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graphpaper.com - Back to the Future: New Poor, New Slums Likening the future of exurbs to the alternate Hill Valley in Back To The Future II. Most interesting if you read the comments too (tags: backtothefuture ex-urbs realestate urbandevelopment) Pitchfork: Exclusive: Bjork Talks Volta for the Very First Time All about percussion (tags: bjork interview music pitchfork) Jean Baudrillard | Obituaries | Guardian Unlimited A nice, if brief, overview of Baudrillard’s life and interests (tags: obituary philosopher) Ficlets | Welcome to Ficlets! ...

For a while now I’ve been realising that there are many, many links that I want to list here but don’t have time (or inclination) to write about in any detail. So as of today, I’ll be using del.icio.us to automatically post a summary of any links I’ve deemed blog worthy each day. Hopefully the blog will continue to contain more than just those postings, but during those times when I’m not writing much, it should still give me an easy way to flag up interesting, amusing, or otherwise diverting web content. ...

SafeJSON JSON parser An interesting (and very small) JSON parsing module for ruby. I’ve been looking for something better than passing it through a YAML library, but not as heavy (or as awkward to integrate with rails) as the various gems. (tags: json parser rubyonrails) Make ruby-mysql create less garbage This sounds like a pretty significant speed-up. It’s surprising the patch hasn’t been applied to the main library yet. (tags: mysql ruby) The Ruby Roundup ...

Wikileaks (via plasticbag) looks likely to be a really interesting site. Designed as a wiki that will let citizens of oppressive regime post leaked documents “anonymously and untraceably” it’s been set up by “Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.” The idea is to provide an online space where people can leak sensitive documents free of the fear of being found out and persecuted. ...

Geocoding Tool for Virtual Earth & Google Maps » Emad Fanous A geocoding API returning javascript calls that can be passed directly to the google maps API. Looks like it supports more locations than most of the (US-only) geocoders out there (tags: apis geocoding javascript) FirePHP - Firefox Extension for PHP Development Somehow lets you write scripts that will integrate PHP debugging into firebug. Looks overly complex for what I need right now, but it’s an interesting idea. ...

For a while now I’ve been wanting to set up one of those fancy del.icio.us posting things, whereby links I’ve added to my account during the day get posted to this blog each evening. But I use my del.icio.us account for a lot more than just topics that are covered here, and I don’t want to clutter it up. Nor did I want to have to switch between accounts to specify which links get posted where. ...

There’ve been some problems with the comment form on this site for the past couple of days (that’s what I get for not fully testing my tweaks to wordpress), which should now be resolved. So on the slight chance that someone may have been itching to comment and couldn’t, now’s your opportunity. Thanks to Brandon for pointing out the problem.

I’ve been waiting for quite some time to see Open Congress in action, so it was a little frustrating that various commitments mean it’s taken a few days to really explore it. The site gets much of its data from govtrack.us, but provides a more intuitive interface. The index of what’s going on in the US Congress can be explored in a variety of ways, going through bills, senators, representatives, committees, industries, and issues. The senator and representative navigation works pretty well, and its nice to have a feed for each one, but it would also be good to be able to navigate using a map or other visual device rather than having to switch to the state view and then scroll down to find the representative I’m interested in. ...

Another FFM promo spot is now up on youtube, and even though some detail is lost in the compression needed to get it onto youtube, I think it’s well worth a look whether you can make it to the festival or not. Enjoy! Tags: ffm2007, youtube

I’d been meaning to take a look at Ralf Wirdemann, Thomas Baustert, Florian Görsdorf and Adam Grove’s Restful Rails Development PDF for a few days, and time travelling over the weekend gave me that opportunity. I didn’t go through it all in great detail, as it’s fairly introductory material, but if you’re wondering how to get started with RESTful rails it provides a great overview to get you going. You can find it here. ...