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High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Where is OpenID Mobile? Good question (tags: authentication mapufacture mobile mobileweb oauth openid)

Right at the start of Pro Active Record the authors address a possible problem some may have with it: that there’s not enough in Active Record to warrant a full book. They point out that the basics are well covered as sections elsewhere but that this is the first book to really dig into working with legacy schema and other ‘advanced’ uses. That’s fair enough, but after reading the book I am still left with the question of why, then, they dedicate the first half to covering ActiveRecord’s most basic concepts? ...

Profiles: Stealing Life: The crusader behind “The Wire”: The New Yorker This piece contains spoilers about seasons 1-4 of The Wire. Which, in case I’ve not raved about it enough already, is probably my favourite television show. (tags: davidsimon thenewyorker thewire)

GeoX is the latest kid on the Ruby on Rails geocoding block. The plugin was announced a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to explore it ever since, just in case it had any new features and also so that I can add it to my comparison chart. The feature set of GeoX is fairly straightforward. It supports a number of geocoding back ends: obviously google and yahoo are covered, but also mapquest’s relatively recent API. The standard lookup process is much like that provided by several other plugins—the sample given is: ...

It took quite a while but a couple of weeks I finally finished uploading all the photos from our big trip this summer. They’re all on flickr, organised into five ‘collections’. You can find them at: Leaving Grand Rapids, Chicago and the Bay Area New Zealand Australia South-East Asia China and Mongolia The South-East Asia collection in particular is very large as it takes in the wonders of Angkor. ...

FaceForce: Facebook Meets Salesforce.com Connecting salesforce with facebook to dynamically update CRM data. (tags: crm facebook mashup salesforce) XML.com: jQuery and XML As the name suggests: using jquery to work with XML (tags: javascript jquery parsing xml) Last.fm – the Blog · Spot the difference Unsurprisingly, the last.fm top 10 tracks for last week is identical to the track listing of ‘In Rainbows’ (tags: charts inrainbows last.fm radiohead)

Guy Holmes seems to have a weird take on selling records. In a piece at the Guardian about his label Gut’s experiment with releasing a single on a hybrid vinyl/CD disc he comments: The music business desperately, desperately needs to invent new formats; the CD is an antique, it’s 20 years old. With little context available it’s hard to tell why, exactly, he thinks the industry needs a new format, but my guess is he’s been looking at the figures for the bubble the music industry experienced while consumers switched from cassette and LP to CD and wants to experience them again. ...

John Gruber comments in his usual incisive way on the claims that Universal Music are looking to start their own subscription service called Total Music. For a variety of reasons, not only the technical and financial ones that John details, the plan seems like the flailing about we’ve become used to hearing from an industry staring into an abyss and refusing to acknowledge the numerous bridges all around. The original Business Week piece contains an amusing quote from Irving Azoff, who says: ...

As a rails developer most of my experience with javascript libraries has been with prototype and scriptaculous, but I’ve never been quite happy with them. The helper methods built into ActionView make simple tasks a breeze, and I’ve played with the UJS plugin to improve the separation of content and behaviour, but even then the weight of the libraries and the comparable simplicty of tasks like iteration offered by jQuery has always made the grass over there look quite a bit greener. ...

A little blogging inertia seems to have set in over the past few months and it seems a bit late to comment on Radiohead’s approach to releasing their new album. Instead, now that the dust is settling, it seems a good time to connect it up with some commentary my friend Steve has been offering over on his blog. Steve has been doing a lot of thinking about things like the emotional connections people make with music and what the change of experience from queuing outside a record shop to freely downloading means for how people value music something that, as an independent musician, is of quite immediate importance to him. When we have a constant flow of free or nearly-free new music washing over us, it suffers from some of the same attention problem that many of us have faced since RSS allowed us to theoretically track many hundreds of web sites but we didn’t have the tools to work out how to prioritise that and what could simply be left behind. ...