Blog posts

I found Craig Mod’s " Embracing the digital book" a helpful read in the context of a current project. It’s a nice survey of the range of issues that need to be considered when presenting a book online. I was interested to note shortly after reading it that amazon have started publishing a table of “most highlighted passages” by kindle readers, but in practice that table’s not all that revealing. Such information needs to be much more fine grained (what’s interesting within this individual book? which of these key texts in my discipline draws most highlights? etc) ...

I’ve kept meaning to link to the EFF’s collection of excerpts from facebook’s privacy policies. They tell a pretty clear story. I recently deleted my facebook account (having suspended it a few months back) partly because keeping up with its changing approach to privacy, terms+conditions, etc. is simply too much work. Representing social relationships and working out privacy/publicy in that context is always going to be hard, but facebook’s approach appears more and more cavalier, reliant on their users’ confusion and/or apathy. ...

I stumbled across James Herdman’s piece on asset bundling in rails earlier this week. I’d always presumed you could do this but never got round to investigating as very few of my projects load in very large numbers of JS/CSS assets. In the end it was quite timely as I’ve been trying to reduce the footprint of an app I’ve recently inherited that is using far too many plugins. With this technique it was very straightforward to remove the asset_packager library. Now, what else can I eliminate…? ...

Eric Hodel writing a week or so ago: Ruby 1.8.6 is old and it’s API is lacking the forward-compatibility that Ruby 1.8.7 has for moving to Ruby 1.9. Since I maintain two large ruby libraries that are shipped in 1.9 (RDoc and RubyGems) it is becoming hard to maintain 1.8.6 support inside them comfortably. … RubyGems 1.4.x will not support Ruby 1.8.6. Seems eminently sensible.

The Campaign Monitor blog has a nice write up of Panic’s use of CSS3 techniques in their email newsletters, particularly the email they sent out to announce this week’s release of (the really rather nice) Transmit 4. If only all email clients were as capable as Apple Mail…

Simon Willison has published published the slides from his Redis workshop at the recent NoSQL EU conference. They’re pretty comprehensive, and delve beneath the usual “here’s what redis does” into a little more “here’s what you might do with redis”. (the conference was excellent and I’m sorry I’ve not had a chance to write about it here, but I had to dash straight from attending to implementing a rush job using one of the NoSQL projects covered) ...

At last weekend’s Amsterdam Music Hack Day the Echno Nest guys announced their new and extended API. The song API looks like it could be a lot of fun, allowing not only searches for songs by title/artist, but also similarity, loudness, tempo and a range of other attributes.

It seems like it’s time to give this another go. With justinian and the Greenbelt relaunch over, this week has continued along the lines of the rest of April with a return to juggling a whole host of smaller projects. Work for the James Lind Library continues apace, and while we’re still some way off the full overhaul we’re dreaming of there’s now a set of content management tools in place that will let us prepare the library for that day. It’s been quite a process of mapping, deconstructing and reconstructing the content, and while there’s plenty more of that to do we’ve got enough of a grasp that our guesses of how to move forward are now of the informed variety. ...

Obie Fernandez has a nice interview with Chris Wanstrath of Github up on InfoQ. Github continues to be fascinating, both the company as a startup and the product as a change to how people interact with and around code. From the interview, I particularly like the sound of their hiring practices, which have so far seemed very focussed on new employees’ community engagement and potential to bring new ideas to the table. ...

If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the rails server and console taking longer and longer to launch lately. Even switching to Rails 3 for most active projects hasn’t really helped. But I finally found a solution a couple of weeks ago. I found it reading Mikel Lindsaar’s Bundle Me Some Sanity where he outlines the way that bundler coupled with rvm allows a rather different and much cleaner way to manage gems in a ruby application. ...