Blog posts

I don’t talk much about my work here, saving the more in depth stuff for the other place, but every now and again it seems worth mentioning some new project that has launched. In spare moments over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up Future Music Talk. It’s a site that pulls together blog entries from a group of people talking about the future of the music industry, music promotion, etc. There’s a lot of good discussion taking place, but it’s all so widely spread out that it seemed helpful to bring some of it together for easy discovery and maybe some more cross-fertilisation. ...

Last.fm for television - jonathan.tweed.name An attempt to build social services around the BBC’s iPlayer, in the form of a facebook application (tags: facebook iplayer last.fm media socialtv)

Discussion about the future of the music industry abounds. Whether it’s advice for artists or labels, discussions of the release of new technologies, or predictions for the future, there’s a lot of it out there. It’s good to get a range of perspectives, but until now it’s been hard to know where to get started if you want to delve into that world. Today I’m announcing the launch of Future Music Talk, a site pulling together blog entries from a range of thinkers and practitioners. For those familiar with such things it’s a variant of the Planet-style sites so popular in the web development community (it’s powered by Planet Venus). ...

geobloggers » The overdue Places post II - Prototyping Iconicness Dan Catt talks about the process of building flickr’s Places feature (tags: api flickr geotagging prototyping) Send files faster with X-Sendfile | John Guenin A good overview of how the X-Sendfile can help rails apps send files for download without taking up mongrel processes. Since this was written native support has been added to Rails. (tags: filetransfer http mongrel rubyonrails server x-sendfile) Living on the Edge (of Rails) #3 - X-Sendfile and many other sexy enhancements ...

John Resig - HTML5 DOCTYPE It seems that IE7 will allow you to style elements it doesn’t ordinarily recognise if you create an instance of them using JS. John’s pondering whether that means IE7 can be forced to handle HTML5. (tags: doctype html5 ie7 javascript webstandards) stevenberlinjohnson.com: Outside.in and The Washington Post outside.in’s content will now appear on the Post’s website, and vice versa. A sensible connection. (tags: localisation maps newspapers washingtonpost) Version Targeting and JavaScript Libraries — All in the head ...

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. ...