links for 2008-01-27

geobloggers » The overdue Places post II - Prototyping Iconicness Dan Catt talks about the process of building flickr’s Places feature (tags: api flickr geotagging prototyping) Send files faster with X-Sendfile | John Guenin A good overview of how the X-Sendfile can help rails apps send files for download without taking up mongrel processes. Since this was written native support has been added to Rails. (tags: filetransfer http mongrel rubyonrails server x-sendfile) Living on the Edge (of Rails) #3 - X-Sendfile and many other sexy enhancements ...

January 27, 2008

links for 2008-01-25

John Resig - HTML5 DOCTYPE It seems that IE7 will allow you to style elements it doesn’t ordinarily recognise if you create an instance of them using JS. John’s pondering whether that means IE7 can be forced to handle HTML5. (tags: doctype html5 ie7 javascript webstandards) stevenberlinjohnson.com: Outside.in and The Washington Post outside.in’s content will now appear on the Post’s website, and vice versa. A sensible connection. (tags: localisation maps newspapers washingtonpost) Version Targeting and JavaScript Libraries — All in the head ...

January 25, 2008

links for 2008-01-25

Calvin students protest Isom decision - The Grand Rapids Press We’ve been watching this situation sadly. Glad to see students acting! (tags: calvincollege grandrapids racialjustice)

January 25, 2008

No Country For Old Men

I’d been looking forward to No Country For Old Men for quite some time. Having been rather disappointed by their remake of The Ladykillers I was anxious for something to remind me why I love the films of the Coen Brothers. An adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel seemed just about perfect for them. One of the reasons I thought this might work for the Coens was actually hidden in Jamie’s recent comment (on the book) that: ...

January 24, 2008

links for 2008-01-22

Consultation Feeds “This site, which is very much a work in progress, indexes the details of government consultations from the various websites upon which they’re published.” (tags: consultation egovernment feeds governmentit) Support for BDD and Stories in PHPUnit 3.3 - Sebastian Bergmann PHPUnit is getting BDD support, but the syntax doesn’t look very inviting… (tags: bdd php phpunit testing) mnot’s Web log: Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts) There’s a lot of talk about how we describe RESTful services at the moment ...

January 22, 2008

Book Review: Pro Javascript Design Patterns

According to wikipedia: In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Object-oriented design patterns typically show relationships and interactions between classes or objects, without specifying the final application classes or objects that are involved. Algorithms are not thought of as design patterns, since they solve computational problems rather than design problems. ...

January 20, 2008

links for 2008-01-20

Graceful Exits » FixMySpine Why an overblown government project would have been a lot better had it been built by/followed the approach of mySociety. (tags: enterprise governmentit mysociety nhs) ‘No one in government IT will have done this before’ | Technology | The Guardian A report on the Power of Information Review barcamp (tags: barcamp governmentit opendata powerofinformation) ruby-dtrace’s ruby-dtrace-0.0.4 Documentation Ruby bindings for dtrace. Could be handy for tuning code. It’d be nice to see it also make it easier to work out the trace commands. ...

January 20, 2008

links for 2008-01-20

WorldChanging: Making Angkor’s Tourism Sustainable I was very concerned by the scale of the hotel developments when we visited Angkor this summer. Glad to see that some thought is being given to responses. (tags: angkor cambodia sustainability) YouTube - Radiohead at 93 Feet East “Radiohead’s live performance at 93 Feet East on 16 January 2008. Includes all the songs from In Rainbows, plus You And Whose Army, The National Anthem, My Iron Lung, The Bends and a Thom Yorke solo version of Up On A Ladder.” ...

January 20, 2008

links for 2008-01-16

jQuery: » jQuery 1.2.2: 2nd Birthday Present It’s always nice having spent a day working on some code to find the key library getting significant speed boosts the next day. (tags: javascript jquery performance) Obie Fernandez: About Rails and Ghettos A well balanced response to Zed Shaw’s notorious recent rant. Obie doesn’t deal with the technical issues Zed raised, but helps provide some context. (tags: ruby rubyonrails zedshaw) Changeset 8637 - Rails Trac - “Allow users to declare other namespaces when using the atom feed helpers” ...

January 16, 2008

Book Review: Practical Ruby Gems

For those who aren’t aware, ruby gems refers a way of packaging up code so it can be easily distributed for other developers to use, and a tool to help with the distributing and/or installing that code. Find out more at wikipedia. On first glancing at this book, I wondered how you could fill a full-length book on the topic of gems. While getting the tools installed on some systems requires care, and there’s space for a couple of chapters on packaging your own libraries as gems, both topics have been covered alongside other topics in numerous volumes. What I’d missed was that contents not only covers both of those topics, but also looks at 26 different gems and explains how you might use them in your projects. ...

January 14, 2008