Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
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. ...
has_many :through: New on Edge: dynamic finders with hash attributes for creation “Tag.find_or_create_by_name(:name => name, :creator => current_user)” – much nicer than the previous behaviour (tags: associations rubyonrails) Kingston Technology Company - Flash Memory - DataTraveler Combining a card reader and a flash drive. Tempting. (tags: cardreader flashdrive hardware)
I’m travelling at the moment, so posting has slowed down after three weeks of daily updates. Nevertheless I’ve just about managed to keep up with my newsreader and was pleased to see that some attention has been going into the JSON support in ActiveResource. Previously parsing JSON that couldn’t be easily handled by the YAML parser was a bit of a pain. Now it’s simply a case of calling: ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(json_string) And the JSON param_parser I referenced in my “Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML” article no longer needs extra help. It’s simply: ...
acts_as_twittertasticable!! Tongue-twisting new plugin to set up rails models to talk to twitter (tags: plugins rubyonrails twitter)
Relevance: The J Plugin: Existing Rails Apps on JRuby The Relevance guys have released a new plugin to help get rails apps running transparently on either ruby or jruby (tags: jruby ruby rubyonrails) Twitter: Use it Productively - lifehack.org Some speculation on how twitter could evolve (tags: productivity twitter) High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Geo Twittering Overview of geographical mashups of twitter (tags: geo twitter)
An article I wrote has just been published over at InfoQ. It’s called Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML and shows how easy it can be to extend Rails’ RESTful behaviour to input and output resources not only as XML but also as JSON and Microformatted HTML. The article builds on some posts on this blog, such as Intercepting Microformats In Rails Input, but offers a bit more context. The timing of the article fits nicely with a post on the microformats-rest list about Rails, REST and microformats, so hopefully we’ll see more discussion of these concepts over the coming weeks.
InfoQ: Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML An article I wrote. Probably only of interest to the technically inclined. (tags: articles byme rubyonrails)
WaSP Street Team “WaSP Street Team: getting the message out everywhere, together.” (tags: wasp webstandards) knowee - ESW Wiki “knowee is a distributed, web-based contact organizer. It would be largely bootstrapped via the XFN and hCard microformats, but uses SPARQL (or maybe just a simple RDF lib) for application functionality and RDF for information integration.” (tags: hcard microformats rdf semanticweb sparql) Improve your forms using HTML5! - Opera Developer Community Example of what the WhatWG Web Forms 2 bring to the table. The examples are a little confusing because so many attribute values aren’t enclosed in quotes ...