Blog posts

brad’s life - A proposal: email to URL mapping Proposal for how to use an email address as an openid (tags: email identifier openid) Dawn of the digital natives - is reading declining? | Technology | The Guardian “If you believe a scary US report, reading is on the decline. But, says Steven Johnson, it completely fails to consider the amount that we do every day on our computers” (tags: literacy web) Adapting Ambitiously — err.the_blog ...

According to leaked documents obtained by The Times, the UK government is planning a green (discussion/consultation) paper proposing strong action against “illegal file-sharing.” According to the leaked documents they want ISPs to take the primary responsibility for monitoring usage and to ban any of their users who continually share copyrighted materials without permission. Whatever your position on copyright enforcement in a digital age, this is a ludicrous idea. Logistically such proposals will be almost impossible to enforce effectively. Setting aside the issue that many of us encrypt as much as possible of the data going out from our computers, it will effectively require ISPs to monitor all traffic going through their networks in a far more intrusive way than they currently do. ...

Six Apart - News and Events: The Social Graph API and Surprises “the fact that these relationships are being moved from “possible to find” to “easy to discover” means that we should be thinking of how this affects social behaviors in this new context.” (tags: api dataportability google privacy sixapart socialgraph socialnetworking) Where next for ICT Foresight? - Third Sector Foresight NCVO’s ICT Foresight reports have been interesting projects, so it’ll be interesting to see where they take it next. ...

The TH Interview: Andy Kunz on the importance of green transportation and trains as a solution to climate change and peak oil. Good ideas. High speed rail across the USA would be fantastic. Hopefully he’s right and current oil prices will finally push the authorities towards the needed investment… (tags: environment interview planning sustainability trains urbanism) What is this internet thing? at New Music Strategies Some reflections on recent cultural shifts and what it means for music, but at a more fundamental level than most posts on the topic. How is an internet-age song different from an electric-age song? ...

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to be able to attend the launch of Demos’ Everyday Democracy Index and pick up a copy of the associated 120-page pamphlet. The publication of the Index marks a helpful contribution to an important and fascinating series of conversations about the nature of democracy (in the sense of civic engagement and participatory decision making rather than a specific implementation), where it is most effective and how it can adapt to deal with societal trends and challenges. ...

Flickr: The MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR Pool Vendor generated angst, user generated dissent (tags: flickr microhoo microsoft photos protest yahoo) BlogFish: Review: Design Patterns in Ruby This book sounds like its worth some time (tags: book designpatterns ruby toread) Upgrading from the OpenID 1.x series library Instructions on switching from ruby-openid version 1 to ruby-openid version 2. Very handy (tags: documentation openid ruby ruby-openid upgrade)

Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel. Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS’ core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new ‘regions’ (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine). ...

In memory of chicagocrime.org | Holovaty.com Adrian Holovaty explains his decision to retire chicagocrime.org (tags: chicago chicagocrime googlemaps mashup retirement) Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta As it says in the subject. Now to work out how to get my sites fully OpenID 2.0 compliant (tags: api authentication openid security yahoo) MySpace Developer Platform Launching on February 5th Possibly good news. I’m just waiting to see if they allow more write access to their system than facebook does. Not being able to create events programmatically is _very_ annoying. ...

Daytrotter’s Best 15 Albums of 2007: No. 5 Feist’s “The Reminder” A nice write up of a somewhat-surprising breakthrough hit (tags: daytrotter feist music top15)

The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects—a Ruby book that doesn’t even mention web frameworks—was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience. ...