Blog posts

I am not a visual designer. That’s a statement that’s probably obvious to anyone who’s spent much time on one of the sites for which I am solely responsible. Thankfully I have numerous friends and colleagues who are designers and thanks to them there are a number of projects which have come out looking good. For a long time I’ve been wanting to redesign this site. To give it more presence, to make it a bit friendlier, but mainly to make it neater. I’ve had numerous ideas, but always lacked either the time or the skill to make them a reality. But today, finally, I have at least achieved the third of my aims. It’s all thanks to the CSS framework of the moment, blueprint, and a little free time to work on it. ...

Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph A manifesto for opening up social networking. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this as it seems Brad is hard at work on the problem. (tags: graph socialnetworking) Active Reload: Akismet vs Defensio Round 1 Defensio is the new kid on the spam fighting block (tags: akismet defenseio spam) err.the_blog.find_by_title(‘Full of Ambition’) Raising the stakes in the query generation space. A new plugin that uses ParseTree to take regular ruby enumerable blocks and build queries from the,. Looks a lot cleaner than ez-where. ...

Lunch over IP: São Paulo No Logo: A new identity, and some “new” favelas Sao Paulo removed all billboards from the cityscape a few months ago. Apparently people noticed favelas they hadn’t known existed once the advertising wasn’t there to distract them. (tags: advertising brazil shantytowns urbanism)

So after another whirlwind few weeks (we found a flat, moved in, got our stuff) we are now at Greenbelt, where I’m floating around doing various bits and pieces and Kari is singing with Sarah Masen. It’s Kari’s first time at the festival and so far she seems to be having a good time, though it’s not really started yet. I’ve just started uploading my first set of photos for the weekend over at flickr.

Top 10 tips on overland travel | Travel | Guardian Unlimited We really enjoyed travelling in tuk-tuks in Cambodia, but 12,500 miles in one seems more than a little extreme. (tags: travel tuk-tuk)

slacktivist: Dark places ‘The CIA’s secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the “war on terror.”’ (tags: blacksites cia politics terrorism)

After months of planning, weeks of intense preparations, and two months enjoying a trip around the world, Kari and I have now arrived in the UK. In actual fact, we arrived a week ago on Friday, ten hours later than scheduled ( never fly aeroflot if you can possibly avoid it) but very glad to be here. The days since have been filled with getting bank accounts and mobile phones, catching up with and looking for work, and finding a flat in North London that we can call home for the next few months. We moved in today, to a two bedroom place in Harringay, though looking around it hardly seems like we’ve moved in; the vast majority of our belongings are languishing in customs waiting for all the paperwork to clear. We’re hoping they’ll be here before Greenbelt as camping at the festival could be tricky without a tent. ...

Subtopia: The City in the Crosshairs: A Conversation with Stephen Graham (Pt. 1) Fascinating discussion of urbanism and militarism and the way in which global cities are the axis along which most power runs. (tags: militarism power urbanism) Owls lost in translation (kottke.org) A summary from a Chinese knockoff of Harry Potter. Quite amusing – it makes me wish I’d picked some up while we were there. (tags: china harrypotter piracy) Shrub & The Spesh’s World Tour of London ...

Make yourself at home in Switzerland | Travel | Guardian Unlimited “one little Swiss city is going its own way by creating a Stadt Lounge (city lounge). A public living room complete with sofas, lamps, rugs (they’re actually Japanese gingko trees, but use your imagination here), tables and a great big red carpet rol (tags: switzerland urbanism)

(gs) Ruby on Rails 502 Proxy Error .: (mt) KnowledgeBase Apparently proxied requests on mediatemple time out after 20seconds. That’s fine in normal use, but explains some problems I’ve had with admin functions that involve uploading and processing CSV files. (tags: mediatemple proxying rubyonrails)