Blog posts

It’s time for me to take another stab at occasional link blogging. While I really appreciate those who blog individual links, I seem to keep coming back to ways of packaging links. Here’s a first installment for 2010: Last month may have been the time for advent calendars—with Drew’s 24ways yet again containing many excellent articles that have me very excited about HTML5—but the jQuery team have decided to follow a similar model in the run up to the release of version 1.4. jQuery14.com kicks off on January 14th, but already has details of their new API website based on the contents of the jQuery Reference Guide. ...

When we lived in Grand Rapids, I did a lot of that living in coffee shops. Through my research for the (now rather neglected) Grand Rapids WiFi site I became a bit of an expert on the different outlets around town. These days—having an office—I spend a lot less time in coffee shops. Except when we’re back visiting the US and I’m crazily trying to fit work into the trip. This time around I got the chance to check out two new coffee shops in Grand Rapids: Sparrows and Madcap. I’d heard a lot of talk about the former and really enjoyed working there, surrounded by the magazines that it also sells. The United States has an incredible magazine culture with many, many fantastic titles. But most of the country is terribly short of good places to buy them. I would have loved to have a place so near our house to walk to and browse magazines when we lived in GR, and I’m very glad it’s there now. ...

This is a follow-on from my piece on how I got the (development version of) Catapult Magazine up and running with Rails 3.0pre. If you haven’t already done so, I’d recommend you read that first. Catapult makes use of the permalink_fu plugin which fails in Rails 3. It fails because of a reliance on the evaluate_attribute_method method which no longer exists in version 3. I’ve temporarily worked around that by replacing it with class_eval, but lately I’ve been using friendly_id a lot more and I suspect I’ll be focussing on porting to that if it works cleanly in Rails 3. ...

Last time we were in the States, Nathan Phillips handed me a CD-R of his then-new record Postcard. Nathan had played one of our Ambridge evenings with Julie Lee while touring with her, and I was delighted to have the record. It’s a beautifully understated home recording made over the course of a year, and numerous people have asked me how to get hold of it. Finally, having caught up with Nathan as he returns from California to Nashville, I’m able to answer that question. So if you’ve been dying to hear it, you can preview and/or buy it over at CD Baby. If you’ve not, I’d still recommend it. ...

I’m really quite pleased that there’s not a huge amount to report from the past couple of weeks. There’s been some work done, but not much as I actually managed to take some time off, read some books, and do that kind of thing. And there’s been some tinkering as evidenced by my previous post about Rails 3 and a couple of drafts (more on Rails 3, thoughts on Palm Pre/Web OS development) that will hopefully be ready for publication soon. ...

I used to be a strong adherent to tracking edge rails. Up until the release of rails 2.3 I let most of my frequently updated projects track edge with a vendored copy of rails, and it rarely caused me any trouble. When 2.3 hit I rethought all that. With Rails 3 development ramping up I suspected there’d be significant disruption taking place; even with comprehensive test suits I didn’t want the headaches of keeping track of that, and I didn’t want to spoil the pleasant surprises I expected when Rails 3 landed. ...

In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have expected to hit the ground running when travelling with a one year old. Dealing with one’s own jetlag can be bad enough, but dealing with another person’s increases it all exponentially. I’m quite pleased, then, that I got as much done as I did last week. I’m particularly grateful to the proprietors of Sparrows and Madcap for their tolerance of my hours of wifi usage. ...

Ugh. The second week of doing these and I’m already late. I blame travel, or the lack of internet access for a couple of days at our destination. Or something like that. The big news of last week was that I signed the lease on a new office and we’ll be moving across the road into a larger (and hopefully less chaotic) space on January 11th. We’ve got space for a couple more people so drop me a line if you’re looking for desk space in Shoreditch. ...

I’ve been meaning to jump on Matt Webb’s Week Notes bandwagon for a few months now. I’ve even written a couple when off-line but then forgotten them until so long after the fact that they’re no longer relevant. Still, it seems like a good discipline and clearly this blog needs some injection of life, so here goes. While I do all my work under the " Ket Lai" banner, I’m going to post them here as they’re a fairly personal reflection and may also occasionally contain some links of technical interest. ...

We did, in fact, make a newspaper. The hour or so after my last post were more than a little stressful, but the results (a few typos and a printing hiccup that most certainly wasn’t our fault) more than made up for it. And the response has been wonderful. Thousands of people now have our little artifact as a souvenir of a wonderful weekend, numerous conversations about post-digital concepts and the like ensued, people tell me they’re exploring the URLs we printed, and we might get to do something like it again. There’s talk of a supplement for our next Sunday paper. Matt and I even got a mention in the Church Times! ...