Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Another piece of our promotional strategy for this year’s Festival of Faith and Music (a strategy which has registrations four times higher than last year’s total, with six weeks still to go!) is a short animated video by Karen and Peter. We like it a lot, but I don’t think I’d posted the link here as yet. You can, of course, find it on youtube. Tags: ffm2007
UPDATE: This post was written using Capistrano 1, which has since been superseded. An updated version—covering deployment of Drupal with Capistrano 2—can be found here. It’s easy to get spoiled building rails apps. Tools like migrations make it so much easier to keep databases in sync, the way environments are managed helps considerably, and there’s Capistrano which makes rapid deployments a breeze. I miss those things when I have to work with other systems. ...
Back in August I wrote about SmartPill PHP Edition. SmartPill PHP Edition is a plugin for the filemaker database that embeds the PHP engine, opening up a whole new world of flexibility and open source tools to Filemaker developers. For the past couple of months I’ve been working with Samuel Bowles and Micah Woods (President/Founder of Scodigo) to launch the Scodigo website, promoting that plugin and their other services. As befits a site promoting a PHP plugin, it’s PHP driven, using drupal for content management and ecommerce features, and a few custom modules that do things like generate licenses for SmartPill on the fly. If time allows, I may write up some notes on how we did that. ...
However much we buy into the adage that hardware is cheaper than developers, we all still need to make our code as responsive as possible. We tune the database, we refactor our code, and try to find the optimum balance between developer time, code legibility, and performance. In the process, many of us have found that rails’ rendering, particularly the Erb library is one of its slowest parts. Enter Erubis. ...
Slacktivist has a link to, and some salient commentary on the astonishing speech by House Minority leader John Boehner, in which he argued that the current ‘war on terror’ began with the US Embassy hostage taking in Iran in 1979. It’s a fairly obvious part of the ongoing propaganda build up that seems increasingly directed towards military action by the USA against Iran. But one thing Boehner opens himself up to is an immediate counterpoint that if we’re going to trace the conflict back to 1979, perhaps we could go one step further and look back to 1953 when the United States and the United Kingdom acted to stop the spread of democracy around the world with Operation Ajax. ...
Steve and Jonny both beat me to the punch, but that doesn’t reduce the value of linking to the video for Duke Special’s “Freewheel”. Duke Special’s sets at Delicatessen (our ‘acoustic night’ in Reading) were some of the highlights of running that event and it’s fantastic to see him/them winning such well deserved attention. One of the many things I’m looking forward to about moving back to the UK is getting to see them play more regularly.
There’s something going round, with people sharing the list of gems they have installed locally. To be honest, I’m not quite sure why, but I decided to join in and who knows? Maybe it’ll inspire me to write a little more about a few of my favourites?. So without further delay… abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.5) actionpack (1.13.2, 1.13.1, 1.13.0, 1.12.5) actionwebservice (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.0, 1.1.6) activerecord (1.15.2, 1.15.1, 1.15.0, 1.14.4) activesupport (1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.1) acts_as_searchable (0.1.0) acts_as_versioned (0.2.3) atom (0.3) builder (2.0.0) cached_model (1.3.1) calibre-bbcode (1.0.0) camping (1.5.180, 1.5) camping-omnibus (1.5.180) capistrano (1.4.0, 1.3.1, 1.2.0) cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.1, 2.0.2, 1.0.0) cheat (1.2.1) daemons (1.0.4, 1.0.3, 1.0.2, 1.0.1) ebayapi (0.9.4, 0.9.3) erubis (2.1.0) fastercsv (1.1.1, 1.1.0, 1.0.0) fastthread (0.6.3, 0.6.2, 0.6.1, 0.4) ferret (0.10.14, 0.10.13) flickr (1.0.0) gem_plugin (0.2.2, 0.2.1) gruff (0.2.8, 0.2.4, 0.1.2) hoe (1.1.7, 1.1.6, 1.1.2, 1.1.1, 1.1.0) hpricot (0.5, 0.4.92, 0.4) icalendar (0.98, 0.97) isbn-tools (0.1.0) json (0.4.2) libxml-ruby (0.3.8.4, 0.3.8) markaby (0.5) memcache-client (1.2.1, 1.2.0) metaid (1.0) mime-types (1.15) mofo (0.1.2) money (1.7.1) mongrel (1.0.1, 1.0, 0.3.17, 0.3.13.4) mongrel_cluster (0.2.1, 0.2.0) mt-capistrano (0.0.2) mysql (2.7) needle (1.3.0) net-sftp (1.1.0) net-ssh (1.0.10) paginator (1.0.8, 1.0.7, 1.0.1) parseexcel (0.5.1.1) piston (1.3.0, 1.2.1) production_log_analyzer (1.3.0) rails (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.0, 1.1.6) rails_analyzer_tools (1.1.0) rake (0.7.1) rcov (0.7.0.1) RedCloth (3.0.4, 3.0.3) rfm (0.1.0) rmagick (1.15.2, 1.15.0, 1.14.1, 1.14.0, 1.13.0) Rubilicious (0.2.0) ruby-openid (1.1.4, 1.1.3) ruby-prof (0.4.1) ruby-yadis (0.3.4, 0.3.3) rubyforge (0.4.0, 0.3.2, 0.3.0) rubyosa (0.2.0, 0.1.0) slave (1.2.0, 1.0.0) sources (0.0.1) sqlite3-ruby (1.2.1, 1.2.0, 1.1.0.1) streamlined_generator (0.0.5) tattle (1.0.1) termios (0.9.4) tzinfo (0.3.3) uuidtools (1.0.0) wirble (0.1.2) xml-mapping (0.8.1) xml-simple (1.0.10, 1.0.9) ZenTest (3.4.3)
Over the Festival of Faith and Music weekend, Sufjan Stevens will be playing two shows. The earlier show will be for festivalgoers only, while the second is a general public show and has sold out. In fact, it sold out so quickly that tickets can now be found on ebay. It’s somewhat amusing to see tickets for a show you’re involved with (and an artist you’ve watched come up from playing to much smaller audiences) being sold in this way, but also frustrating as it’s certainly not fair to those who become priced out of seeing their favourite artists. ...
I find much to enjoy in Orion Magazine, but sometimes there is an attitude within its agrarian approach which I find somewhat distasteful. That is a tendency to write off communication technology without seriously considering its context or the ways in which it can be channeled into positive uses. Lowell Monke’s piece " Charlotte’s Webpage: Children and Computers" is a case in point. While Monke is not entirely negative about the use of computers in education, he does leave half-developed research hanging and ignores contextual details that could run counter to his argument. For example early on in the article he notes: ...
This summer, my wife and I will be moving from Grand Rapids to the UK. That’s going to involve selling a lot of our belongings and, of course, our house. We decided that some of these much hyped web tools could be put to good use helping us out with that. So we pressed wordpress into even more use, and over at going… going… you can find a gradually developing listing of what we’d like other people to take off our hands. In a big step, I just listed our house on the site. ...