Design patterns are one of those topics that have eluded me throughout my career as a software engineer. I’ve made use of some patterns, like Model View Controller, Singleton, and Factory, but I’ve never studied them on any formal basis. I’ve seen the famous Design Patterns book on many a bookshelf, and have always fully intended to read it, but I can be cheap and lazy.

This brings us to the book Head First Design Patterns, by Eric and Elisabeth Freeman. I had been eager to read a book from O’Reilly’s Head First series because the approach is so unusual, and because I figured that they must be good because producing books so heavy on illustrations is very expensive and time consuming. The authors were scheduled to do an interview on the Well, and I managed to score a free copy of the book so I could read it and participate in the discussion.

So I’m in the process of reading the book, and I rate it as the best computer book I’ve ever read in the “instructional tool” category. I generally find it difficult to learn new things from books, I prefer to take a more hands on approach that involves tearing into code and looking at documentation when I have to. This book has been the exception to the rule — it’s designed to apply the most innovative thinking on how humans learn, and the approach is effective. The one danger the book runs into is appearing to be gimmicky, but if you can get past that, I think you’ll be impressed.

The interview with the authors is publicly accessible and well worth reading. Feel free to skip over my fawning comments.

Anil Dash says nobody has ever been fired for blogging and a number of other smart things.

So my day job involves designing and building a Web service for use by customers. We started out by building a service designed to meet the needs of a particular client, but I immediately started working on something generic right after. I began by looking at the SOAP option, but I wound up building the service using HTTP POST and an XML document as the response (in what I guess would be called a REST approach). I abandoned SOAP because I was in a hurry and the toolkits looked hard to use and I was intimidated by interop issues. Anybody can formulate a regular HTTP request and parse an XML document.

The upcoming question is whether to go back and build a SOAP interface as an alternative to the REST interface. Here’s a post from James Governor pointing out that developers just don’t care for SOAP, which certainly mirrors my own experience.

Update: Karl Martino forwards a quote from an interview with Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield:

Koman: Do you see Flickr and its open API as representing a next generation of web services? What things can developers learn from what has happened with Flickr?

Butterfield: On the strictly practical side, I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don’t know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others–I don’t even know how many there are–are built on the REST API. It’s just so easy to develop that way; I think it’s foolish to do anything else.

I definitely think REST wins the popularity contest. Most of the clamoring for SOAP seems to come from people with an interest in buzzword compatability.

Looks like in the aftermath of this weekend’s Triangle blogging conference, there’s going to be a regular blogger meetup in Chapel Hill, Wednesdays at 6pm. Time and location are terrible for me (I live in Raleigh and the traffic between here and Chapel Hill is at its worst between 5 and 6), but I wish them luck. Now if someone wants to do the same thing in Raleigh, they should get in touch …

Along these lines, there’s also the Triangle InterNetWorkers, who meet monthly, and a group of Triangle bloggers who meet for lunch roughly once a month, usually near RTP. (I don’t think there’s an easy-to-link Web page.)

I’m reading on a number of weblogs today about where people are taking their Valentines for a nice dinner out in the spirit of romance. I had the same idea, but I quickly realized that, at least here in Raleigh, Valentine’s Day is mainly seen by the nicer restaurants as an occasion to extort money from people who aren’t part of their usual clientele. I had read in the paper that most restaurants offer special Valentine’s Day packages. I’m not opposed to prix fixe in general, so I called one of the places that we often visit on birthdays and anniversaries to get an idea of what was on offer.

Their regular menu is here. Two people can get out for under $100 if they forego wine, even if they both have their own appetizer and dessert. The Valentine’s Day special is $85 per person — two salads, two appetizers, two entrees, and a special dessert sampler for two. Oh, and you each get a glass of sparkling wine. The options are limited for each course, and the price does not include tax or gratuity. In other words, for the same price, we can eat there twice and have whatever we want, or we can eat there once, choose from a limited selection, and have the privilege of celebrating Valentine’s Day. I went ahead and made reservations (which had to be guaranteed with a credit card, naturally), presented my wife with the value proposition, and called a few hours later and cancelled when she dismissed the idea of paying more for less as absurd. A perfect reminder of why I married her in the first place. We both love a good meal out, but throwing money away doesn’t appeal.

I think that the idea behind the pricing is basically that fancy restaurants get a huge clientele on Valentine’s Day who would never eat there otherwise. These people are less price sensitive because they are expected to treat someone to a nice meal out, so the restaurants can gouge them. The prix fixe enables the restaurant to get people to pay the higher amount without dwelling on the per course prices (people might blanch a bit if they saw a chicken entree that normally goes for $17 priced at $40), and it gets the patrons with unsophisticated tastes off the hook because choices are limited. The thing that really pushed us away from going out was that we felt that the menu choices on Valentine’s Day would certainly be the safest that the restaurant could afford. When you’re catering to people who don’t normally eat pretentious food, you don’t present an adventurous menu. And at $85 per person, I want to have an adventure.

Billmon has a great post on American Lysenkoism.

I made it to the Triangle Bloggers Conference today, and had a great time. The proceedings were interesting (although I couldn’t get called on when I wanted to make an incredibly salient point about the fixation on media criticism among bloggers), and I got to meet a bunch of new people and see a few people I hadn’t seen in awhile. I finally got to meet Dave Winer, whose work on Scripting News was the inspiration for this Web site, way back when, and I got to thank him for motivating me to do something that has become a huge, permanent fixture in my life. I also got to thank Eric Muller and thank him for adding his powerful criticisms of Michelle Malkin’s arguments in favor of internment and Thomas Woods’ faux history to the body of human knowledge.

I didn’t get to personally thank Anton Zuiker or Paul Jones for organizing the conference, so I’ll mention them here. The directions were great, the conference began and ended on time, and the discussions were stimulating.

There was a lot of talk at the conference about regional weblogging, which was interesting to me, even if it wasn’t directly up my alley. Heck, it was years before even mentioned where I lived at rc3.org, so needless to say, I’m not really focused on local issues. At the end of the day, I kind of felt ashamed of that.

I definitely felt my passion for working on this site rekindled. I haven’t lost any of my passion for writing entries here, but there are a lot of other features that I could add to this site that I just haven’t gotten around to. For one thing, I was one of three people out of a few dozen who does not have a comment facility at all, so I’m definitely thinking about adding one. I have my own ideas about how to do it so that I can avoid spam and build a community of readers. We’ll see what happens.

I think the quote of the conference came after someone said that comments are binary, either enabled or disabled. Dan Gillmor said that they’re binary in the sense of being crappy or not. If I do come up with a commenting system here, you won’t have to worry about reading crappy comments.

Some of you don’t believe President Bush’s rhetoric about being a uniter, not a divider. Well, just look at what he’s done for Iranians.

Google has offered to host Wikipedia. This seems like a nice bit of altruism. Bandwidth and hardware costs that are no doubt a constant headache for the Wikimedia Foundation are a rounding error for an outfit like Google.

I’ll be at the Triangle Bloggers Conference tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to meeting some new people and seeing the people I’ve met before. If you read this site, be sure to look me up. (Hopefully we’ll all have name tags.)