Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Calvin students protest Isom decision - The Grand Rapids Press We’ve been watching this situation sadly. Glad to see students acting! (tags: calvincollege grandrapids racialjustice)
Such has been the flood of information since Aaron Gustafson broke the news of Microsoft’s radical new plans for Internet Explorer that I’ve mostly sat back and tried to absorb it all, waiting before contributing anything. For those who haven’t been following the developments, Microsoft have said that future versions of Internet Explorer will support a new HTTP header and/or meta-tag which will indicate to the browser which version of IE the page is designed for. Unless the page specifies otherwise, all future versions of Internet Explorer will render it just like IE7 would. If you want IE8 to actually use the new features it brings with it, such as (we hope) improved standards support, you will need to explicitly ask it to do so. ...
I’d been looking forward to No Country For Old Men for quite some time. Having been rather disappointed by their remake of The Ladykillers I was anxious for something to remind me why I love the films of the Coen Brothers. An adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel seemed just about perfect for them. One of the reasons I thought this might work for the Coens was actually hidden in Jamie’s recent comment (on the book) that: ...
Consultation Feeds “This site, which is very much a work in progress, indexes the details of government consultations from the various websites upon which they’re published.” (tags: consultation egovernment feeds governmentit) Support for BDD and Stories in PHPUnit 3.3 - Sebastian Bergmann PHPUnit is getting BDD support, but the syntax doesn’t look very inviting… (tags: bdd php phpunit testing) mnot’s Web log: Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts) There’s a lot of talk about how we describe RESTful services at the moment ...
According to wikipedia: In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Object-oriented design patterns typically show relationships and interactions between classes or objects, without specifying the final application classes or objects that are involved. Algorithms are not thought of as design patterns, since they solve computational problems rather than design problems. ...
Graceful Exits » FixMySpine Why an overblown government project would have been a lot better had it been built by/followed the approach of mySociety. (tags: enterprise governmentit mysociety nhs) ‘No one in government IT will have done this before’ | Technology | The Guardian A report on the Power of Information Review barcamp (tags: barcamp governmentit opendata powerofinformation) ruby-dtrace’s ruby-dtrace-0.0.4 Documentation Ruby bindings for dtrace. Could be handy for tuning code. It’d be nice to see it also make it easier to work out the trace commands. ...
WorldChanging: Making Angkor’s Tourism Sustainable I was very concerned by the scale of the hotel developments when we visited Angkor this summer. Glad to see that some thought is being given to responses. (tags: angkor cambodia sustainability) YouTube - Radiohead at 93 Feet East “Radiohead’s live performance at 93 Feet East on 16 January 2008. Includes all the songs from In Rainbows, plus You And Whose Army, The National Anthem, My Iron Lung, The Bends and a Thom Yorke solo version of Up On A Ladder.” ...
jQuery: » jQuery 1.2.2: 2nd Birthday Present It’s always nice having spent a day working on some code to find the key library getting significant speed boosts the next day. (tags: javascript jquery performance) Obie Fernandez: About Rails and Ghettos A well balanced response to Zed Shaw’s notorious recent rant. Obie doesn’t deal with the technical issues Zed raised, but helps provide some context. (tags: ruby rubyonrails zedshaw) Changeset 8637 - Rails Trac - “Allow users to declare other namespaces when using the atom feed helpers” ...
For those who aren’t aware, ruby gems refers a way of packaging up code so it can be easily distributed for other developers to use, and a tool to help with the distributing and/or installing that code. Find out more at wikipedia. On first glancing at this book, I wondered how you could fill a full-length book on the topic of gems. While getting the tools installed on some systems requires care, and there’s space for a couple of chapters on packaging your own libraries as gems, both topics have been covered alongside other topics in numerous volumes. What I’d missed was that contents not only covers both of those topics, but also looks at 26 different gems and explains how you might use them in your projects. ...
The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone On how compression is killing the emotional impact of pop music. (tags: audio compression mp3 music musicindustry) Obama’s Wide Net How Barack Obama’s campaign are organising successfully online (tags: campaigning obama presidentialrace uspolitics) David Byrne Journal: 01.09.2007: Correction? Some responses to David Byrne’s Wired article, arguing that you can’t really “make an album for nothing”. (tags: davidbyrne futureofmusic musicindustry recording) RubyForge: Starling: Project Info “Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.” ...