Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to over since 2002.
For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. Karina Brisby - Interactive Campaigns Manager - Oxfam ...
For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. ...
Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is primarily a book about the presentation of reports. Having gone in expecting a mixture of presentation and production techniques I was a little surprised to find that the vast majority of the reader’s time is spent looking at various GUI and graphing toolkits, export to MS Office and the like, and there’s not much space given to managing large volumes of data, warehousing, and other such topics. ...
Report backs freer use of data | Technology | The Guardian “work is under way on a government “information incubator” to encourage experiments with “mashups” and other innovative uses of government data” (tags: forblog freedata government uk web2.0) Using SimpleDB and Rails in No Time with ActiveResource (tags: activeresource amazon databases simpledb thecloud) Should I be worried about piracy? | New Music Strategies “The overwhelming cry from the independent musician twenty years ago was ‘How can I just get my music out there?’ Problem solved. Now what are you going to do?” ...
Aid to developing world falls for second year | Business | guardian.co.uk “At the 2005 Gleneagles summit, G8 countries committed to pledge an additional $50bn in aid by 2010. Three years on, this target now looks to be missed by as much as $30bn, said Oxfam, enough to save 5 million lives.” (tags: aid debt g8 internationaldevelopment poverty) Open veins: Crude reflections Nick’s article on Ecuador from the latest Red Pepper. “We need a vision of growing qualitatively not quantitively.” ...
A few months back I posted a series of entries about the process of producing HTML emails. Those posts generated a number of comments and emails, including some from Christopher White who has been working with the TamTam library in TextMate to clean up his workflow. He offered me this article which I present below. ...
For many the idea of bringing design patterns to ruby is a terrifying one. Having taken refuge from over-engineered java projects (or for that matter, attempts to apply java engineering approaches to a somewhat dynamic language like PHP) the baggage that often goes along with design patterns isn’t what a recent convert is looking for. But as I mentioned in my last review of a design patterns volume, and series editor Obie Fernandez highlights in his foreword, design patterns don’t have to be used that way and maintain merit when used as a source of collective experience and shared language. ...
Working with a number of non-profits I frequently find myself tasked with extending or upgrading drupal. Each new version of drupal has been a significant step forward and I’m usually keen to get up to date but there’s the small matter of the suite of modules most sites use that need to catch up with changing APIs. With the release of Drupal 6 a few weeks back I found myself wanting a tool that would help me check if my chosen modules were ready for the upgrade yet. ...
With its complex yet penetrating arcs and careful unravelling of a fictionalised but well-rooted version of Baltimore, The Wire quickly became my favourite television show of recent years. So following its recent conclusion I’ve naturally been devouring every article I can find, not quite ready to let go. The following paragraphs from a piece by executive producer David Simon struck me as an unintended example of why newspapers (his previous profession) have generally fared so poorly over the past few years, and a reminder of how easy it can be to miss the possibilities new technologies : ...
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US names ‘9/11 steel’ warship Steel salvaged from the World Trade Center site has been used to build a warship. Terribly symbolic, and terribly sad. (tags: militarism revenge symbolism worldtradecenter) John McCain’s Charitable Contributions For a while I held onto a belief that John McCain somewhat resembled his chosen persona. Then he decided that maybe torture was okay after all, and a whole lot more crept out of the woodwork along with that. ...