Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
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. ...
cfis : Resurrecting libxml-ruby Ruby’s XML handling has been lacking and until recently showed little sign of life. This may be just the news we were waiting for. Anyone know if it just drops into rails or if more work is needed? (tags: libxml ruby rubyonrails xml parsing) /Message: XMPP As A Key Component Of The Social Web Stowe Boyd pulls together some highlights from the increasing chatter about XMPP/jabber (tags: xmpp jabber queueing scaling rest webservices) history.forward() - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft ...
A little over a year ago I wrote up some instructions for deploying drupal sites using capistrano. It’s proved a popular entry, still getting a good bit of traffic, but in the time since I wrote it Capistrano 2 has joined us and my techniques have moved on, so it seemed high time I updated the instructions with some new ones. As before, I’m going to presume that anyone reading this already has capistrano installed and has shell access to their server. If you need help with the former, I’d recommend stopping by the Capistrano website, and for the latter you should probably talk to your hosting company. ...
It’s always fascinating to see how applying good practice in one area can lead to unforeseen benefits. The article on version control with subversion in the latest issue of A List Apart is a fine example of just that. Not only is the use of version control a good way to manage your own projects, it’s a vital enabler for significant shifts in working practices and management styles. ...
Meerkat | Code Sorcery Workshop “Meerkat is an easy to use SSH tunnel manager built specifically for the Mac.” (tags: mac software ssh tunnel) bkkeepr | Track your reading and bookmark on the go A nice little reading tracker service. You send them a message on twitter with the ISBN number of the book you’re reading, and they do the rest. (tags: books library reading twitter) mySociety » TheyWorkForYou video - seeking One of a series of blog entries from MySociety about their great new video features on TheyWorkForYou. Not only can you track what’s going on in parliament, you can watch very specific parts of the proceedings thanks to some clever work on their part ...
I knew when I emailed the editor of Matthew’s House Project with a fairly strongly worded response to one of their recent articles that there was a good chance I’d be asked to write something as a follow-up. And that’s exactly what happened. So a piece I wrote on identity and immigration is now available for reading over there.