JSON is very much lighter weight than XML and is meeting a need for easily calling some Scheme code from a Ruby program. The Scheme code I am using is old, I wrote it years ago to extract entities from plain text. Since the Scheme program starts very quickly, I am able to simply start a Scheme interpreter as a separate process using back quotes to capture any output to stdout in a Ruby string variable: require 'json' s = `gsi extraction.scm -e '(get-proper-names "President Bush moved to South America.")'` # parse JSON text... Here I am using Gambit-C Scheme interpretively. It is very easy to write any structured data in JSON format in the Scheme (or Lisp) code and parse it on the Ruby side. It is also easy to speed things up and compile my program: gsc -c extraction.scm gsc -link extraction.c gcc -o extraction extraction.c extraction_.c -lgambc -I/Library/Gambit-C/current/include/ -L/Library/Gambit-C/current/lib/ which both makes the program faster and reduces

This looks very good. You get access to Google's infrastructure: GFS, big table, email, etc. The IDE is cool: it only requires Python 2.5 to run. I was too late to get one of the first 10,000 developer invites, but I am hopeful that before too long my turn will come :-) The Google App Engine supports many Python web development frameworks like Django, CherryPy, Pylons, and web.py. I have only used CherryPy to any great extent, but Django has a good reputation, and I once worked through it's tutorial and it looked good (also, very good documentation). Google also supplies their own Python web application framework webapp .

www.npr.org Perplexed by the U.S. economy? You're not alone. Law professor Michael Greenberger joins Fresh Air to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, credit defaults, the shaky future of other types of loans and what we can expect from the U.S. financial markets. Greenberger is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the director of the University's Center for Health and Homeland Security. This is a long listen (39 minutes), but is the sort of thing that if every voting American listened to, and if every politician in Washington knew everyone listened to, that a lot of the future corruption in Washington might be avoided. Professor Greenberger also gives very solid advice on what we must do as a country to avoid having Asian countries "eat our lunch": emphasize science and technology and build companies that produce real products - and don't idolize people and companies who make money speculating instead of producing. I liked that he seemed

As a consumer I have not bought a Blu-ray player yet - I think that it will still be some time before the technology settles. That said, I am intrigued by the BD-J Java programming environment for Blu-ray and something that I would like to look at. About 8 years ago I wrote a set top box emulation in Java for Disney, perhaps similar to what people may do in BD-J with custom directory viewers, ways to annotate material, etc. Who knows what smart developers will do with the platform? Not me. I am turned off by the extremely high cost of writable Blu-ray media - yuck! The prices will come down, but by how much? Massive personal storage does not (yet) excite me. We have hidef satellite TV with a hidef DVR, but we don't need to store too many hours of video, and there is nothing so far that we want to keep around for more than a week. My brother owns 1500+ Blu-ray, HDVD, and DVDs and he takes great pleasure in owning entertainment media. My wife and I prefer renting (NetFlicks) and time