Blog posts

Documenting the hypocrisies of the Bush administrations claims about “spreading democracy” in the Middle East can be a thankless task, and to do so on an ongoing basis would quickly become repetitive and dull. Every now and again, however, it’s time for an article covering that ground and providing a sense of what democracy might actually mean on the ground in the Middle East. Ken Silverstein’s “Parties of God” in Harpers’ March 2007 issue is just such a survey and well worth reading for a more nuanced understanding than is otherwise readily available. Hopefully it’ll be online soon. ...

It seems DHH is hopping on the OpenID bandwagon, and that the next 37signals app will allow openid-based authentication. He’s talking about releasing his code as a plugin, so maybe I won’t need to find the time. For those following the OpenID buzz, Simon Willison’s cool things you can build with OpenID is well worth reading to begin to get a sense of the new opportunities opened up once we have unique IDs for users that map between sites. And the comments on this post at Tim Bray’s site may help people with some lingering questions. ...

I’ve used Site5 for a couple of PHP sites, and they were one of the earlier entrants onto the rails hosting scene, so when I recently needed to find hosting to recommend to a new client they seemed worth a try. Like dreamhost, about whom I wrote a few days ago, they use a basic apache/fcgi setup for serving rails applications, but so far it’s felt like processes can be killed a bit more reliably, making deployment a little easier than it is at dreamhost. I’ve not really pushed the servers, but they’ve seemed pretty responsive so far. This is another app which can be fairly heavily cached, so that helps. ...

I’ve read through Gavin Bell’s slides from his BarCamp London 2 presentation " Time, History and the Internet" a couple of times now, and they’ve certainly provided food for thought. Gavin’s asking questions about how we describe and search for content based on both its own time of origin, but also the events to which it refers. His references to documentation around the current war in Iraq are probably easiest to digest, how do we distinguish between reporting from 2002, reporting about 2002, and information from 2002 that has only come to light in 2006 or 2007? How do we show the build up of information, the layering of understanding, in a now-centered internet culture. ...

In an effort to tidy up various older projects that were never quite completed, I’ve turned my attention to my first PEAR module Services_Technorati. It’s a very simple wrapper around the Technorati API, but the PHP4 version never reached a stable release as it depended on some other packages which were also never stabilised. So it seemed time to make the simple step of converting the code to be PHP5-only and use simplexml for their XML parsing. That removes the dependencies which were slowing me down, and should result in improved speed along the way as the XML parsing is now handled in C rather than PHP. I just released 2.0.0alpha1, but the code should be pretty stable and I’m hoping to run through the steps and get a stable release out very soon. ...

By far the most popular (and most versatile) plugin for working with payment gateways from rails is ActiveMerchant. I’ve used it in a couple of places, and it’s been a joy to work with, apart from one slip-up which was largely due to inadequate documentation. So I’m very pleased to note that they’ve release their 1.0 and launched a website, which bodes well for improved documentation and support.

I had an email the other day asking about my experiences with a particular shared hosting company (not dreamhost). I’ve worked my way through a few companies for smaller projects, and thought I’d throw some thoughts out there. Dreamhost are one of the cheaper hosting outfits around, and seem to inspire either love or hate, depending on your experiences. Their setup for rails is apache+fcgi, which isn’t the optimal configuration, but works well enough for a low-demand application or one where a lot of content can be cached. ...

I don’t know quite what to say about the ongoing belligerence on the part of the USA towards Iran. If they’re not stopped by disclosures that Dick Cheney rejected an offer Iran made four years ago that would have satisfied all their public demands, then I fear there’s not much that can be done to prevent the administration from using Iraq as a launching pad for an invasion of Iran. This story at Kos’ place didn’t help (via Ed in email) ...

The buzz about OpenID keeps building, and with the announcement that all AOL/AIM users now automatically have OpenIDs it doesn’t look set to slow down any time soon. For those who’re not familiar with the concept, OpenID is a distributed single sign-on system that lets you set up one account and then log in to any OpenID compliant site using that account. For a better introduction, check out this screencast from Simon Willison. ...

In Input formats and content types in Rails 1.2 I mentioned a project I’ve been working on that will provide a RESTful service interface which accepts its input in a number of formats, including microformatted HTML. For certain types of data microformats provide a great way to receive input as they don’t require your clients to learn a new schema to send you data. They can take the same semantically rich HTML they’re displaying on their website and POST it to your endpoint. Or they can use a tool like Ryan King’s hcalendar creator to generate some sample input. ...