Blog posts

For at least the past two years around Oscar time I’ve bemoaned the fact that it’s so hard to get access to short films, even those nominated for Academy Awards. Last year Apple picked up some of the slack by making a few of the films available for download through iTunes, but this year there’s a more interesting offering. Oscar Torrents provides summaries of all the nominated films and links to torrents (the files you can feed into bittorrent software, see wikipedia for an introduction) or youtube pages for the films. Not every film is available, but there are enough to give anyone a good overview of what’s up for awards. ...

Moving from Grand Rapids to the UK, as we’re doing this summer, is going to involve selling a lot of our belongings and, of course, our house. We decided that a good way to do that would be to set up a new blog. So 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. ...

Wednesday’s post on acts_as_locateable didn’t do much to explain what the patch to the plugin’s methods was doing to allow us to pass extra arguments to ActiveRecord#find. The secret is in the *, or array argument. A normal method will have a fixed number of arguments: def simple_method(first, second, third) puts "#{first} : #{second} : #{third}" end simple_method('one', 'two', 'three') >> one : two : three and sometimes we can develop that by allowing default values for those arguments: ...

After upgrading to Wordpress 2.1, I patched the code behind this blog to support Atom 1.0, but apparently a few pieces didn’t go in the right places. So apologies to anyone who may have been waiting on updates that never came. I’ve made some changes, and hopefully normal service can now be resumed.

iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that scans your library and produces a list of upcoming concerts that you may be interested in. It attempts to detect your city from your IP address, but that can be overridden, and the calendar itself is provided as an iTunes visualiser. The iConcertCal installer has been sitting on my desktop for a few days now, awaiting a chance to be used, so it was finally time to give it a whirl. ...

There have been quite a few geographically-themed Rails plugins emerging over the past few months and I decided it was time to try out acts_as_locateable. Acts_as_locateable is based on ZipCodeSearch. It loads in a database mapping US zip codes to coordinates and then adds convenience methods to ActiveRecord objects that let you search by distance. eg. Event.find_within_radius(50, '49503') will return all events within 50 miles of me. What the standard plugin doesn’t allow is the passing in of more search parameters. So if I wanted to limit that search to future events I’d have to retrieve all the results and iterate over them. In a large system that could be very inefficient. ...

I have to confess that we were a little disappointed to hear on the radio the other night that Beijing have announced plans to crack down on poorly translated (into English) signs in the run-up to the Olympics. We were looking forward to seeing such signs when we visit this summer. Thankfully, it seems like Malaysia Airlines are extending some sympathy. I’ve been having consistent problems with 500 errors on their website, so emailed them to suggest they might like to fix it. A few seconds later, I got this delightful automatic response: ...

One feature of recent releases of Rails I hadn’t spotted before is the ability to define your own parameter parsing based on content type. I’m working on an application that will employ a RESTful API and that I hope will take its input in either standard http parameters, microformatted HTML, XML or JSON. I don’t really want to have to write custom code within the controllers to interpret the input based on content type, so I started looking for how rails parses XML input and came across the following in the actionpack changelog: ...

The New York Times on Monday carried a piece by Robert Sullivan arguing that New York City is falling behind other North American cities (and certainly other major global cities) when it comes to being accessible on foot and by public transport. It rings true, though I don’t know New York well enough to really engage. Of particular interest is the paragraph that begins: Then there is Grand Rapids, Mich., which has a walkable downtown with purposely limited parking and is home to a new bus plaza that is part of a mass transit renaissance in Michigan. The state is investing in high-speed trains, and it is even talking about a mass transit system for the nation’s auto-capital, Detroit, where a new pedestrian plaza anchors downtown. ...

Having very much enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth on Sunday, I was pleased to hear the creative mind behind it, Guillermo Del Toro, interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air this lunchtime. The interview’s a good one and can be heard here. Tags: pan’s layrinth, guillermo del toro, npr, fresh air, terry gross