Blog posts

Trailer Mash-ups: Wall-E-nator Mashup Proves Cuteness May Destroy the Future Best mashup I’ve seen in a very long time (tags: mashup pixar terminator) Building explosion in Grand Rapids’ Eastown - The Grand Rapids Press Very bizarre news (tags: eastown explosion grandrapids) Londonist: Some Of Our Banksys Are Missing Someone’s painting over Banksys. My money’s on it being the man himself. (tags: bansky london streetart) Obituary: Larry Norman | Obituaries | guardian.co.uk Music Steve Turner on Larry Norman, who died a couple of days ago. ...

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. ...