Blog posts

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.” ...

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)