Blog posts

I’m gradually porting a number of my older Rails apps over to Rails 3. The main motivation is a chance to really put the new version through its paces, get a better sense of how it’s working, where plugins are at, etc; but it’s also rather nice to get some of the performance improvements and cleaner code along the way. Catapult relies on Evan Weaver’s has_many_polymorphs plugin quite extensively so it was important to be have a Rails 3 compatible version. I couldn’t find any evidence that anyone else was working on it, so I’ve forked the github project and made a few alterations. I’ve set it up to work as a gem (so I can pull in the latest version using bundler) and adjusted to fit the new rails initialization process. It’s rather hacky, but it’s working for me so far. ...

Its been twenty years since Coldcut formed Ninja Tune and they’ve got a lot planned to celebrate that anniversary. There’ll be events, a very special box set, and… a website featuring exclusive giveaways every week for the next twenty weeks. Ninja Tune XX launched at 4pm today. This is the rush job I’ve referred to in recent weeknotes, and it feels great to have it launched. It’s already attracting quite a bit of traffic and seems to be holding up well sitting on a little dreamhost private server (we needed cheap access to a lot of bandwidth). Under the hood it’s a Rails 3 app talking to MongoDB via mongoid. We’re using devise for authentication, formtastic for forms and InheritedResources to keep controller code to a minimum. ...

Four day weeks always feel a bit odd. This week’s particularly so as I somehow managed to not be ill or work on the Bank Holiday. That doesn’t often happen. (When I say I didn’t work, I mean on client work. There was some tinkering, but not with anything directly relevant to an active project) The rest of the week seemed to muddle along with a light scattering of meetings. ...

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.