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The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone On how compression is killing the emotional impact of pop music. (tags: audio compression mp3 music musicindustry) Obama’s Wide Net How Barack Obama’s campaign are organising successfully online (tags: campaigning obama presidentialrace uspolitics) David Byrne Journal: 01.09.2007: Correction? Some responses to David Byrne’s Wired article, arguing that you can’t really “make an album for nothing”. (tags: davidbyrne futureofmusic musicindustry recording) RubyForge: Starling: Project Info “Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.” ...

Pandora To Shut Down UK Streaming Rights issues are bringing Pandora’s UK service to an end. I’ve never been a big Pandora user, but this is clearly more evidence that the whole international licensing model needs fixing soon. (tags: internationalisation musicindustry onlineradio pandora streaming) If all your friends jumped off of a bridge… at Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar " If a piece of social software causes people who do not choose to use it to become ostracized, there is a serious flaw in that piece of software." and “I hope that the future of the net lies not with mega-networks like Facebook, but with m ...

a little bit of zeank » JSJaC A JavaScript Jabber client (tags: chat jabber javascript) beatnikblog » Erlang-style concurrency with JavaScript 1.7 There’s some really impressive JavaScript work popping up at the moment (tags: concurrency erlang javascript) Flickr to Authenticate OpenID - Is This The Yahoo! CES Announcement? - ReadWriteWeb It seems like flickr will soon become an OpenID provider. It’d be nice if they also let you log in using your existing OpenIDs. (tags: flickr openid yahoo) Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection ...

Red Artisan: Attachment_fu magic with Core Image and Ruby Cocoa! Good stuff. RubyCocoa makes me wish I deployed to an OS X server (tags: attachment_fu coreimage imageprocessing rubycocoa rubyonrails)

Sam Ruby: Ruby 1.9 Strings — Updated A useful explanation of some of the details of how Ruby 1.9 handles unicode (tags: ruby strings unicode)

It’s very clear from posts on the rails email list that there’s space for books that take the novice developer beyond what they learn in beginners’ books like Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails. Those books will help you build your first app and get a sense of the structure of Rails but before long you’ll want to write code that needs to be reusable between models, or across projects, or to interface with services other than databases. The beginners’ books, by definition, don’t deal with intermediate topics. That’s the niche Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development sets out to fill, but sadly it doesn’t offer much beyond those beginners’ guides. ...

Music in China: The Inside Story | The Register An exploration of the music industry in a very different culture. One striking anecdote: apparently the Chinese version of pop idol terrified the Chinese authorities because of the level of participation in its “democratic” decision making (tags: china musicindustry) BenCurtis.com » Painless Rails action caching with memcached One of a number of pieces building on Tobias Lütke’s suggestion that the best way to do cache expiry is not to expire a cache. ...

With PHP 5.3 looking very close to release, bringing with it significant changes such as namespaces, this is an awkward time to release a PHP book of any generality. Within a few months it will be clearer how well the new features are taking hold and there is almost certainly going to be a clamour for books that show how new features affect development practices and how to make use of them. Even without that, it is hard to recommend this book as it fails to live up to its promise and provides a poor introduction to Object-Oriented programming. ...

Josh Owens » Rails Edge Change: How to add a counter cache to an existing db table Counter cache attributes are protected in rails 2.0 so you need to use slightly different syntax to update them manually/in a migration (tags: countercache rails2.0 rubyonrails) BBC NEWS | Technology | Weblogs rack up a decade of posts We’ve now had 10 years (and a few days) of blogging, apparently. (tags: blogging) Premailer — preflight for HTML e-mail — dunae.ca ...

If you’ve encountered Ruby primarily through Rails and know it chiefly as an elegant tool for writing web applications it’s easy to miss its longer history as a tool for systems administration. Before Rails made Ruby the language-du-jour sysadmins bore much of the responsibility for keeping it alive, with the result that it has a suite of libraries helpful for server monitoring and a range of other administrative tasks. Author André Ben Hamou is clear that his book is not an exhaustive guide to using Ruby for systems administration. Rather than try to cover every possible context he provides an introduction to the language and some of its key libraries intended to give a feel for how it might be used and why it leads to succinct and expressive solutions. A number of the more important libraries for working with network protocols and files are covered, and there’s a good introduction to rubygems and how they can be used and created. ...