Archive for February, 2009
Selected Saturday Links
Feb 28th
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The Cost of Accessibility?
Comments by Drew McLellan on the recently released Atlas IDE for the Cappuccino web framework, and the need for accessibility to be taken into account in any new approach to web app development.
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Accessibility & Degradation in Cappuccino
A response to Drew’s piece. I’m not entirely convinced, but that may be because I still feel like any attempt to bring desktop-style-GUIs to the web is missing the point.
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Mixing Cucumber with Test::Unit/Shoulda
Looks like a good combination.
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russell davies: interesting sounds again
“THE BASIC POINT is for people to show and talk about Interesting Sound-producing things they’ve made. Not just to perform with their ‘thing’ but to talk about what they’ve made, why they did it, what’s interesting about it. It could be acoustic, electronic, anything”
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Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way
Some good pointers, many of them useful even if you’re not using Rails or building a startup.
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Intro to CIUnit (part of fooStack) for CodeIgniter
Testing framework for the PHP framework. Looks like a nice tool and makes me wonder if I should try CodeIgniter next time I need to build a PHP app. (via infovore)
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OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter now freeware
Now I really have no excuse not to try OmniWeb. And OmniDiskSweeper has saved me several gigs of disk space so far this week.
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Querious – MySQL Database Tool
Nice looking new database tool. Perhaps not nice enough to tempt me away from Sequel Pro, but good to see nevertheless.
Hacking wordpress to support per-post banner images
Feb 23rd
I seem to be spending a lot of time with wordpress at the moment. It’s become so ubiquitous that it often makes far more sense to set it up and integrate with an existing app than to set up some other blogging system and re-train users. As a result I’ve been writing a few wordpress plugins. Most of them are too specialised to be worth sharing, but one seemed worth opening up…
Implementing a (not quite public yet) design recently I had need of a way to specify a banner image for each post. While wp has pretty good support for adding various media into the body of posts, this needed to sit outside the post body.
I whipped together a quick plugin to handle uploading a banner and storing its details in the metadata for the post. It was a simple process, nicely self-contained, except that the post edit form doesn’t have the appropriate enctype=”multipart/form-data”. I looked around for any hooks that would allow me to cleanly add attributes to the form tag, but in the end resorted to editing wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php to add it.
I’d hoped that there’d be time to find a cleaner way to do all this before telling people about it—perhaps some javascript that hooks into the existing media selector but allows it to populate a custom data field?—but it hasn’t, so I’m throwing it out there to the wider world as-is. The code is at github. Feel free to take it and use it as-is, to fork it and update it to be a better wordpress citizen, to email me patches to apply to my copy, or even to employ me to spend more time cleaning it up! Either way, it deserves to be out in the open and hopefully it’ll be of us to somebody besides me.
Selected Saturday links
Feb 21st
It’s always a little embarassing to realise that two or more consecutive blog postings are nothing more than a collection of links, but that’s the way it is at the moment. Busy-ness, illness and distractedness have all kept me from the blog this week. There aren’t any clear themes in this week’s links either. Chatter around OAuth has continued apace, as have musings about fuzziness, location, time, and the web (represented well by Matt Jones’ piece), but mostly this is the (to be) usual random assortment that have spent more than a few seconds open in my newsreader or web browser
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twitteroauth – PHP OAuth lib for Twitter
Further evidence that OAuth support for twitter is finally on its way in the form of a PHP library for interfacing with it.
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Fixing OAuth
The author of my favourite iPhone twitter client (tweetie) outlines an idea for improving the usability of OAuth outside of web applications.
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iPhoneFlow – iPhone Development Links
iPhoneFlow is a community link blog for iPhone developers. (via Mobile Orchard)
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Interview with Matt Bauer, author of Data Processing and Visualization with Ruby
I’m really looking forward to this book.
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CloudMade: Using OpenStreetMap to Chart the Future of Mapping
CloudMade is a new mapping service from some of the creators of Open Street Map. Lots of libraries for integration are available, along with a variety of services on top of the map data.
