Blog posts

UPDATE: The item has now been sold Having recently upgraded to the wonderful Canon EOS 50D I’m looking for a new home for my old 400D (actually the US version: the Digital Rebel XTi). I’ve taken about 15,000 photos with it and it was a great introduction to the world of digital SLRs. Despite all that use, it’s in really good shape and will come complete with a 2GB memory card, a spare (non-Canon, but perfectly fine) battery, strap, 18-55mm kit lens, and US and UK chargers, all in the original box. ...

For the past few years I’ve been maintaining a PHP package called XML_Feed_Parser. It’s part of PEAR and attempts to offer a unified API for handling RSS and Atom feeds in your PHP code, a little inspired by projects like the universal feed parser. Its parsing and API are pretty comprehensive, but lately I’ve been falling a bit behind in managing it and there are aspects that could definitely do with some attention. ...

Elisabeth Soraya Clare Stewart, born 7.13pm on December 4th. Mother and baby (and father) all doing well. Being in the hospital, witnessing the birth, and just living through the past few days have been wonderful and fascinating. Elisabeth permitting, I may just have to write a few notes on this neglected blog next week.

In the name of closing a few tabs, here are a few of my favourite post-US-election links: The Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” blog is often excellent. They had a really nice selection of photos of President-Elect Obama. Jason Kottke collected a whole variety of electoral maps The Guardian collected many-a-homepage to show how sites around the world reported the results and of course the flickr set showing the First-Family-to-be watching the results roll in

As I’ve mentioned here before, when working on web applications built with PHP, whether custom-rolled or drupal-driven, I often find myself missing various tools from the ruby kit. I’ve talked before about using capistrano with non-ruby code, but lately it’s been rspec and its stories that I’ve been craving. I’m aware of PHPSpec and have played with it from time to time, but the lack of a compelling way to work with mocks/stubs has slowed my adoption, and last time I checked it didn’t offer anything for high level user stories. So this week I set out to harness cucumber and webrat to write some simple stories. ...

The third in our series of Ambridge Acoustic Revues was another roaring success. Noting the date, Rob had suggested we adopt a Day of the Dead theme and decked the building out in fine style. And for a special treat Garry created a fabulous puppet to greet people on the door. Jon and Phil, our usual house band, were off on tour with Beth Rowley, giving the evening a slightly different feel. Jez kindly stepped in on drums, and Foy Vance joined a couple of the others to lend some bass to their tunes. Hayley, Jon, Foy, and of course Iain played well, and all in all it was immensely enjoyable. We hope to have another one ready to announce in the next couple of days. ...

I’d listened to a few reviews and didn’t go into this latest Coen Brothers film with high expectations but having enjoyed every one of their previous films (except, perhaps, their Ladykillers remake) and considering myself a committed fan I’d hoped to see something the reviewers had missed. Or at least enjoy a riotous, if inconsequential, romp along the lines of Intolerable Cruelty. But no. Forty minutes in I was pulling out my phone wondering how much longer there was to go. Most of the time I just watched in disbelief as lines came and went that were clearly intended to be jokes but just fell flat. There was another hour or so before we could leave. It was quite a comedown after No Country For Old Men and I left with my faith in the Coens deeply shaken. ...

The Design Cities exhibition–running at the Design Museum until early January–has been on our list for quite a while and we finally made it along yesterday. The exhibition focussed on seven cities that the curators argued had in turn dominated world design over the past 160 years, and laid out a number of iconic items from each. It seems like almost every exhibition we’ve visited in the past couple of years has been dominated by chairs and this was no exception, but there were also a range of other devices from tableware to consumer electronics. ...

About eighteen months ago I compiled a series of reviews of Ruby on Rails plugins concerned with geography. I put together a comparison chart and posted it on this blog. It subsequently found a new home on a wiki, but lately that wiki has rarely been accessible so I decided it was time to move it all back into this site. You can now find the comparison chart at: /process/resources/rails-geo-plugins/ A few updates have been lost along the way as they were solely made on the wiki, but hopefully it’s still of use. Since I published the original reviews and chart my attention has wandered a little from the geo plugin scene, so please do flag up any new plugins, changes in features or fixes that I may have missed. I’m going to be trying to check through all the existing listings to update them but that may take a while, so comments here may well encourage me to focus more quickly. ...

Over at Netsquared.org Amy Sample Ward has posted another of their regular ThinkTank questions. This time around it’s: What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning? I’m coming in a bit late. There are some good responses appearing, such as those from Ashley Messick and Beth Kanter which offer a number of key questions to consider when developing a strategy for your organisation. The responses to date are summarised on the netsquared site. ...