Blog posts

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 ...

Clinton unveils $110bn universal health plan | Subscriptions index | Guardian Unlimited “This is not government-run.” – classic Hillary cowardice. The government run healthcare in the US is extremely efficient but she still dodges the issue (tags: healthcare hillaryclinton presidentialrace2008)

DanNorth.net » What’s in a Story? Good overview of stories and Behaviour Driven Development (tags: bdd communication projectmanagement story testing) danbri’s foaf stories » Querying Facebook in SPARQL Efforts are underway to draw facebook data into a form that makes it easier to work with. (tags: apis facebook semanticweb sparql) New York Times Launches Facebook App More facebook. It’s interesting to see how one existing organisation is reimagining their content in order to provide a compelling experience in this new context ...

One of the many tasks that’s been languishing on my ’to do’ list has been improving the handling of opening/operating/business hours for Grand Rapids WiFi. So today, in a fit of wanting to reduce that ever-present list, I decided to take a proper stab at it. Since it’s got to be a fairly standard situation but I couldn’t find any other write ups online I thought the process might be worth a little documentation. ...

Several years ago while in Genoa for the now notorious G8 summit, I shared the outrage of many of my fellow protestors about the decision by the Italian authorities to seal off significant parts of the city with a large fence. The areas inside the fence were designated the “red zone” into which you could only pass with appropriate security credentials, those near to its perimeter were the “yellow zone” in which group gatherings were banned and the police presence was heavy, and then the outlying areas were the “green zone” which meant that people could get on with their lives relatively undisturbed. ...