You'll find that working mobile has amazing rewards, and can be very productive. However, I personally found that my schedule became very organic. I might put in 10 hours in a day, but they were spread out over 2 - 3 hour blocks. In between was hiking / exploring, surfing, laying on the beach... Setting expectations with your client / employer is key. Here are a few tips:

* Ensure you take some habitation time off when traveling to a new location, perhaps even just a day or two, to give yourself time to explore your new area, ensure you have good connectivity, find backup wifi hotspots should your mobile connection die, and have fun.

* Research the area beforehand, as best you can. Know numbers for local rangers or police, fire, legal, mechanic, and medical. If you're going international, having banking / financial workflow sorted.

* Cell, if you're going international, can be outrageously expensive if you plan on keeping your US carrier. Get an intermediate number, like from Skype, and have calls forwarded. If you plan on keeping a smart phone, make sure you pay double to get it unlocked. You can get SIM chips from local providers. Otherwise, just buy a cheap phone in country and pay as you go. Either way, your number will change, but with Skype (or similar provider), everyone back home will use a local number to reach you. If you plan on using VOIP, make sure you test it out before an important call when in a new location.

* Have a 2nd laptop, and external drive for file system images. Be disciplined about making backups. Should you be away from civilization and something goes wrong, this will save your bacon.

* Make sure you know how to cook. Learn to make recipies from scratch, like bread & pastries (if you have an oven), sauces, etc. Good food can be hard to come by on the road, and the last thing you want to do is live out of cans or boxes if avoidable.

* If you go international, and like to legally download movies, make sure your providers don't discriminate based on origin of IP regardless of your account. ITunes doesn't appear to, but Vudu, Netflix, and Hulu do -- as do most networks. To get around this, set up a VPN account with a provider in the source country.

It's an amazing world out there -- enjoy it!

That would be fine as long as you choose a religion that does not hold its scriptures as anything other than a parable. Unfortunately, none of the major religions qualify.

A large part of Instagram's value exists in the experience and strategies that allowed an initial three employees to manage a scalable, distributed application serving 10s of millions of customers. If Facebook is able to successfully incorporate Instagram's knowhow into their current stack, they could see significant savings in operations and management. That, alone, is worth billions of dollars.

More on Instagram's architecture...

No, it's really not useful. It's overhead. It takes more effort to maintain such a formal interface than to have people simply consume JSON as they will. And often the parts of the system that are supposed to process those formal definitions fail. All around just a horrible block to getting things working the way you like.

Couldn't disagree more. Frameworks and protocols are meant to make life easier. What I see with many implementations based on REST are frameworks that, through the lack of a published schema, encourage half-baked, undocumented APIs that often result in developer headaches and lost time. Personally, I think we can do much better.

Ignore all concerns but scalability, and REST becomes far more preferrable than SOAP. The overhead of XML -- usually an order of magnitude in data size -- can be a huge, undesirable impact. That said, there's one aspect of SOAP that popular REST specs are missing: a definition language. With the help of the WSDL, SOAP gained cross-platform client generation and type safety. REST protocols would do well to leverage this concept, at least for invocation parameter definitions. In most cases, REST result messages are encoded in JSON, where a Javascript interpreter for parsing and object model translation can be leveraged. But even then, having a documented result schema would be a huge improvement over forcing developers to inspect result sets at runtime to divine structure and content.

But, back on topic, having evaluated OAuth 2.0, I agree with Hammer's assessment. It's not a protocol, and the inability of this team to produce a viable solution will only lead to fragmentation and the failure of OAuth.

Kazakhstan *does* have superior potassium.

The WSJ and Fox News are both are owned by Rupert Murdoch. In effect, the WSJ is Fox News.