Blog posts

Some time in late March, the database server hosting this blog died a horrible death. Since it happened right before this year’s Festival of Faith and Music and as our preparations to travel and move were ramping up, it’s taken far too long to fix. But it seems like after a fresh OS install and a few hours of moving files to and fro, I may just have it working again. If this post appears correctly, it should mean that the usual (albeit usually intermittent) updating of this blog can begin again.

Last.fm Launches Video - Aims To Be The MTV Of Web 2.0 Age Hot on the heels of the mashup that hooked youtube videos into last.fm’s system comes an official video option. I doubt I’ll use this as much as the music service, but it’s a nice idea (tags: lastfm music video) Joyeur: DTrace for Ruby is available There’ve already been performance/memory patches to rails coming from the use of this. I guess I’d better have another go at getting solaris installed somewhere ...

GeoRSS | GeoRSS :: Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds New Drupal-based GeoRSS site, allowing community documentation and open proposals for extensions. (tags: drupal georss) Nginx Config Like Whoa Generating nginx config from yaml. I’ve been hosting one project over at Planet Argon and have been converted to nginx. As soon as slicehost get caught up and my new VPS is set up I’ll be trying this out as I migrate some sites ...

Capistrano: Home Capistrano finally has an official home, and the soon-to-be-released version 2 looks like a nice upgrade. (tags: capistrano deployment) Coalition For Free Broadband Now I’m not sure that free broadband should be a priority when so many people are without healthcare, and most of those who can’t afford broadband don’t have computers, but it would be interesting to see what impact this had. (tags: digitaldivide freebroadband) Introducing http:BL | Project Honey Pot ...

I am not a graphic designer. One look at the current state of this blog should tell anyone that. But when I have to explain to non-techies what it is I do all day (and many evenings), it’s not unusual for them to walk away with the idea that I’m a “web designer.” Perhaps they’re right, if you take that in its broad sense to mean designing how certain things work on the web. ...

On Ruby: Some Real World Performance notes on Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 Pat Eyler is seeing a 2.5x performance increase between Ruby 1.8.5 and 1.9.0. That’s a release that can’t come quickly enough. (tags: performance ruby) “Mad Dog” Murdoch to Teach a Generation How To Read The News - Gizmodo “According to Reuters, the service will be a combination of Google News and Digg” (tags: aggregation myspace news) MySpace News MySpace’s new “social news” aggregator has launched. Not quite so ugly as most of the rest of their site, but not particularly enticing ...

Google AJAX Feed API “With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs like the Google Maps API.” (tags: ajax api atom google rss syndication) From enclosure to co-operative 2.0? | Tom Chance’s website Still thinking about this one – “Web 2.0 is a far cry from this idea of real cultural freedom - it creates a proprietary space for centralisation, limited expression and exploitation, albeit far more open than the traditional media.” ...

Sneaky Abstractions: RESTful XHTML Plugin making it very easy to return xhtml to those user agents that want it. (tags: contentnegotiation plugins rubyonrails xhtml) Don’t even leave a footprint - Yodel Anecdotal Yahoo have announced they’re going to try and go carbon neutral this year. Glad that it sounds like they’re attempting to reduce their footprint as well as offset what’s left (tags: carbonneutral environment yahoo)

Music Ontology Specification Good to see this project getting its own domain and a wiki. Wish I had more time to follow things like this. (tags: music musicontology rdf) hCalendar profile for hKit I need to parse some microformats in PHP, and obviously wanted to use Drew’s hkit. Unfortunately all the links I could find to this hcalendar profile were broken, but I managed to track it down. It doesn’t (yet) support hcard nested within hcal ...

Within a large project that uses a lot of partials to load in page components, there are a lot of potential points of failure. Add in a developer new to the project, or a front-end developer pressed into service working directly on your views, and the chances of someone editing a partial without realising it’s used in several more places than they’d noticed are fairly high. And if the partial hits an error, the exception will roll all the way up the chain and the end-user will see your 500 page. ...