Blog posts

E-Advocacy, the Digital Divide and GIS: An Interview with Arnold Chandler of PolicyLink Interesting interview about e-advocacy, GIS, and other use of technology by non-profit groups. Also interesting commentary on the digital divide and internet use amongst North American ethnic minorities (tags: advocacy campaigning digitaldivide forblog gis housing) Bill Eisenhauer » GeoKit: Going International? Bill is exploring adding UK addresses to the GeoKit geocoders (tags: geocoding geokit rubyonrails)

After writing my review of acts_as_geocodable/graticule earlier in the week, I decided to go searching for geocoding services that might offer data for addresses outside of North America. One that I came across is at Local Search Maps. There’s an introductory blog entry here. The API is a little different in that it returns its data as javascript strings, but otherwise it’s simple enough to send a GET for a given address and get back the data. To see how easy it is, I decided to code up an extra geocoder for graticule that would use this service. ...

ryan lott {a.k.a. son lux}: Cool Cleveland Interview Been really enjoying the son lux record. Looking forward to seeing him/them in a few weeks’ time (tags: ffm2007 music sonlux) Daytrotter review of Neon Bible “Win Butler ain’t mad at God, just his PR team.” (tags: arcadefire music reviews) E-Advocacy, the Digital Divide and GIS: An Interview with Arnold Chandler of PolicyLink Interesting interview about e-advocacy, GIS, and other use of technology by non-profit groups. Also interesting commentary on the digital divide and internet use amongst North American ethnic minorities ...

Back around the 2004 Presidential Elections, I read an article published in what I think was The Atlantic reporting on a roundtable discussion between a number of key political thinkers. They were exploring the state of the two-party system in US politics and the possibility for a third party. To my surprise (coming from a point of view where both major parties in the USA seem to be of the right) they were arguing for a third party to appear in the middle of the US spectrum. But as I thought about it more, and have come back to it over the past few years, that makes a lot of sense. A serious third party in the middle would force the Democrats and Republicans to refocus. It could suck away those on the central fringes of each party who drag the others to more moderate positions, and it would be taken seriously in a way that no third party has been here for a long time. ...

Clarification from Metaweb re. centralisation Danny provides some follow-up to all the chatter around Metaweb/Freebase (tags: semanticweb) ImageScience “ImageScience is a clean and happy Ruby library that generates thumbnails – and kicks the living crap out of RMagick. Oh, and it doesn’t leak memory like a sieve.” (tags: image imagemanipulation rmagick ruby thumbnailing) O’Reilly Radar > My “Outdated View” of the Semantic Web Tim O’Reilly responds to the comments about freebase: “In short, it sounds like the bottom-up approach to Web 2.0 and the current thinking on the Semantic Web are growing closer together every day.” ...

I’ve used Rick Olson’s excellent acts_as_attachment on a number of projects and it’s saved me a huge amount of time that would have been spent worrying about how best to resize images, how to make sure uploaded files are properly written to storage, and other such boring details. So I’ve been noticing with interest increasing references to his new attachment_fu plugin, which is a complete rewrite of acts_as_attachment. That interest was piqued as I skimmed this nice how-to on file attachment from Mike Clark (if you’re just looking for how to get started, go read that). It seems attachment_fu is almost entirely backwards compatible with acts_as_attachment (you just need to change your models to rename the ‘acts_as_attachment’ declaration ‘has_attachment’), but with a number of enhancements. ...

graphpaper.com - Back to the Future: New Poor, New Slums Likening the future of exurbs to the alternate Hill Valley in Back To The Future II. Most interesting if you read the comments too (tags: backtothefuture ex-urbs realestate urbandevelopment) Pitchfork: Exclusive: Bjork Talks Volta for the Very First Time All about percussion (tags: bjork interview music pitchfork) Jean Baudrillard | Obituaries | Guardian Unlimited A nice, if brief, overview of Baudrillard’s life and interests (tags: obituary philosopher) Ficlets | Welcome to Ficlets! ...

For a while now I’ve been realising that there are many, many links that I want to list here but don’t have time (or inclination) to write about in any detail. So as of today, I’ll be using del.icio.us to automatically post a summary of any links I’ve deemed blog worthy each day. Hopefully the blog will continue to contain more than just those postings, but during those times when I’m not writing much, it should still give me an easy way to flag up interesting, amusing, or otherwise diverting web content. ...

SafeJSON JSON parser An interesting (and very small) JSON parsing module for ruby. I’ve been looking for something better than passing it through a YAML library, but not as heavy (or as awkward to integrate with rails) as the various gems. (tags: json parser rubyonrails) Make ruby-mysql create less garbage This sounds like a pretty significant speed-up. It’s surprising the patch hasn’t been applied to the main library yet. (tags: mysql ruby) The Ruby Roundup ...

Wikileaks (via plasticbag) looks likely to be a really interesting site. Designed as a wiki that will let citizens of oppressive regime post leaked documents “anonymously and untraceably” it’s been set up by “Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.” The idea is to provide an online space where people can leak sensitive documents free of the fear of being found out and persecuted. ...