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seed16 a new model for conferences
An interesting response to the ridiculous speed with which tickets for the next BarCamp London sold out, and the issues that that raises.
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A new kind of front page
How Phil Gyford is currently experimenting with the front page of his site, pulling together his activities from across the web. I really like the way Phil approaches these sorts of projects and manages to pull things together in interesting ways.
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Implementing Prototype’s Array Methods in jQuery
One less reason to use Prototype over jQuery if you’ve not already made the switch. Like Josh I find I rarely feel the absence of the array methods Prototype provides when I write javascript with jQuery, but there are some convenient shortcuts here.
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Exporting the past into the future, or, “The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present”
A series of musings from Matt Jones on space, time and the web (in its biggest sense), “nowish”, “hereish” and all that. Also notable for having what may be the longest ’slug’ URL component of any article I’ve linked to from this blog.
Selected Saturday links
Feb 14th
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Initial Release Of Moneta: Unified Key/Value Store API
A new library from Yehuda Katz that seeks to provide a unified interface for key/value stores, meaning you can treat memcached and any other similar caching or database system as a ruby hash.
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Twitter OAuth Spotted in the Wild
Excellent news. Hopefully soon we can get away from the ridiculous situation where every new twitter app wants to know my password. Or in other words, those of us who care about security can actually start using new twitter apps again.
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Replacing ads with art
“Add-Art is an interesting Firefox extension which takes AdBlockPlus one more step forward and tries to replace the ads with a different art exhibit every 2 weeks.”
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WhatTheFont for iPhone
Recognises fonts in photos taken using an iPhone. Looks handy for people like me who have a poor memory for font names.
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Wordpress Art Direction plugin
Allowing per-post styling for wordpress, so each post’s permalink page can have distinctive styling. Could be very handy and liven up the blog world quite a bit.
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The REST of the Cloud
James Governor takes a conversation we had in the pub the other day and turns it into an extended comment on avoiding the complexity-for-its-own-sake end of the Web Services world, and looking at how to keep it simple.
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Amish Hackers
Kevin Kelly looks at technology adoption among the Amish. Fascinating.
Quick update on Heathrow Tower
Feb 13th
While there haven’t been any visible changes to my Heathrow Tower project in the past couple of weeks beyond my throwing in a few greetings in other languages to break things up a bit. Having put some of the statistical plans on hold as the snow last week prevented any data gathered from being anywhere close to representative, I’ve gradually been building up the database behind the scenes so I can start to do some of the more intricate things I’d like to do.
The key data I wanted was the airport codes for the various flights, and geographic data for those airports.
Firstly I found FlightAware.com who will provide all sorts of data from a flight code, but unfortunately the first time I tried making a request to their site using HTTP Client I spotted a comment in the HTML referring visitors to http://flightaware.com/about/termsofuse.rvt which states:
You will only access the FlightAware web site with an interactive web browser and not with any program, collection agent, or “robot” for the purpose of automated retrieval of content.
So I started looking at airline sites. United have a relatively straightforward URL scheme that responds to a GET and returns data that can be scraped. eg:
http://www.ua2go.com/flifo/FlightSummary.do?date=20090201&fltNbr=959
BA and Virgin, on the other hand, both require cookies to be enabled in order to get results from their flight trackers and don’t advertise any other URLs for flight data. Once I’d realised that only one of those three carriers was going to be helpful, I decided not to keep checking airlines.
So, a little frustrated, I tried just typing flight codes into google. And lo and behold… most of them give useful results. It doesn’t get them all, of course, but it’s enough that out of the 838 flight codes in the database, 695 are fully identified. Of those not identified, a number seem to be flights that were diverted to Heathrow but don’t normally go there.
So with some sense of the airports served, I also want to know about the airports themselves. Wikipedia’s pretty good there, with geo data for them all in an easy to capture form. Some, like Heathrow itself, are very easy to find:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHR
while others are a bit trickier. But with some manual intervention I was able to get all of that data. The manually produced mappings and the code for pulling in the data can both be found on github.
More updates as time allows…