Blog posts

James Clark’s Random Thoughts: Thai personal names Using the way Thai culture understands names as an insight into how complex internationalizing an application can be. We learned a little about that while in Thailand this summer and were particularly fascinated by the way Thai script has no spaces. (tags: i18n l18n language thai) 24 ways: JavaScript Internationalisation A little help with internationalizing javascript-based UIs from Matthew Somerville and his friends at the North Pole ...

The content on this blog has been a bit more diverse of late and while I tend to take the approach that if I enjoy some of the content on a blog I might as well keep an eye on all of their content to get a more rounded view of the writer, I recognise that some readers may not be interested in tracking everything. As a result I’ve added separate feeds for my two key consulting foci. So if you’re just here for musings on music on the web, you might want to grab this feed and if you’re looking for thinking on the web and other technology for charities, campaigns and other non-profits then you’ll want this one. The main feed remains at its existing location. ...

Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! DHH’s announcement of Rails 2.0 (tags: frameworks gems rails ruby rubyonrails web2.0) Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog this morning apologizing for missteps with the roll-out of their much maligned Beacon advertising system.” (tags: beacon debacle facebook privacy) Softies on Rails: Softies on Rails Interviews: Orbitz Nice interviews with one of the guys from Orbitz about why they decided to use Ruby on Rails for a new product development ...

Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling. Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site. ...

All reports, and the evidence of the subversion commit log, says Ruby on Rails 2.0 will be with us very shortly. Apparently the announcement has been delayed until the gems have properly circulated. For those who’ve not been following, Rails 2.0 isn’t going to seem like a huge step forward as it’s mainly focussed on cleaning up existing features, and moving quite a few out of the core and into plugins. ...

Creative Business : Blog Archive » Substitutes and complements (tags: economics futureofmusic marketing musicindustry) Comet works, and it’s easier than you think (tags: comet javascript) Producing, not consuming, makes the GeoWeb go ’round. « Into The Pudding Arguing that if you’re producing something with geographical content (an event, a news story, etc), you should publish the geographical information to go with it. (tags: georss neogeography)

We first stumbled across St. Vincent by accident when she opened for John Vanderslice at one of the last Calvin concerts before we moved away from Grand Rapids. While Mr. Vanderslice put on a fine show, I couldn’t help but feel that St. Vincent upstaged him with a much more striking set of songs, culminating in a near-perfect cover of Jackson Browne’s These Days. ...

shaunandrews.com » Using a retainer in the web world Includes a sample retainer agreement. Very handy. (tags: management retainer webwork) Massive Passport Canada data leak - Boing Boing A quite remarkable oversight in the security arrangements (tags: dataprotection security) evang.eli.st User stories with RSpec’s Story Runner Story Runner is to rspec as integration tests are to test::unit. Still trying to decide if I like the syntax. (tags: bdd rspec storyrunner userstories)

Beth Rowley - iTunes single of the week Good news for Beth. Well worth checking out if you have access to iTunes UK (tags: bethrowley itunes)

Back before the Afghan and Iraqi wars, when it seemed like every month there was a different global summit in the news (primarily because of overblown and misleading reports on the protests surrounding them) I had an idea for a site that would aggregate the reports from a variety of NGO and citizen journalism sites covering the summits. It would have been a complement to indymedia and protest.net and would have provided aggregated RSS feeds which other sites could embed. ...