Blog posts

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. ...

Graticule can failover | opensoul.org Geocoding gem graticule now lets you specify a sequence of geocoders to provide failover. Very nice. (tags: failover gem geocoding graticule rubyonrails) Daring Fireball: The Ringtones Racket “The distinction between ringtones and songs is an artificial marketing construct.” (tags: apple digital itunes music ringtones)

Along with travelling for two months and moving to another country, one of the main reasons this blog has been quiet for the past few months is that I have been having ongoing problems with my MacBook Pro. I’ve frequently toyed with writing about them here, but decided to wait and see if Apple could redeem the experience. The saga seems to be reaching a conclusion, but Apple don’t emerge from it looking very good. ...

A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design An interesting approach to site mapping inspired by the Tube Map (via O’Reilly Radar) (tags: ia sitemap) The Exciter: CouchDb and CouchObjects The first attempt I’ve seen to map CouchDB to ruby model objects. Looks interesting, though I wonder if technology like CouchDB will lead to a change in how we understand models. (tags: couchdb databases json models) Why we need standards support in HTML email - Campaign Monitor Blog ...

Wildbit » Email delivery for developers – Social Networking and Subscriber-based Services. A nice overview of issues involved in sending out lots of email (tags: distribution email mta) UnitRecord: disconnecting unit tests from the database Looks useful for apps with large numbers of unit tests. I’ll be trying this out next time I need to speed up some tests (tags: plugins rubyonrails unittesting) CouchDB: distributed document database system with bi-directional replication Everyone seems to be talking about it. While I’m waiting for my new laptop to arrive I only have time to linkblog it. But CouchDB, and its JSON over REST approach, really does seem to be a fascinating development. ...

Extracts from interviews about The Wire Season 5 I don’t think I’ve ever been looking forward to a new season of a TV show as much as I am for The Wire. The interviews contain some interesting bits on influences at play in the writing: “the Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutio (tags: hbo thewire tv) Mark Lynas: On Climate Change, Neutrality Is Cowardice I don’t know that I’d put it in quite the same terms, but I’m with Lynas in finding the arguments against the BBC doing specials on global warming rather specious ...

Thanks to some hard design work on the part of Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma I was able to launch a new look for the website of singer/songwriter Sarah Masen a week or so ago. Sarah’s recently released three new EPs (her first releases since 2001, and all with hand made packaging) and it was high time the site got a new lease of life. At heart, the site is a simple rails application, and we’re still making frequent updates as we let the new design settle in and begin to hook the site together with the new web world that has sprung up since it was last given any real attention. One of the latest changes is the use of the flickraw gem to pull in photos from gigs. We’re using last.fm’s machine tags to identify events, which may not be the best route as we build out the archive but for now provides a nice way to disambiguate events on flickr, with the fringe benefit that the photos show up on last.fm too. ...

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)