• mad.ly – Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview
  Helpful overview of one of a number of great improvements coming up in the next version of rails
  (tags: rubyonrails timezone)
• Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa | White African
  More great work being undertaken using the Ushahidi engine
  (tags: africa ict4d nptech ushahidi)

Recommend this post:

Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code.

Harold’s is a well known name in the XML world, and that background shows through in how he approaches the book. While a general audience will probably find useful content, the reader needs to be prepared for a series of command-line and Java-based examples. Tools like tidy are featured prominently, as is the use of regular expressions to seek out broken code to fix and, in the music-to-my-ears category, automated testing.

If you’re equipped to do so, following these steps will lead to much cleaner, more manageable sites, but I found myself wondering how many of those comfortable with command line tools and regular expressions are in the market for a book like this.

In general I suspect the key audience for this will be IT departments inside large organisations tasked with refreshing or extending an intranet. For those developers, who maybe don’t spend much of their time working with HTML and like the idea of using scripting tools similar to those in their regular workflow, this book’s worth a look. If you’re already familiar with current trends in web development, then there are probably other ways of picking up on the scattering of techniques that might be new to you.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

Recommend this post:

I’m getting my event blogging a little out of order but a few words on last weekend’s excellent geeKyoto seemed in order. Put together by Ben Hammersley and Mark Simpkins to see what a group of self-identified geeks would say in response to the question “We broke the world, how are we going to fix it?” the event brought together a couple of hundred of us in a hall in Central London for a Saturday for a fascinating journey through a wealth of ideas.

The presentations ranged from discussions of designing sustainable tourism in the Mediterranean to an account of arctic exploration, by way of ideas like Secular Sabbath (exploring the impact of Sabbath on Orthodox Jews’ carbon footprint), AMEE’s aim to measure all energy usage everywhere, attempts to improve government web usage, and transforming bus stops into spaces for play.

Some might have complained that not much time was spent analysing the nature of the problem. The AMEE presentation was probably the closest to what you’d expect at a climate change event—demonstrating some of James Hansen’s recent work on the melting of the arctic ice shelf and the reality of climate change tipping points—but in general there was a refreshing sense that we didn’t need to dwell on such studies because we recognise we’ve gone wrong.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the event was the shared recognition that not only do we need to look for more efficient technology and ways that we can reorganise ourselves to reduce our impact, but that doing so may open up a wealth of possibilities. Whether that’s in recapturing communal, outdoor play (Bruno Taylor noted that 71% of present adults played in public spaces when they were kids, compared to 21% of current-day children), in building new awareness of the spaces around us, or in realising that the constraint of sustainability can drive more creative and more flexible aesthetics. In a sense that tapped into part of what we’re driving at with Generous. The vision of the project is to be more than just “green”, partly because we think there’s a lot of inherent value in some of the other commitments we ask people to make, but also because sustainability can only be achieved if we approach it with a broad vision of how we want society to be.

geeKyoto didn’t present solid answers on what we can do. It offered a few ideas, and reminded me of why it’s an exciting time to be working in this industry in London. There’s a growing sense that the web revolution’s implications spread throughout society and those of us designing and building in its wake have a lot to contribute. With events like Social Innovation Camp, geeKyoto, and a series of others coming up that strive to be more than just talking shops, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

The key question, of course, is how fast we get there. According to Hansen’s numbers we have around ten years before global emissions levels must have peaked, otherwise global climate change will accelerate beyond control. How fast can we turn some of the ideas floating around into significant practical change, and how do we manage the changes so they’re more than just lifestyle changes for the world’s rich?

Recommend this post:

With all the talk of credit crunches, sub-prime mortgage crises, and all that follows from them it can be difficult to know how to make sense of it all. When you add in the fact that money is a far more complicated beast than most of us realise it’s pretty bewildering.

Ann Pettifor is an expert in getting to grips with these issues, communicating them and campaigning on them. And I’m very pleased to say that you can now find her blogging at debtonation.org, the result of a quick project Jenny Brown and I have been working on.

There are lots of talks of exciting spin-offs, campaigns for more effective regulation of the financial sector, and the likes, but for now the key thing is to get Ann’s writings on the topic out there, building reputation and conversation. A quick blog fit the bill just right, so we’ve kept it at that. Where it goes from there will unfold over the coming months.

Recommend this post:

In trying to get to grips with the NESTA Innovation Edge conference I’ve kept returning to Tim Berners-Lee’s appearance early on in proceedings. Berners-Lee himself didn’t offer anything groundbreaking, but made a series of sensible comments on innovation, the potential of the web, and providing space for creative people to get on with exploring their ideas. But his comments were rather awkwardly juxtaposed with a claim in NESTA’s video introducing him that he could have become rich beyond measure from the web had he not chosen to give it all away.

That statement, offered as fact, is pretty hard to back up. It ignores the open source origin of much of the key web infrastructure and the key contributions of a wide range of people who have helped make the web what it is today, in sum the significant potential that if HTTP and HTML had not become open standards, the web would never have taken off in anything like the way it has. Beyond that, it tapped into one of the key dichotomies of the conference, in the tension between desires to stimulate innovation and to grow global brands.

During the morning a series of speakers provided some insights into the ways innovation disrupts, the key challenges facing us today (climate change and global poverty being the two most significant) and ways we might begin to address them. Bob Geldof—despite his usual fluidity about facts made most obvious in a claim that the web brought about the end of the Cold War—was perhaps the most stimulating, but I particularly enjoyed the contributions of Sam Pitroda who gave the whole thing a more international and more realist touch, helpfully asking us all to remember that “innovation” doesn’t always mean “high tech.”

The afternoon’s panels, however, didn’t seem to live up to that introduction. I only made it to two, but talking to others who attended a few other sessions there seemed a general sense that despite claims to be talking about innovation there wasn’t nearly enough time given to disruptive innovation, technologies of change, or a business landscape that may well be shifting away from the corporate behemoths that have dominated in recent decades. In particular the panel on “Where the UK leads…but for how long?” seemed far too driven by questions about how Britain can grow brands as big as Google or Yahoo, without space for much challenge to the preconceptions about the necessity of such huge brands or whether that is really what innovation is all about.

I suspect some of the problems with the conference were growing pains. Having leapt massively to 3000 or so attendees meant the “expert seminars” were too large for much meaningful panel/audience interaction, and it was difficult to allow for the vastly differing levels of knowledge and expertise around. In that I definitely resonate with Lloyd’s mention of Cognitive Surplus which became more evident as the day progressed.

Innovation Edge was a positive event. It is always exciting to see a large group of people gathered to talk about changing things for the better. But there was a lot of space to dig deeper, to explore changing contexts for innovation and business, and to challenge more of its audience’s preconceptions.

Recommend this post: