Blog posts

Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 | Book Details (tags: books microformats)

Lift Web Framework I’ve begun considering what language and/or framework to learn next. I doubt it’ll be Scala, but this does sound interesting. (tags: frameworks lift scala) Dean Edwards: Yet Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation “This library doesn’t do anything interesting like script.aculo.us or jQuery. It only does standards. But it is my belief that if you build on standards in the right way, you can help future-proof your scripted pages.” (tags: base2 dom javascript) Sam Ruby: Which Way Is Up? ...

Guardian Unlimited | These invasive species are ruining the retail ecosystem “Like it or not (and it is something about which most policy makers and economists are in deep denial), weakly regulated markets give free rein to economic invasive species and hence tend towards monopoly.” (tags: economics planning retail sprawl urbanism) Anne Lamott’s amazing grace | Salon Life (tags: annelamott salon)

catapult magazine : Holy Week : A day to remember Another little piece I wrote (tags: byme catapult cino theology) GOOD Magazine - Sterling On Cities Bruce Sterling offers a video looking at Belgrade, and the future of cities. (tags: urbanism)

ongoing · JRuby Servlets Sounds like running ruby apps within a servlet is becoming a possibility, with good results (tags: jruby ruby servley) GeoRSS blog » Blog Archive » Google supports GeoRSS! “GeoRSS, in all its glory, is now supported by Google Maps. Support for KML has been vastly improved too.” (tags: geography georss google maps)

Joe Queenan watches Ingmar Bergman’s entire oeuvre Like the experience of watching 38 Bergman films in a row, the article is a little repetitive, but worth the time (tags: bergman film) Daytrotter on Neon Bible “Their stateliness and funereal attire could be seen as comically serious, especially as the band builds song suites and concept albums and the such. But at the heart of the Arcade Fire is a palpable sense of spontaneity and fun, some of which comes from ...

fame, narcissism and MySpace (tags: myspace socialnetworking)

Click opera - The virtual world of consumer spectacle fails to describe its describer “The difference between the French obituaries of Jean Baudrillard, who died last week, and the Anglo-Saxon ones was really remarkable. The Anglo ones seemed to be written by people trapped in exactly the sort of spectral, consumerist cage that Baudrillard (tags: baudrillard obituary)

Along with Bill Eisenhauer, I’ve been digging into what it would take to fix the problem I found with GeoKit, that it wouldn’t support :include queries properly. The explanation has seen us going deep into the internals of ActiveRecord to discover, as others have before, that the :select parameter (which GeoKit uses to build its distance column in the query) and the :include parameter don’t play nicely together. The reason for that is that Rails employs special methods to build the select parameters when there’s a :include in the query (ie. when you’re joining with other tables and eager-loading them) and currently ignores :select along the way. GeoKit would ordinarily produce SQL along the lines of: ...

Back in the UK for a few meetings and some flat hunting, I’ve been experiencing first hand the way that Fair Trade has become a mass consumer movement over here in the few years since I left. As a long-time supporter of fair trade it’s gratifying to see such a plethora of products readily accessible, but a discussion at my parents’ church this weekend also got me thinking about the trade-offs involved in such a movement going mainstream. ...