Chuq has some alternate ideas about Bloggercon. A lot is being made of the cost of Bloggercon, and who did and didn't get invited. I wish that I could justify going all the way to the other coast for Bloggercon, but it would probably cost me almost $1K by the time it was all said and done. I think it's a good thing to have a conference like Bloggercon, even if not everybody can go. That's true of conferences in all fields. However, just because not everybody can go to Bloggercon, doesn't mean that there aren't ways for parts of the blogosphere to get together. I've really enjoyed the Crossroads bloggers dinners when we have them -- I couldn't make the one last night, but I've gotten a lot out of them. We could easily do something like what Chuq and Teresa are suggesting, if there was enough interest.

Chug also posted about counter-googling. This doesn't bother me much. If you don't want to be counter-googled, don't have a presence online. If you need to have a presence online, then accept that you will be googled. I'd rather have the people selling me stuff googling me to find out if I'm a good fit. Today a telemarketer called me to sell me help with search engine placement. I asked him if he had actually done a search to see if he could find me or my company. Since I'm the number 2 entry for "Sauria" on Google, and the first screenful of Google hits for "Ted Leung" are for me, I told the poor fellow to do his homework before trying to sell me something that I don't need.

Oddly enough, this came up in the Technorati Breaking News. The study in the article was commissioned as part of the effort to build out the fiber optic backbone for Kitsap county. Unfortunately, for me, Bainbridge is held up by some environmental clearances that must be obtained.

Bill de Hora has a really good post on why is RDF useful, based in the context of quantifying the RDF Tax on Atom. Sometimes its not the knowing of a story, it's the telling of it, and I think that Bill's telling of the RDF story is helpful (at least it was to me). Aside from some enlightenment on RDF, I found this quote:

We'll start with a standard device for any technology that is not widely adopted - draw a spurious analogy to it and Lisp.

We'll always be the whipping boys...

• Erik Hatcher is bailing on Struts for Tapestry. But what he really likes is WebWork2 and holds that up to the Struts developers as input for Struts 2.
• [ via Vinny Carpenter's blog] GenJar is a program that walks all of you class files (and jar files) and extracts the classes that are needed into a single jar file that makes for easier deployment. This is neat, but it still doesn't solve the jar dependency problem.

Glen Stampoultzis posts a reply to Andy Oliver's request for a construct by construct comparison of Java, Python, and Ruby.

Meanwhile Jim Weirich is working through Dave Thomas' Katas in Ruby. He's only on Kata Two (Thomas is on twelve) but it's for good reason. Jim's five variations include Continuation Passing Style and No Tail Recursion. This info came to me via Artima's new (to me) Buzz feeds.

This year at the Lisp Conference, they are having a talk by Daniel Friedman (one of the Giants of Scheme) from Indiana University on "Object-Oriented Style". Daniel is going develop an "object-oriented style" in the same way that Lispers have used a "continuation passing style". Included in his keynote is a set of exercises. The Scheme code that you need to work through those exercies is also available.

I've only briefly looked over the paper (I think I want to try the exercises), but one of the comments in the conclusion was interesting:

Macros have come a long way from the early days of Lisp. Now, with hygiene, and with-syntax, syntax-case, etc., we see that macros are powerful enough to write sophisticated compilers. More importantly, the compiler can be written so that the expressions are not traversed by the code written by the macro writer.