Stemtags is back, thanks to Camping

December 10th, 2006  |  Published in 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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Video of a lightning-talk on my Second Life work for Nature

December 9th, 2006  |  Published in Uncategorized

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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A Second Life teaser

November 12th, 2006  |  Published in 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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Coming in to land

October 9th, 2006  |  Published in 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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Talk in Helsinki this week: the Open Data Movement

August 13th, 2006  |  Published in 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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Extended trip to San Francisco

August 6th, 2006  |  Published in 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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Using Omnigraffle to visualise Rails model associations

August 2nd, 2006  |  Published in rails  |  1 Comment

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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My first week with Thinglink

July 23rd, 2006  |  Published in 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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My last.fm hack discussed on BBC Radio

July 14th, 2006  |  Published in Uncategorized

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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RailsConf 2006 is over

June 25th, 2006  |  Published in events

RailsConf wrapped up this afternoon and I’m heading back to reality. Before I fly home to Amsterdam, I’m staying one night in actual downtown Chicago. It’s a great relief after so many nights in O’Hare Airportsville. Luckily the quality of the conference made up for the terrible location.

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