Blog posts

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. ...

A few random selections from this week’s reading. Discussions of online privacy continue to rumble on. ReadWriteWeb had a piece about (facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg repeating the adage that “the age of privacy is over.” Zuckerberg’s comments would appear to continue the confusion around facebook and privacy. Facebook’s popularity is at least in part due to peoples’ perceptions that there is some privacy (or at least control) inherent in it, but they keep eroding that. I deleted my facebook account a few weeks ago, partly because I was tired of negotiating its plethora of options. Twitter’s “always public” or “private” are really so much easier to handle. ...

Our group of friends in Nashville has strong ties to the Downtown Presbyterian Church. Many of them attend the church, others have done at various times, and some have had art studios, worked on programs with the homeless or simply found some shelter in the building. One of the latest initiatives based out of the church is the Nashville Contributor street newspaper. It was there that we read of Patty Griffin recording her new album in the church sanctuary, and naming it “Downtown Church” in its honour. You can read their exclusive article on their website. ...

A tweet from Jenny this evening reminded me to blog a little more about the snow in Tennessee when we were there last week. This wasn’t the first time we’d been in Nashville when it was snowing. A few years back a few flakes fell on New Year’s Day. Nothing really remarkable in many places, but even that elicited some surprise at the time. This year there was significantly more snow, though still barely a grazing compared to what the UK has experienced over the past week, let alone a typical winter snowfall in Michigan. It was somewhat satisfying to see another society grinding to a halt in the face of a lot less snow, having been one of the many rolling my eyes when, during the snow in February 2009, the CBI and others moaned about Britain’s poor infrastructure and the billions of pounds lost to the economy. And then there was the way many less jaded than I were loving the snow. A reminder that an economy that can’t handle a few days of unplanned collective unwinding is at least as bad as one that insists on continuing whatever the weather. ...

In his weeknotes for last week, Matt Webb commented that “The first week back after new year is tough. It’s like dropping sudently onto a bike halfway up a hill”. I resonated with that, though for me it started half way through the week. The first half was spent trying to follow up on pre-Christmas enquiries, and then suddenly the bike appeared and I was careening away. And then there were travel disruptions meaning we arrived back in London 24 hours later than planned, the day before the big office move. (I’d also note that, as Matt mentioned in his post, this will be my wife’s first week working at BERG) ...

I’d never flown facing backward before last night, and had a little trepidation before take-off as I wondered how it felt. But I’d very happily do it again. The views of early-evening Chicago as we took off, circled around the city and then headed east over the lake were stunning. Somehow the fairly dull grid system that rules the city came to life and the occasional diagonal created wonderful effects. ...