Blog posts

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.” ...

Pandora To Shut Down UK Streaming Rights issues are bringing Pandora’s UK service to an end. I’ve never been a big Pandora user, but this is clearly more evidence that the whole international licensing model needs fixing soon. (tags: internationalisation musicindustry onlineradio pandora streaming) If all your friends jumped off of a bridge… at Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar " If a piece of social software causes people who do not choose to use it to become ostracized, there is a serious flaw in that piece of software." and “I hope that the future of the net lies not with mega-networks like Facebook, but with m ...

a little bit of zeank » JSJaC A JavaScript Jabber client (tags: chat jabber javascript) beatnikblog » Erlang-style concurrency with JavaScript 1.7 There’s some really impressive JavaScript work popping up at the moment (tags: concurrency erlang javascript) Flickr to Authenticate OpenID - Is This The Yahoo! CES Announcement? - ReadWriteWeb It seems like flickr will soon become an OpenID provider. It’d be nice if they also let you log in using your existing OpenIDs. (tags: flickr openid yahoo) Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection ...

Red Artisan: Attachment_fu magic with Core Image and Ruby Cocoa! Good stuff. RubyCocoa makes me wish I deployed to an OS X server (tags: attachment_fu coreimage imageprocessing rubycocoa rubyonrails)

Sam Ruby: Ruby 1.9 Strings — Updated A useful explanation of some of the details of how Ruby 1.9 handles unicode (tags: ruby strings unicode)

It’s very clear from posts on the rails email list that there’s space for books that take the novice developer beyond what they learn in beginners’ books like Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails. Those books will help you build your first app and get a sense of the structure of Rails but before long you’ll want to write code that needs to be reusable between models, or across projects, or to interface with services other than databases. The beginners’ books, by definition, don’t deal with intermediate topics. That’s the niche Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development sets out to fill, but sadly it doesn’t offer much beyond those beginners’ guides. ...

Music in China: The Inside Story | The Register An exploration of the music industry in a very different culture. One striking anecdote: apparently the Chinese version of pop idol terrified the Chinese authorities because of the level of participation in its “democratic” decision making (tags: china musicindustry) BenCurtis.com » Painless Rails action caching with memcached One of a number of pieces building on Tobias Lütke’s suggestion that the best way to do cache expiry is not to expire a cache. ...