Links from August 2010

Links for Monday 2 August 2010
Fantomas42's django-blog-zinnia at master - GitHub
Another Django weblog application.
A Vision of Britain through Time | Your national on-line library for local history | Maps, Statistics, Travel Writing and more
This is interesting. Seems to be a collection of historic texts and maps and data, all searchable by location. Some nicely done stuff.
If Britain decides to ban the burqa I might just start wearing one | David Mitchell | Comment is free | The Observer
All wonderfully, beautifully sensible. "It's not bigoted to disagree vociferously with people's choices, as long as you're even more vociferous in defending their right to make them."
Kung fu grippe — Making the Clackity Noise
"Make the clackity noise until a little story falls out. Just a little bit and just for a little while. Just until you notice one tiny, dumb, pointless story that the keyboard wanted you to remember."

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Links for Tuesday 3 August 2010
11 years old, on the pill and sexually active? The media loses the news again
I'm increasingly interested in the real stories behind shouty news headlines. The kind of background digging Ben Goldacre, and Dr Petra here, does with science reporting needs to be done with most stories. (via Alice)
The return of Expect: 100-continue « gnegg
I was sending data via a big POST request using PHP's curl and getting nothing back. I had to do this to fix it. (Wake up at the back!)
London cycle hire launch – live updates | UK news | guardian.co.uk
For Boris's Big Society gag and "If you can't turn the clock back to 1904 ladies and gentlemen, what is the point of being a Conservative?" (via Haddock)
keith flett (kmflett) on Twitter
Champion letter writer is on Twitter. Of course!

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Links for Wednesday 4 August 2010
Panic Blog » Coda Notes for Safari: Now Available!
That is very, very nicely done. And useful. (via Daring Fireball)
Songkick - Concerts, tour dates, and festivals for your favorite artists
Wow, a good, historical listing of gigs. I looked up a couple I went to in Bristol in the early 1990s and they were there (and easy to find). (via @tomtaylor)
Space Cadets - Charlie's Diary
Space colonisation would require a huge organised effort in an uninhabitable environment and so is "incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier." (via Warren Ellis)

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Links for Friday 6 August 2010
Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered « OOO
Fascinating look at a group of conservative Digg members who vote down Digg stories they disagree with. A few years ago this would be science fiction. (via Waxy)
The Twitter Phil Gyford Daily (Paper.li)
Paper.li is very interesting but... suffers from every problem I wrote about re finishability, readability, friction... I don't want to read any of it. It also obscures the context (the tweets).
WebFaction : Hosts : Djangofriendly
Sounds like a really good place to go for hosting Django websites. (Shame about the comment spam on the Djangofriendly site though.)
The Twitter Times: philgyford
Similar to Paper.li, things friends have linked to on Twitter. But... again, it assumes I'm more interested in the articles than what my friends say about them, the context. At least article text is inline, so quick to read.

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Links for Saturday 7 August 2010
Twist in the sale as Whitecross Street shops go for £3.5m | Islington Tribune
Those derelict shops/flats on Whitecross Street have been sold at auction.
Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty | Mother Jones
Fascinating to read about the "tea party-isation" of the Republican party, with more reasonable office-holders running scared. Scary, but fascinating. (via Daring Fireball)
10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source « Paul Irish
I generally dislike screencasts -- seems like an inefficient way to deliver information about code -- but this was pretty good.
Scaling startups
Chad Dickerson on how to grow while maintaining a startup culture. Hire well, IRC, deploy very frequently, experiment, love engineers, external transparency, embrace failure. (via Waxy)
Erwtenpeller - War of the Worlds - SoundCloud
"A dubstep mix retelling Jeff Wayne's musical version of war of the worlds, sampling the original narratives by Richard Burton, Phil Lynott and David Essex." I keep wanting to hear Jeff Wayne's music but this is very good. (via Meg)

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Links for Monday 9 August 2010
Django via fastCGI on Lighttpd | App Delegate Inc
This description of how to set it up sounds comprehensible.
The Sweeney Forum • View topic - London Wall
Stills from films/shows like 'Blow Up', 'The Italian Job' and 'The Return of the Saint' featuring London Wall and Barbican highwalks, compared with photos from 2010.

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Links for Tuesday 10 August 2010
My Large Google Maps tool
Not pretty, but handy for drawing polylines and shapes on Google Maps and getting the coordinates.
Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - Boing Boing
As @revdancatt said, news organisations should do features with custom designs, like Boing Boing have done with this one. Lovely. Interesting. Doesn't look like the front end to a database.
My Cooking Diary - Granola bars
Beautiful HTML/CSS/Javascript coverflow-like site that you're better off looking at than me trying to describe. (via Daring Fireball)

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Links for Wednesday 11 August 2010
HTML5 Boilerplate - A rock-solid default for HTML5 awesome.
Even if you don't use the whole thing, it's a nice collection of handy little JavaScript/CSS/.htaccess techniques in one place.
London Cycle Hire Explorer
Tom Taylor's nice site for exploring data about London's cycle hire stations - graphs showing their activity over time.
BLDGBLOG: On the Road Again
A bunch of links that, while fascinating, you shouldn't read if you're feeling at all pessimistic about things. This isn't the future I was hoping for.

