Blog posts

FaceForce: Facebook Meets Salesforce.com Connecting salesforce with facebook to dynamically update CRM data. (tags: crm facebook mashup salesforce) XML.com: jQuery and XML As the name suggests: using jquery to work with XML (tags: javascript jquery parsing xml) Last.fm – the Blog · Spot the difference Unsurprisingly, the last.fm top 10 tracks for last week is identical to the track listing of ‘In Rainbows’ (tags: charts inrainbows last.fm radiohead)

Guy Holmes seems to have a weird take on selling records. In a piece at the Guardian about his label Gut’s experiment with releasing a single on a hybrid vinyl/CD disc he comments: The music business desperately, desperately needs to invent new formats; the CD is an antique, it’s 20 years old. With little context available it’s hard to tell why, exactly, he thinks the industry needs a new format, but my guess is he’s been looking at the figures for the bubble the music industry experienced while consumers switched from cassette and LP to CD and wants to experience them again. ...

John Gruber comments in his usual incisive way on the claims that Universal Music are looking to start their own subscription service called Total Music. For a variety of reasons, not only the technical and financial ones that John details, the plan seems like the flailing about we’ve become used to hearing from an industry staring into an abyss and refusing to acknowledge the numerous bridges all around. The original Business Week piece contains an amusing quote from Irving Azoff, who says: ...

As a rails developer most of my experience with javascript libraries has been with prototype and scriptaculous, but I’ve never been quite happy with them. The helper methods built into ActionView make simple tasks a breeze, and I’ve played with the UJS plugin to improve the separation of content and behaviour, but even then the weight of the libraries and the comparable simplicty of tasks like iteration offered by jQuery has always made the grass over there look quite a bit greener. ...

A little blogging inertia seems to have set in over the past few months and it seems a bit late to comment on Radiohead’s approach to releasing their new album. Instead, now that the dust is settling, it seems a good time to connect it up with some commentary my friend Steve has been offering over on his blog. Steve has been doing a lot of thinking about things like the emotional connections people make with music and what the change of experience from queuing outside a record shop to freely downloading means for how people value music something that, as an independent musician, is of quite immediate importance to him. When we have a constant flow of free or nearly-free new music washing over us, it suffers from some of the same attention problem that many of us have faced since RSS allowed us to theoretically track many hundreds of web sites but we didn’t have the tools to work out how to prioritise that and what could simply be left behind. ...

VoiceOver and Safari: Screen reading on the Mac | 456 Berea Street Explanation/reminder of how to switch on VoiceOver and use it for testing websites for accessibility (tags: accessibility osx screenreader voiceover) Tom Morris: Simple RDF Querying with Python Using semantic web tools to simply query social network data (tags: librdf python rdf semanticweb) identity-matcher - Google Code “This code, extracted from the Rails codebase of dopplr.com, extends your User model with methods to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and any site supporting appropriate Microformats.” ...

There’s one project I work on where the client wants to be able to edit HTML files in the root folder, but I want to be able to deploy with capistrano. It’s a pain to have to log into the server and check whether those files have changed before each deployment so last night, I added the following to my deploy.rb: desc "Make sure we don't overwrite manual static file changes" task :before_deploy do captured = false run "svn status #{deploy_to}/current/public" do |ch, stream, data| if stream == :out and data.chomp.match(/^M/) captured = true end end if captured run "svn commit #{deploy_to}/current/public -m 'Storing manual changes to static HTML before deploy'" end end It’s not the most elegant, but it’ll make sure that any files the client has changed (which were already in the repository) are committed, and it makes the deployment process just that little bit easier. ...

Informed Comment: (US) Senate Partitions Iraq Next, they’re planning to break Britain and France back into their constituent early medieval kingdoms. (tags: iraq ussenate weirdpolitics)

A conversation with Ed Iacobucci about the reinvention of air travel « Jon Udell Fascinating ideas about how to transport networks by building flexible systems that respond to passenger demand in real-time. Given the environmental concerns over air travel it’s good to see railways mentioned in the comments. (tags: complexitytheory forblog mapping networkintelligence travel) Optimus Uses XSLT to transform microformat-laden html into XML, JSON or JSON-P, making it much easier to process microformats in languages without existing toolkits. Potentially very useful. ...

A conversation with Ed Iacobucci about the reinvention of air travel « Jon Udell Fascinating ideas about how to transport networks by building flexible systems that respond to passenger demand in real-time. Given the environmental concerns over air travel it’s good to see railways mentioned in the comments. (tags: complexitytheory fordevblog mapping networkintelligence travel) Douglas Coupland - “The Gum Thief” at Bloomsbury Theatre (Tuesday, October 9, 2007) Douglas Coupland is coming to London and we have tickets ...