Blog posts

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. ...

I’ve got quite a few tech books I never get round to using and I’d rather like to reclaim the shelf space they take up. I’ve tried selling some on amazon, but increasingly the meagre returns don’t seem to warrant the effort they take to ship, so I thought I’d list them here and see if anyone wants them. They’re generally in good shape, there’s the odd dog-eared cover here or there but they’re perfectly usable. ...

The last week of January’s here already and it seems like I’m still trying to sign off on the same projects I’ve been on all month. It’s not all that bad, really, and the budgets are working out fine (I’m very glad that one of these projects in particular wasn’t a fixed quote). But I’m feeling very ready to move on. Maybe this week will see some pieces being signed off? ...

So perhaps calling these Friday Links was overly ambitious. From now on they’ll be weekend links, which allows me at least a little more flexibility. This week youtube bought the rights to broadcast Indian cricket. This could be a very big deal. The jQuery team really have done a marvellous job producing content and getting attention the past few weeks. Here John Resig talks about getting organised, with the new jQuery organisation and a few plans including a conference in London. Also on javascript I stumbled across this round up of progress on bringing ECMAscript 5 features to webkit. Quite a few changes that could be very handy - I’ve always wondered why there was no Object.keys available. And for debugging JS it was very good to see that Firebug 1.5 (with Firefox 3.6 support) appeared shortly before the launch of Firefox 3.6. ...

So it’s Friday afternoon and I’m only just writing my weeknotes. In a rush. There’s something appropriate in that. It’s been a busy week and I find myself having to check Billings to get a sense of where the time’s all gone. It’s been another week of small jobs. One of the small pre-Christmas projects that had sprawled into this year finally launched—there’s a bit more work to do polishing the CMS but the immediate pressure is off—and two others are in the final days of fine-tuning. I spent a lot of time in Internet Explorer testing things, and remembered why I’m so grateful that that’s usually not my responsibility. And I hit that point in a project where a tool you’ve been pushing and pushing finally snaps. ...