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Links for Friday 13 August 2010
The best five books on everything | FiveBooks
"Every day an eminent writer, thinker, commentator, politician, academic chooses five books on their specialist subject. From Einstein to Keynes, Iraq to the Andes, Communism to Empire. Share in the knowledge and buy the books." Interesting. (via @suegyford)

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Links for Sunday 15 August 2010
DecisionLab » FacilitationCamp
Next Friday and Saturday in Vauxhall. Might be interesting / useful? (via @wendyinfutures)
The Online Photographer: The Best Photography How-To Books
Excellent, a short list of practical photography book recommendations by someone who knows their stuff.
This Window: Close It - Safari 5 Port of Helvetireader
Helvetireader as a Safari Extension, yum. The version of Helvetireader I'd been using was quite old; the latest one is gorgeous.
LRB · Rebecca Solnit · Diary
If you're feeling too happy, well worth a read. "A bayou redneck told him: 'Osama fuckin’ bin Laden could not have imagined, planned or executed more devastation than BP has.'"
BeaTunes ~ build better playlists
Interesting metadata editor/finder for music in your iTunes library. Can also do some kind of Genius-like playlist creation.
When Internet businesses don't work out as planned... | Ask MetaFilter
I'm fascinated (and horrified) by this kind of "Internet business" which... does nothing but SEO, "content generation", ads, auctions... what's it *for*?
The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music: Issues
Search the page for links to seven articles (and an introduction) by Simon Reynolds from 1992-2005 on the "hardcore continuum".
Energy Flash
More from Simon Reynolds on "the Hardcore Continuum".
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture | Reynolds: The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate
More Simon Reynolds to read after that last lot, looking back at debates over The Hardcore Continuum. (via Beyond the Beyond)
Instapaper: Simon Reynolds (Phil Gyford)
I put all those Simon Reynolds articles in a folder in Instapaper and here's the RSS feed. (I'm phil@gyford.com on Instapaper, btw, but don't use it a *huge* amount.)

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Links for Monday 16 August 2010
I have tried to be happy with django, I really have. : django
I'm finding this quite reasoned discussion about what's good/bad about Django really interesting.
William Gibson on 'Zero History' in London, October 2010 - Intelligence Squared
Click, booked. (via @moleitau)

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Links for Thursday 19 August 2010
BBC - About the BBC: BBC Genome: The Complete Broadcast History of the BBC
Wonderful - the BBC is OCRing and making computer-readable, all the programme listings from the 'Radio Times' going back to 1922. (via @catfunt)
ESPN - OTL: The Franchise - E-ticket
I like American football but have never played Madden (until trying the demo this evening). I enjoyed this article about the history of the game, and trying to make the first version work on early consoles.

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Links for Sunday 22 August 2010
OCA TAoP Assignment 3: Neighbourhood - a set on Flickr
A set of lovely photos of Walton-on-the-Naze, better than the usual holiday snapshots that crop up there. Very British Seaside.
Extremist Makeover - Homeland Edition - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 08/19/2010 - Video Clip | Comedy Central
On the "ground zero" mosque nonsense. Even better than usual. (But video won't play in UK. Why can't I show this to people? How is this good for the Daily Show?)

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Links for Tuesday 24 August 2010
Setting Up Twitter Bots with OAuth | maSnun's logs
Least baffling description I've read. Phew. (via Infovore)
Why trust Facebook with the future’s past? — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard
Twitter and Facebook are storing what will be our history, but it's not accessible. (Which is why I have my own public archive of my Twitters, and rarely use Facebook.) (via Preoccupations)
OCAD - Graduate Studies - MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation
I hadn't heard of this Master of Design at the Ontario College of Art & Design. Interesting.

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Links for Tuesday 31 August 2010
What's the best way to structure large JavaScript/jQuery projects? - Quora
I asked a question on Quora and had some helpful responses.
YouTube - BBC Town Planning Programme circa 1961
Featuring the Barbican area, London Wall, etc. A shame the clip is so short. More, more!
YouTube - Tour of the lifts at the Barbican estate walkways
Er... good?
YouTube - Look at Life - Top People, 1960
Men in flat caps without harnesses working high above the City of London (Golden Lane Estate, London Wall, etc). Lots more 'Look at Life' on the right, too.

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