Blog posts

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. ...

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. ...