Blog posts

So. No week notes again last week. It was a week of juggling numerous projects, trying to get the month’s job list under control before diving into the project that is to dominate March. Writing here was the ball that got dropped. One of the big jobs on the agenda has been implementing a redesign of various parts of the Greenbelt website. It was important to get it under way as it was one of those pieces which are easiest to get a feel for once you’ve made a start. It’s also quite satisfying to work on as it pulls together a number of strands that represent how the organisation has been changing and growing, but which the current site doesn’t really allow for. ...

Towards the end of our last trip to the US I referred in a blog entry to the flourishing London coffee scene. Word of that continues to spread, it seems, and the New York Times travel section has become the latest publication to run a feature: London Sips a Different Cup. I’ve yet to make it to Prufrock, the main establishment featured, because although it’s a short walk from my office it doesn’t open till 10.30am by which time I’m usually well settled with a cafetiere we’ve prepared ourselves. I can, however, vouch for the comfort of the battered sofa at Tina, We Salute You. And worry a little that it’s now going to be even harder to find an open seat at Milk Bar… ...

Once again I find myself writing these notes on a train. This time it’s to Exeter along with James Weiner to meet with a potential new client. I don’t know all that much about the projects he’s got in mind, but the connection was a word-of-mouth recommendation, which is always gratifying. So far, it’s been a week spent primarily on work for a single client–very much a rarity lately–and it’s been good to be able to focus. I even ended my period of avoiding looking at facebook by working with some of their APIs and once I deciphered the documentation it wasn’t too bad. It’s not so much that the documentation is bad, but like the platform in general it makes huge all-or-nothing assumptions and all I wanted was something equivalent to oAuth. ...

A few bits and pieces that have crossed my browser in the past couple of weeks (though mostly sifted through yesterday). The NoSQL (or LessSQL) movement has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, but numerous people have pointed out that MySQL can be adapted to cover many of the most common use-cases. Flickr’s Kellan kicked off a series of posts on that topic with Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr and Richard Crowley responded with OpenDNS MySQL abuses. On the other side of the coin, Luke Melia has a write-up of how he uses Redis to build a “who’s online now list” and Sean Cribbs’ (fairly convincing) Why Riak should power your next Rails app is worth a read even if you’re not a ruby developer. ...

A mention on twitter got me listening to The New Diggers, an episode in Radio 4’s Costing the Earth series. It’s a good listen and part of an encouraging wave of attention being paid to new-old approaches to food production such as farming small plots in urban spaces. The stories in it won’t be entirely new to anyone who’s been tracing Guerilla Gardening, Community Supported Agriculture, or Transition Towns for any length of time, but new examples are always encouraging and the people of Todmorden make an eloquent case for large institutions handing over their latent land to green-fingered locals. ...

Once again I set out to write some weeknotes a few days ago, but the distractions of email got in the way and then it was time to dodge the umbrellas of a rainy Soho on my way to a Street Action board meeting. Which is a little odd as the past week was a good example of the way I hope more of my weeks will go: time at the start and end of the day handling email and other admin, and the bulk of each day spent focussing on a single longer task. It’s good to be able to finish each day with a clear sense of what was achieved. ...

I’m always tempted to roll my eyes and respond cynically when confronted with unqualified, fear-building statements like the “Britain is broken” refrain currently popular with the Tories. It’s too easy a statement, illustrated with anecdotal evidence, and implying that since you’re the ones claiming there’s a problem, people need you to fix it. Of course, someone living as comfortably as me needs to be reminded that rolling our eyes and bringing out a cynical line is not really enough of a response. It’s increasingly seeming like even careful analysis, counter-examples and discussion aren’t enough either, but those of us who value those things should probably keep trying. And we need to do what we can to ensure that we’re not simply blinded by our comfort. ...

I had planned to write last week’s notes on Wednesday in the ninety minutes I had free between meetings. But then another meeting came along and ate that time. By Sunday I decided it was time to give in and just skip a week. Now it’s Wednesday again and I’m sitting on a train heading to Reading to meet with my accountant so it’s time to actually get something down. ...

MockSMTP.app bills itself as “smart and simple e-mail testing for new apps and websites on Mac OS X” and works as a non-delivering SMTP server so you can trap and review any emails your application sends. The instructions describe how to set it up for a Rails app but it should be usable in many contexts. As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story ...

The usual round of Rails 3 updates: Pratik writes about the new Active Record Query Interface. I’ve had trouble with chaining nested scopes, so am very glad to see a better logic implementation, but the real win is that no queries are executed until the results are needed meaning that fragment caching suddenly gets much easier/more reasonable to use. Also on the new API front, Mikel has a piece on the new ActionMailer API which also seems much improved. Naturally with so many pieces about Rails 3 cropping up, posts are emerging linking as many as possible; Maxim Chernyak’s is the most comprehensive I’ve seen so far (though it’s missing my posts on the topic). If you’ve got a few hours free on February 18th, you may like to check out O’Reilly’s free online conference about Rails 3. And if you can’t wait to get started you might like to look at Jeremy McNally’s rails-upgrade gem that may help you on your way. ...