Blog posts

A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter— Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore. ...

Thoughtbot have released a suite of plugins over the past few months that are enlivening the fields of Ruby on Rails file attachments ( paperclip) and authentication ( clearance), long dominated by Rick Olson’s attachment_fu and restful_authentication. You can see some previous posts about attachment_fu here and here. I’ve been playing with paperclip on a couple of projects, including one which was previously using attachment_fu. That necessitated some work migrating the previous attachments. Opinions are divided on whether data should be transformed in migrations or in separate libraries, and I’d rather remain agnostic on that, but I whipped together some code that can be used either in migrations or an external library to make the transfer. ...

I’ve been working on a wordpress plugin to make it easy to set a banner image for any blog entry outside the post content. The current approach is flawed as it requires hacking at the form tag for the post edit page to allow file uploads, but while I look around for a better way to do that without sacrificing the simplicity of the UI, I wanted to share some digging I did to figure out how to handle file uploads with wordpress. All this data is available in the documentation, but it took quite a bit of looking to find it and there aren’t enough examples kicking around. ...

I’m currently building a site where users will enter details of books and music they’re listening to and we want to provide lists of that on their profile and also find ways of matching users based on those choices. We’re looking at a number of ways of doing that, including matching based on genre, and in order to achieve that I needed a way to identify the genres for their listed books and music. ...

UPDATE: The camera 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. ...

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. ...