Sad day today at “the borg”. I really liked Robbie Bach’s and J Allard’s styles. I am sure they have their reasons (the ones they talk about and those that they keep to themselves) for leaving the collective.

I liked J Allard’s farewell message. I couldn’t agree more with the last paragraph, especially the note about agility! We soooo need to be more agile. We are currently soooo slow :-(

[…]

Find a college student that claims we don't get it and blogs tirelessly about our lack of agility. Track down an EE that has been focusing on fuel cells and has radical thoughts about power management. Or a social networking whiz who is tired of building little islands that go hot and cold and can't break the mainstream. Hire a designer who's given shape to 2 decades of beautiful automobiles and thinks we can sculpt technology to better connect to users. Infuse them with our purpose. Give them the tools. Give them lots of rope. Learn from them. Support where they take you. Invite them to redefine The Tribe.

Decide. Change. Reinvent.

(source: Gizmodo)

Here’s the advert that the Financial Times didn’t run (commentary from the Guardian). Share it through your Facebook account, if you have one.

I’ve been boycotting Shell for years now (even came close to running out of gas in the middle of nowhere recently because of my refusal to use one of their stations). I am sure that the other petroleum companies are not better :-( However, I believe that if we all did/said something concrete, perhaps they’ll start listening.

My “REST in Practice” co-authors, Jim and Ian, have been doing an amazing job at creating presentation/courseware material for the book. It’s really humble to experience the kind of interest we’ve had so far from academics, even before the book is published, based on the presentation material that we have made available.

Now that a complete first draft of the book is done,* I thought of sharing something funny from Ian’s presentations. As he gives many invited talks on all things related to the Web, he talks about our ideas and the work that we’ve been doing for the book. He, of course, cites us all as co-authors. Last time I was in London at Jim’s place, where we all got together to chat and co-ordinate, he showed me the slides that he’s been using. I thought they were hilarious, so I asked for his permission to blog about them :-)

 

BTW... all presentations, courseware material, code, and much more will be available through the book’s Web site soon.

 

* Finally! Checkout my previous entry for more information regarding the completion of the first draft of the book: “REST in Practice in editing/review/correction state and available on Amazon”.

It’s been a loooooong road, I think it might even be more than 2 3 years. Jim and I had talked about writing a book together about the Web, its design principles, its technologies, and its potential role in distributed applications. We love working together so we wanted this to be our next project. Little we knew it would have taken so long. Many of the original ideas got revised along the way, Jim changed continents, I changed 3 different teams, Restfulie got inspired from our Chapter 5 even before its publication, we talked to publishers and at the end we were in the fortunate position that we had to actually choose amongst them, and we even invited a third co-author to join us. It was apparent that we needed help. Ian Robinson joined us relatively early in the project. Jim knew him from ThoughtWorks and I got to know him along the way and realized why Jim thought so highly of him. His knowledge of Web technologies is amazing and he’s great to work with.

There have been heated moments, periods of hard work, and periods of not-so-hard work. I now know that I should have followed the advice Jim Gray once gave me about writing a book. Something along the lines of “take few months off and go finish the thing”. That’s how he wrote his famous book on Transaction Processing with Andreas Reuter.

Last night, I was the last of the co-authors to check in the last remaining chapter, the “Semantics” one. Of course, we are not done with the hard work. We need to review some of the chapters amongst us, apply the feedback that we get both from our own reviewers and then from O’Reilly’s ones, build a website, etc. However, there is now an end-to-end first draft and, to us, that’s a huge milestone.

O’Reilly has made “REST in Practice” available on Amazon with a publication date of September 2010. Jim has already blogged about it. He also mentioned the many people that have helped us along the way. I’d very much like to extend my personal thanks to them again (and will do so again in the future). Their help, throughout the last year in particular, has been amazing. Quoting Jim from his post on REST in Practice available for pre-order on Amazon:

“…big thanks go out to Solomon Duskis, Rafael de F. Ferreira, Glen Ford, Martin Fowler, Colin Jack, Ken Kolchier, Eric Newcomer, Chris Read, Ryan Riley, Scott Shaw, Guilherme Silveira, Halvard Skogsrud, Nigel Small, Stefan Tilkov, Jon Tirsen, Spiros Tzavellas, Steve Vinoski, Lasse Westh-Nielsen, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen, and everyone else who helped review proposals, provide feedback on chapters, made cups of tea or was otherwise understanding.”

