-text search on headers and body, powerful operators, and setup properly, puts the results in a IMAP folder populated on the fly. Perfection!! I kick off a db update nightly (I could do it on demand if I wanted…but it’s just not THAT necessary), and I’ve already used it several times with great results. It integrates beautifully with mutt, too. Totally, totally recommended if you go the roll-your-own mail server route.

FreakAngels, the new weekly webcomic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, is looking good. Check it out.

Wow…great overview and link: Torture, Same As It Ever Was — Powerful historical references, too: Some denied, on racial grounds, that Filipinos were owed the protective limits of civilized warfare. When, during the committee hearings, Senator Joseph Rawlins had asked General Robert Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing U.S. troops was within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare, Hughes had replied succinctly, These people are not civilized.

I wonder what we’ll think of our mess in 100 years? Oh, heck…we’re on Internet time now. I’ll be fascinated to see what history makes of it in just a couple or three decades. Hopefully, I’ll be alive to see it.

I don’t think I’ve seen a better explanation of the telecomm immunity issue than this from Brad Templeton (Chairman of the EFF): Whose call is it to say what’s legal?. Thanks, Brad.

It’s been difficult at times to watch the rhetoric here. When people say that you want the terrorists to win, or you’ll make this country less safe in the context of this issue, it’s (IMO) dangerous and unfair. As Brad makes so clear, we’re not even talking (at this point) about terrorism, or surveillance…we’re talking about the rule of law, and how we ensure that the checks and balances in our system of government endure. Legislating retroactive immunity for decisions like these is a really, REALLY bad idea.

I’ve done web development off and on for a long time (1995 or so), and I’ve done a fairly good job of keeping up on the backend, I think. From CGI/perl to Zope to Apache, mod_python, and Django, dashes of AJAX, with side journeys into .NET/Mono, Rails, and even more exotic toolkits and frameworks. But I’ll admit, I’ve been slow to pick up new tools on the desktop. In particular, for some bizarre reason, I’ve resisted using Firebug, the web development plugin for Firefox.

And boy, was that stupid! I finally bit the bullet last night and installed the Firefox 3 beta and Firebug, and wow. I worked on some CSS tweaks for some of my pages today, and got more work done in two hours, with less effort, than probably the last 4 months! Awesome. This is a killer tool, and I’m so glad I finally trusted all the folks who give it a 5-star rating. Heck…you learn something new every day!