Posts

Continuous integration is key to good development practices if you’re a team any larger than, well… one. But spinning up a CI server is still an exercise fraught with peril.

Add in getting one up for Rails that can deal with Cucumber and capybara testing (needing a browser for js testing) and rspec and if you don’t have someone with solid sysadmin skills, most teams throw up their hands. Also, if you’re doing this for short duration projects (yeah, I’m looking at you RailsRumble and Hack weekends), you really want something that you can spin up or down at will and not have serious iron dedicated to doing this. We chose to put ours on Amazon’s EC2. We chose Hudson, a rather excellent java CI server despite my personal feelings about java (and also the excellent hudson ruby gem that makes running it locally no effort at all).

Most popular social networks worldwide for Dec 2010 by Vincenzo Cosenza (FB is the leader in 115 out of 132 countries analyzed).

I was surprised the other day talking to some tech friends who weren’t aware of Anonymous and especially were intrigued about how they managed to take down the sites of both MasterCard and Visa in response to their blocking funds (in my opinion, unethically, since Wikileaks nor Julian Assange have been convicted of any crimes) to Wikileaks. The friends hadn’t heard about the campaign Anonymous had conducted against Scientology and the RIAA either or, more importantly, the all powerful weapon in their arsenal, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon< or LOIC.

Great post on how not to cock up open data and how amazing it is to be even having a conversation about it at all.

1. Argue for it as a numbers game. Not all gov data sets will yield huge value, but some definitely will
2. Cease tinkering around and build something useful as a service
3. Obsessively gather information on what value is generated by people using the data
4. Keep an eye on public servants who might inadvertently share private or sensitive data
5. Mistakenly insisting that Government really should be in the business of publishing everything non-private it can

Great list actually. I really, really need to get down to some of those Gov 2.0 hack days going on in Canberra and Sydney.

One of the things I absolutely love about the iPad is all the mind blowing melding of interface and things you just never see combined like music, sound and visuals. OK, how can anyone not like fingerpainting sound? I mean, why have people not been screaming at me about this. So cool. Oh, and Singing Fingers is free. Download now . I am having much fun with it. Absolutely brilliant.

Oh, and works on the iPhone and iPad, but so much nicer on the iPad with the extra screen real estate.

Great campaign ad from FalseEconomy.co.uk on how the British government’s severe austerity choices are liable to stall the economy and make the crash worse rather than deal with some of the real issues we could use it to deal with - and also how those measures will unfairly impact the poor and average earners rather than those who caused the financial crash. Great video.

via GetUp’s Oli .

Every year, Reuters takes untold numbers of photos covering the news and every year they honour the best from amongst them. Here’s the 55 best for 2010 (note: some of these are quite graphic and depict suffering, so be forewarned). That said, some of these are brilliant and amazing. Love this one from Thailand, though tough pick between it, the guy in Mogadishu wit the sharp and the out of focus Chilean carrying the dog. Amazing.

Fascinating article on Germany , long derided as the sick man of Europe for its economy, got a lot of things right and is now the strongest economy in the world (well, second only to China, but hey, the DE only has 82M people vs. China’s 1B).

I do find it interesting as it brings together a couple of themes that I’ve seen recurring lately, the idea of the small, good businesses (mittelstand) which create real economic value even when they’re not trying to do billion dollar IPOs (most vehemently pushed by 37Signal’s DHH and JF) and a lot of what Umair Haque has been saying about America’s toxic economy full of value destroying, rather than creating, businesses being its problem. Too many people speculating, and shifting inflated value around rather than creating it themselves. And the focus on long term strategy for success, rather than short term tactics.

Fantastic interactive data animation of the scale of the universe you’re currently calling home. Pretty impressive effects. Move the slider back and forth to get a nice interpretation of everything from unimaginably infinitesimal quantum foam to DNA, through to the planets, our local supercluster and the estimated size of the whole thing. Very cool.

Even as a trained economist, I kind of keep wondering what the hell the Federal Reserve is doing in the States. Makes no sense though imagine they are trying to stave off a similar crisis that we’re seeing in Ireland and that is threatening to spread to the rest of Europe. Anyhow, if you’re confused by the whole thing, there’s nothing like cute cartoon animals to explain it to you. Bit long, but great.