I couldn’t sleep last night. So I designed a RESTful interface for version control. Yeah, that’s weird. We already have a nice model for RESTful document storage in Amazon’s S3. But S3 doesn’t do versioning. What if it did? A PUT to a previously-unused URI creates a new resource with version number 1. Any subsequent…
Well, it happened. I ran out of space on the 250 GB drive I use to develop AltLaw. Not all that surprising, although it did happen sooner than I expected. I’m deleting gigabytes of cached data — file conversions, mostly — just so I can get enough space to work again. But this makes me…
I can’t help it. I just love big, complicated systems that let you get really precise about what you’re talking about. Types, classes, ontologies, schemas, normalization, denormalization, XML, RDF, XSLT, Java, … It’s all so cool. I can happily spend hours scribbling pages of hierarchies, interfaces, specifications, file formats, and the like. But at the…
Since I started working on AltLaw.org a little over a year ago, I’ve struggled with the data model. I’ve got around half a million documents, totally unstructured, from a dozen different sources. Each source has its own quirks and problems that have to be corrected before it’s useful. When I started, I was using MySQL…