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A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter— Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore. ...

Thoughtbot have released a suite of plugins over the past few months that are enlivening the fields of Ruby on Rails file attachments ( paperclip) and authentication ( clearance), long dominated by Rick Olson’s attachment_fu and restful_authentication. You can see some previous posts about attachment_fu here and here. I’ve been playing with paperclip on a couple of projects, including one which was previously using attachment_fu. That necessitated some work migrating the previous attachments. Opinions are divided on whether data should be transformed in migrations or in separate libraries, and I’d rather remain agnostic on that, but I whipped together some code that can be used either in migrations or an external library to make the transfer. ...

I’m currently building a site where users will enter details of books and music they’re listening to and we want to provide lists of that on their profile and also find ways of matching users based on those choices. We’re looking at a number of ways of doing that, including matching based on genre, and in order to achieve that I needed a way to identify the genres for their listed books and music. ...

UPDATE: The camera has now been sold Having recently upgraded to the wonderful Canon EOS 50D I’m looking for a new home for my old 400D (actually the US version: the Digital Rebel XTi). I’ve taken about 15,000 photos with it and it was a great introduction to the world of digital SLRs. Despite all that use, it’s in really good shape and will come complete with a 2GB memory card, a spare (non-Canon, but perfectly fine) battery, strap, 18-55mm kit lens, and US and UK chargers, all in the original box. ...

UPDATE: The item has now been sold Having recently upgraded to the wonderful Canon EOS 50D I’m looking for a new home for my old 400D (actually the US version: the Digital Rebel XTi). I’ve taken about 15,000 photos with it and it was a great introduction to the world of digital SLRs. Despite all that use, it’s in really good shape and will come complete with a 2GB memory card, a spare (non-Canon, but perfectly fine) battery, strap, 18-55mm kit lens, and US and UK chargers, all in the original box. ...

Elisabeth Soraya Clare Stewart, born 7.13pm on December 4th. Mother and baby (and father) all doing well. Being in the hospital, witnessing the birth, and just living through the past few days have been wonderful and fascinating. Elisabeth permitting, I may just have to write a few notes on this neglected blog next week.

In the name of closing a few tabs, here are a few of my favourite post-US-election links: The Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” blog is often excellent. They had a really nice selection of photos of President-Elect Obama. Jason Kottke collected a whole variety of electoral maps The Guardian collected many-a-homepage to show how sites around the world reported the results and of course the flickr set showing the First-Family-to-be watching the results roll in

As I’ve mentioned here before, when working on web applications built with PHP, whether custom-rolled or drupal-driven, I often find myself missing various tools from the ruby kit. I’ve talked before about using capistrano with non-ruby code, but lately it’s been rspec and its stories that I’ve been craving. I’m aware of PHPSpec and have played with it from time to time, but the lack of a compelling way to work with mocks/stubs has slowed my adoption, and last time I checked it didn’t offer anything for high level user stories. So this week I set out to harness cucumber and webrat to write some simple stories. ...

The third in our series of Ambridge Acoustic Revues was another roaring success. Noting the date, Rob had suggested we adopt a Day of the Dead theme and decked the building out in fine style. And for a special treat Garry created a fabulous puppet to greet people on the door. Jon and Phil, our usual house band, were off on tour with Beth Rowley, giving the evening a slightly different feel. Jez kindly stepped in on drums, and Foy Vance joined a couple of the others to lend some bass to their tunes. Hayley, Jon, Foy, and of course Iain played well, and all in all it was immensely enjoyable. We hope to have another one ready to announce in the next couple of days. ...

I’d listened to a few reviews and didn’t go into this latest Coen Brothers film with high expectations but having enjoyed every one of their previous films (except, perhaps, their Ladykillers remake) and considering myself a committed fan I’d hoped to see something the reviewers had missed. Or at least enjoy a riotous, if inconsequential, romp along the lines of Intolerable Cruelty. But no. Forty minutes in I was pulling out my phone wondering how much longer there was to go. Most of the time I just watched in disbelief as lines came and went that were clearly intended to be jokes but just fell flat. There was another hour or so before we could leave. It was quite a comedown after No Country For Old Men and I left with my faith in the Coens deeply shaken. ...