Blog posts

This post is a follow-up to my initial thoughts on our Social Media efforts at this year’s Greenbelt. Going into Greenbelt I’d made some fairly naive assumptions, primarily that it would be easy enough to just capture conversations we were having anyway and events we were attending. For people whose sole responsibility at the festival was reporting that might have been possible, but for those of us who were already deeply committed to other activities it’s not quite that simple. While Steve, Lisa and Mike were able to gather a lot of great material, and made the capture their primary focus, I was more distracted and my efforts are much thinner on the ground, and decidedly patchier. ...

For this year’s Greenbelt a group of us decided it was time to beef up the festival’s ‘social media’ output. With approval from the powers-that-be, the help of some phones from Nokia and the energy that comes from a festival’s buzz, we built up a twitter community, streamed plenty of content live to qik, and enjoyed the fact that the festival’s flickr presence now has a momentum all its own (the official photos had over 100,000 views in the past week and there are over 3600 photos tagged greenbelt2008 as I write this). ...

This year’s Greenbelt programme contained a piece by Maggi Dawn, who sadly wasn’t able to be at the festival. Reading the programme on the tube back from a post-festival get-together, I really connected with Maggi commenting: Whether Glastonbury or Global Gathering, at their heart, all festivals are actually less about gazing at bands from the back of a field, and far more about the day-to-day encounters we have around the site. We have a fundamental need for these real-life meetings, because without them, we cannot create or sustain community. Yet, strangely, that’s one of the paradoxes of this idea of festival: we immerse ourselves in order to be able to leave it. Showing up is what makes the festival work, but Greenbelt is also all about not being at Greenbelt, about taking the infection away and breeding it in the day to day communities that sustain us. ...

Discussions of multi-model forms and nested models in Rails has been revived recently, with various changes appearing in Edge Rails, plugins like attribute_fu getting a lot of attention, and the release of ActivePresenter. It looks like when the dust settles we’ll have a nice new set of ways to simplify our code. ...

Massive interest in Ruby on Rails over the past few years was quickly mirrored in book sales. Early entrants like the (near definitive) Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails were break away hits in a world that usually sees modest sales of each title. It’s not surprising a lot of people wanted to get a share of that market, and the range of Ruby and Rails titles has exploded, with an unsurprising dip in average quality. ...

The first of our little musical get-togethers at St. Luke’s went so well that we’re planning to make them a regular fixture under the name “Ambridge Acoustic Revue.” The next one will be on August 30th and if all goes according to plan will feature Julie Lee, Lobelia Sabo and Aaron Roche. And of course it will once again be ably hosted by Iain Archer. ...

The facts of climate change have entered the public consciousness to an unprecedented degree over the past couple of years. But to date there hasn’t been a strong, coherent campaign around which masses could organise. Effective campaigns need clear targets and, ideally, clear deadlines. I’m hoping that that is what the recently announced 100 Months can offer. Introduced by Andrew Simms, writing in the Guardian, the campaign is based on the idea that 100 months is a very good bet for how long we have until the cascade effects of climate change take us past the final tipping point. ...

Last year among many other activities we managed to: sell a house travel round the world move from the USA (Grand Rapids, MI) to the UK (London) As a follow-up this year, we’re in the process of: moving out of our rented flat heading to the US for a couple of weeks buying a house having a baby Today was the big day when the removal firm came and moved us out of our rented flat. All our belongings are going into storage until such a time as we can move into the house we’re buying. So for the next couple of weeks while in the US, and for at least a week after that we’re going to be experiencing that safe, middle class form of homelessness known as “crashing with friends.” And very grateful we are too. ...

Providing a whistlestop tour through building a range of Ruby on Rails applications on the back of other services, Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects is aimed at those who are already comfortable building rails applications and want some sense of how they can be enhanced using a variety of other visualisation, data and processing providers. Aside: The term ‘mashup’ is one of those tech terms that’s almost impossible to pin down. I should note that the way it used in this book (seemingly any application that draws on a third-party services) is not a way I’d choose to use it, but I’d rather focus on the book itself than on titling semantics. ...

It’s been seven years since the notorious G8 summit in Genoa, and a fair bit of news coverage seems to have come with that. In part it’s because the Italian government still haven’t really dealt with the fallout, or even recognised that the brutality on the part of their police forces must have been authorised very high up in their establishment. Nick Davies (who’s coming to Greenbelt this year) has a very good piece in the Guardian a few weeks back that is well worth reading for a summary of why we should still be worried that none of those really responsible has been brought to justice. ...