Blog posts

Developing OAuth clients in Ruby Nice step-by-step tutorial (tags: oauth ruby) Matt Legend Gemmell – MGTwitterEngine - Twitter from Cocoa “MGTwitterEngine is a Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API.” (tags: api cocoa twitter) foi.mysociety.org MySociety’s new Freedom of Information site is now in “public alpha” (tags: freedomofinformation mysociety nptech web4change)

‘If I find one reel, I must kill you’ | Features | guardian.co.uk Film “Erlend Clouston on the men who risked their lives to save the Afghan film archive from the Taliban " (tags: afghanistan film) Gary Younge in New York: It’s up to the superdelegates to prove Democrats believe in democracy | The Guardian “The elections we have all been watching account for 80% of the total voting delegates who will nominate the candidate. The remaining 20% goes to “superdelegates” - Democratic legislators, governors, former presidents and vice-presidents, a ...

In between writing reviews of tech books I’ve been gradually working my way through a wonderful little book called Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth?. I’ll write about it in more detail later, but it was very much in my mind as I read an article Nick posted back in January about Bolivia’s new constitution. While much of the consideration of “democracy” over the past few years has been focussed on US elections, ill-advised adventures in the Middle East, and occasional flare ups in other places, Bolivia has been hard at work on a new constitution. And whereas that often means a dry process of regulations and legal language, this constitutional process has been about throwing off the shackles of imperialism and looking for ways for a country to reflect its plurality, its history, and economic contributions from outside the normal economic sphere. ...

Tuesday night saw us heading to Water Rats to see Anathallo, friends from the US on their first UK tour. They’d been in the country for a while, opening for Manchester Orchestra, but this was their sole headline show of the trip. We were pleasantly surprised to see the small venue packed with people and, like the band, a little taken aback to hear quite so many people singing along. ...

Django is a framework I’ve long (in web years) held in some esteem, despite never having used it before the past few weeks. The framework’s creators’ many well reasoned contributions on all manner of debates about the web suggested a thoughtful approach, and the range of high quality sites powered by Django has kept growing, with the recent launch of EveryBlock being a prime example of its capabilities. So I was delighted to receive a copy of The Definitive Guide to django: Web Development Done Right for review. ...

London is Free is a great source not only of ways to save a little cash, but also to find out about a number of events that could easily be overlooked. That’s where I stumbled across the news that Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall would be performing together in HMV on Monday lunchtime. ...

About our maps / The EveryBlock Blog On why EveryBlock chose to build their own maps rather than use one of the existing mapping providers (tags: everyblock localism mapping neogeography)

eMusic Selects Q&A: Breathe Owl Breathe - eMusic Spotlight emusic are profiling a Michigan band that is well worth a little of your time (tags: breatheowlbreathe emusic michigan music) Americans abroad are giving up citizenship for lower taxes - International Herald Tribune “other countries base taxation on residency, not citizenship” (tags: america citizenship nonresidency tax) Some thoughts on The Wire, season 5 (kottke.org) We’ve been following Season 5, and while it’s great I can’t help but agree that so far there’s too much to keep track of and not enough momentum. Still, there’s a long way to go… ...

I’ve found myself working in Python lately, both for a new project and while preparing a review of the Django book. Working in Ruby I’ve become used to relying on ActiveRecord whenever I need to talk to a database (whether inside Rails or not) and after a little time refamiliarising myself with MySQLdb I realised I was going to need a decent ORM for this project. As well as being road-tested and well documented, I was also looking for something that could either generate its models on the fly, or had a tool to generate them from an existing schema. ...

Two recent visits to the delightful cinemas at the Barbican deserve a mention here: The Diving Bell And The Butterfly has already been widely lauded, and thoroughly deserves it. Partially adapted from the Jean-Dominique “Jean-Do” Bauby’s autobiography of the same name, the film follows Jean-Do’s experience of living with the rare locked-in syndrome, the sudden onset of which leaves him only able to move one eyelid. Director Julian Schnabel has done a masterful job, using the camera initially to show us the world from Jean-Do’s restricted perspective but gradually opening up the viewer’s line-of-sight as his experiences unfold. His background as a painter clearly helps inform the visual pallete of the film, but he never quite drifts off into the impressionist self-indulgence that would have been so easy. The result is a story that is moving without being sentimental, and tinged with a deep sadness without being depressing. For me, it was one of those films that can serve as a reminder of the medium’s true capabilities. ...