Blog posts

The Economist is the latest organisation to announce it will be putting its archive online. Stretching back to 1843, that’s a huge mass of data coming online, even if (for now) it sits behind a very expensive pay-wall. The news comes three days after The Guardian and Observer announced that: The first phase of the Guardian News & Media archive, containing the Guardian from 1821 to 1975 and The Observer from 1900 to 1975, will launch on November 3. ...

It is to be hoped that Tony Blair’s new role as Middle East Envoy will allow him to break away from being an apologist for the neo-conservative hardliners in the Bush administration, but based on a recent speech it seems that is unlikely. The Guardian this morning reported that Blair has said, speaking of “militant Islam” that: This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace. ...

Steve Lawson: more on indie-musicians and the web A useful listing of sites indie musicians should be exploring (tags: indiemusicians music resources stevelawson) Mac Rumors: iTunes Plus Expanded, Becomes Largest DRM-Free Catalog Apple are finally beginning to practice what they preach and allowing non-major labels to put DRM free content on iTunes (tags: apple drm itunes itunesplus) In the ongoing battle between the iTunes Music Store and amazon… (kottke.org) The MP3 store battle is hotting up. Amazon are giving a 20% referral fee to associates on each and every song. This could be quite the earner for musicians whose material is available on the amazon mp3 store ...

It has long frustrated me that so many of the thinkers and movements I admire seem determined to denigrate the urban in favour of an idyllic picture of rural or small town living. Partly that’s because my psychology doesn’t deal well with spending too long outside of a large city, but it’s also because whether we like it or not it’s pretty clear that the future of the human race is going to be in cities. Effort that could be spent working out what was good about our rural past and can be translated into our urban future is often spent merely eulogising it. ...

The rumours of MySpace launching a platform or API have been floating for quite some time, but now as reported on the O’Reilly Radar they have been confirmed. Over the next two months they are going to increase third-party access to their site. First, they are going to highlight the thousands of widgets that have been on their site for years now. This should be released in the next couple of weeks. I am assuming that it will go beyond the FIM’s Spring Widget Gallery. Second, they are going to offer an API for applications to all developers. However, these applications are going to be sandboxed initially and 1-2 million users will have access to them. If the users deem the applications safe and useful they’ll be available to all users. Developers will be able to advertise in their applications. ...

High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Where is OpenID Mobile? Good question (tags: authentication mapufacture mobile mobileweb oauth openid)

Right at the start of Pro Active Record the authors address a possible problem some may have with it: that there’s not enough in Active Record to warrant a full book. They point out that the basics are well covered as sections elsewhere but that this is the first book to really dig into working with legacy schema and other ‘advanced’ uses. That’s fair enough, but after reading the book I am still left with the question of why, then, they dedicate the first half to covering ActiveRecord’s most basic concepts? ...

Profiles: Stealing Life: The crusader behind “The Wire”: The New Yorker This piece contains spoilers about seasons 1-4 of The Wire. Which, in case I’ve not raved about it enough already, is probably my favourite television show. (tags: davidsimon thenewyorker thewire)

GeoX is the latest kid on the Ruby on Rails geocoding block. The plugin was announced a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to explore it ever since, just in case it had any new features and also so that I can add it to my comparison chart. The feature set of GeoX is fairly straightforward. It supports a number of geocoding back ends: obviously google and yahoo are covered, but also mapquest’s relatively recent API. The standard lookup process is much like that provided by several other plugins—the sample given is: ...

It took quite a while but a couple of weeks I finally finished uploading all the photos from our big trip this summer. They’re all on flickr, organised into five ‘collections’. You can find them at: Leaving Grand Rapids, Chicago and the Bay Area New Zealand Australia South-East Asia China and Mongolia The South-East Asia collection in particular is very large as it takes in the wonders of Angkor. ...