Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed Storage A much easier to digest summary of amazon’s “highly available storage system” than Werner Vogels’ paper. (tags: amazon databases dynamo performance scalability)
Dopplr Blog » In rainbows Deceptively simple and quite lovely use of colour to supplement the written content (tags: colour dopplr navigation sparklines) Unworkable private sector ideas ’too often used in the not-for-profit sector’ - Third Sector “Neither profit nor market share are relevant to what we do, yet this doesn’t stop some folk from applying it.” – worth considering where else that applies beyond fundraising (tags: branding fundraising marketshare strategy) W I L C O: Tour Dates ...
Judging the Candidates by the Company They Keep Interesting study of the political stances of various candidates based on which other websites visitors to their sites frequented. Sadly appropriate that Hillary Clinton is considered more conservative than a Republican candidate. (tags: data politics uselections uspresidentialelections) Safety Fears Prompt New Crossing (from Haringey Independent) Great news for those of us who frequently cross Endymion Road (tags: harringay localnews trafficsafety) Murder Suspect Caught Through MySpace Wow (tags: fordevblog myspace socialnetworking) The Leaves Of The Tree Are For The Healing Of The Nations ...
The market for books about mashups has become fairly crowded over the past few years but none have really enticed me as from a casual look most seem more interested in following the trend than offering solid information. Thankfully PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects manages to slide in a good number of practical programming tips as it works its way through a variety of services. The book dedicates the majority of each chapter to more general concerns than just interfacing with the system in the chapter’s title. So Chapter 2—“Buy It On Amazon”—spends most of its time exploring XML-RPC and REST approaches and building tools to work with those different styles of interface. Similarly the next chapter spends most of its time introducing WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP before showing how they can be used with Microsoft Live Search. ...
On Tuesday evening I found myself at a google/ demos event, How Has The Internet Changed British Democracy?. Unlike most discussions about the net and democracy I’ve attended, the panel here was very ’establishment’, consisting of Demos Director Catherine Fieschi , Spectator Editor Matthew D’Ancona, Stephan Shakespeare, the founder of online polling agency YouGov, and BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson. Tom Watson MP was detained in the House of Commons, or he would have joined the panel. ...
Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment. The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails’ testing framework are introduced as they’re used. The style isn’t test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance. ...
Since I wrote my first piece on extending a rails app to accept OpenID quite a few other tutorials and an official plugin have appeared to make that process easier. OpenID is quickly becoming quite mainstream, at least amongst developers, and that is very good news. It’s becoming so mainstream in fact, that recently I’ve been asked to implement an OpenID server on top of an existing user database so that those users can have an easy single-sign-on option across a range of sites. Writing the server side piece is not quite so straightforward and there’s not much documentation yet. A few sample servers are available but the rails examples don’t run cleanly on the latest gems, so while I took some code from them it made most sense to start from scratch. Over the past couple of days I’ve hacked together something that works for me and even though it could still do with some polish a few notes follow. Please do use the comments to correct anything I may have gotten wrong or skipped over. ...
Ryan’s Scraps: What’s New in Edge Rails: Filters get Tweaked Filters in rails controllers no longer halt on false, but instead on render or redirect. I’ve been hoping for that change for quite a while, but had better make sure my apps running on edge still work (tags: edgerails filters rubyonrails) ongoing · End of a Chapter The Atom Publishing Protocol is published. Now hopefully lots of client and server support will follow. ...
I usually try not to post twice in a day, particularly not on the same topic (there is more techie content coming soon, honest) but this has the potential to be big news: the Danish branch of the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers “has seriously proposed allowing unrestricted downloads of music over peer-to-peer networks, in exchange for a modest monthly fee to be charged to all ISP users.” Andy Oram notes: ...
There are many good reasons to make sure that your web presence follows the advertising maxim “if you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere.” For one thing, it makes it very hard for people to miss you, but increasingly it also means that as web sites become more and more interconnected, your profile will rise still higher. The latest example of interconnectedness comes as last.fm announce they’re going to be hooking in youtube videos alongside their own video service. So all those musicians who have videos over at youtube will now have them represented at last.fm too, making their profiles all the richer and more compelling. ...