December 14th, 2006 |
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events
The call for proposals for XTech 2007 is closing this weekend. Last year’s conference was superb, and if you’ve got anything to say about making the web then you’ll definitely want to be part of next year’s lineup.
The theme for this year’s conference is “The Ubiquitous Web”. As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect to the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.
The technologies underpinning these developments include mobile devices, RFID, ultra-wideband, Second Life, location-aware services, Google Earth and more. The issues surrounding them include privacy, intellectual property, activism, politics, regulation and standards.
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December 10th, 2006 |
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Uncategorized
Nearly two years ago, I wrote a utility to check your del.icio.us tags for duplication using Porter stemming. Until today, the application had stopped working completely due to the fragility of the screenscraping code it was using. For fun, I’ve done a rewrite using Ruby and Hpricot, with all-new fragile screenscraping code based on the del.icio.us JSON feeds (thanks to Lenny Domnitser for pointer those out to me). I web-enabled it using Camping, a nice mini-framework for when webapps don’t need all the bells and whistles of Rails.
Here’s the result.
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December 9th, 2006 |
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Last month I went along to the Google Open Source Jam in London. It was a very entertaining evening with a great crowd. At the last minute I decided to give a quick show-and-tell on the work in progress at Nature.
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November 12th, 2006 |
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misc
This month my freelance work takes me to Nature Publishing Group to work on a new scientific project in Second Life. We’re not quite ready to talk about what we’re doing yet, but I’m so pleased with a bit of work in progress that I thought I’d put a teaser up here.
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October 9th, 2006 |
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events
It’s nearly time to return to London for a pause and a stretch. Since I quit my job at the BBC almost exactly a year ago, I’ve spent 4 months snowboarding, attended 6 conferences and spoken at 3 (LIFT06, ETech, SXSW, XTech, Railsconf and Foocamp), worked on at least 5 freelance contracts, lived in 3 different countries (France, Holland and the USA) and spent time in at least 5 others (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland). I’ve travelled more than 40,000 miles by air, taken a flight every 2 weeks on average, and probably met more people in one year than in all the previous years of my life put together.
Although it’s no substitute for simply avoiding wasteful airtravel, after doing the calculations for this post I paid for a 15,000 lbs CO2 carbon offset from TerraPass.
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August 13th, 2006 |
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events
UPDATE: video from the talk, expertly shot by Jyri Engestrom, is now available.
I’m heading to Helsinki in a few days for the next Thinglink workshop. My lovely hosts Ulla-Maaria and Jyri have organised a chance for me to give an Aula talk on “the Open Data Movement”. I’m honoured to be part of a series that has included Ben Cerveny, Henry Jenkins, Joi Ito and Lawrence Lessig.
Here’s the invitation:
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August 6th, 2006 |
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misc
The nice people at O’Reilly invited me to Foo Camp this year. On August 24th I’ll be packing up my bags and leaving Amsterdam for sunny California.
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August 2nd, 2006 |
Published in
rails
This week I’m doing some Rails consulting work for a company that’s already developed and deployed a major application. Getting to know a new codebase takes a little time and every diagram or visualisation helps. To help me understand their ActiveRecord model relationships, I knocked together a quick script to scan the associations between models and output it in the Graphviz DOT format.
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July 23rd, 2006 |
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metadata
The first Thinglink technical workshop took place in Amsterdam this month. Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and I spent an incredibly productive week at the Mediamatic offices thrashing out ideas that will form a Thinglink technical whitepaper over the next few months.
I’d like to highlight two things in particular that came out of this activity.
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July 14th, 2006 |
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Thanks to Tristan for pointing out a little snippet on the Phill Jupitus 6Music Breakfast Show this week. The Internet’s Dave Green talked a bit about my last.fm hack as part of his “zomg teh internets!” section.
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