Here’s where you can find out more about our book:

• “REST in Practice” on Amazon
• “REST in Practice” on O’Reilly Rough Cuts
• “REST in Practice” on Facebook
• “REST in Practice” on twitter (#RESTinPractice) (stay tuned for an opportunity to get a free copy of the book through our twitter channel).
• “REST in Practice” on the Web (coming soon)

Stay tuned for more information about the book and our next project :-)

It’s been two weeks since Coachella 2010 but I only now got the chance to blog about the experience. Work and the focus on finishing “REST in Practice” have kept me really busy.

The Coachella festival is definitely not Glastonbury, not even close! It occupies a very small space and the few stages are very close to each other. However, its location (in the desert :-) means that the weather is in most likelihood warm/hot. It was a great experience music-ways. The bands were great.

Here’s the list of bands I saw.

• Friday
  • Sleigh Bells
  • Yeasayer
  • She & Him. Cute... see photo.
  • The Specials. Yes, they are still around and they are still fun
  • Gil Scott-Heron. Only briefly.
  • Them Crooked Vultures. Only briefly because my guest didn’t like them… they were great, as when I saw them during their visit in Seattle
  • Echo & the Bunnymen. Fun!
  • Vampire Weekend. First time I saw them was in December... still very good.
  • Benny Benassi
  • Ceu. Great Brazilian Jazz music.
  • deadmau5. Rave in a tend, at the end of a long day :-)
• Saturday
  • Porcupine Tree. Pleasantly surprised.
  • Camera Obscura
  • The Temper Trap
  • Gossip. I had seen them in Glastonbury as well. Still amazing and sooooo much energy!!! A LOT of fun.
  • The xx. Only briefly and not very impressed. I know my friend Michele Myers likes them so I want to give them another chance at their own concert.
  • Faith No More. Well… perhaps “legends” is too strong but they were definitely awesome and fun… I was right in front, almost touching them.
  • Muse. No doubt the world’s best band at the moment for me. Mary and I saw them live in Seattle and I had also seen them in Dec. They followed Faith No More so my guest and I were again right there, in the very front. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow my usual pattern of avoiding the hotheads so we were squeezed. The effort took some of the enjoyment but Muse were still awesome.
  • Tiesto. Great to see 10s of thousands of youngsters raving in front of the main stage at the end of the night.
• Sunday. Weird day because I didn’t enjoy it as much. Long story, related to my guest. I stayed away from the front of the stages :-( Oh well. Good lesson though.
  • Florence & the Machine. As always, great! Second time I see the band, after Glastonbury.
  • Jonsi. I had really enjoyed Sigur Rós when they visited Seattle (saw them together with my friends Tini and Nuno). He was good on his own too.
  • Phoenix. I enjoyed them the last two times I saw them but I thought they were particularly good on this occasion. Their lights guy didn’t make it from France due to the volcanic ashes, so their stage performance was unique, focusing on just the music. I really enjoyed that.
  • Gorillaz. Well... I was really really looking forward to seeing them. Too bad I was far away. Nevertheless, I enjoyed them very much so. They are great!

I think I am going to be there next year as well :-)

During the festival, Mary joined us as well. We all headed towards the Pacific ocean and spent two relaxing days at Santa Monica, cycling and running on the beach, dinning, and just chilling out :-) I hear that David Heckerman has his lab there. Something to think about :-)

The photos

Here are some representative photos from the weekend and the trip to Santa Monica.

  
(Isn’t it crazy that you have to be behind a fence in order to drink alcohol?)

  
  
  
  
(yes, there was a fire on the roof of the main stage for a while)