Posts

I have to admit to have become more and more enamoured of heroku for production class hosting of Rails and Ruby applications. It makes things pretty painless (see my first post on gotchas for my first deploy there) and for Nunemaker’s rather strong sentiment, You’re An Idiot for Not Using Heroku .

It does kick ass if you’re getting stuff up fast, but if you’re moving into more serious production environments with multiple devs and you also need a staging environment, the simple git heroku push master gets to be too simple. You really need something capistrano -esque for managing deployment even to heroku.

Fantastic Do lecture from “Vagabonding”’s Rolf Potts, traveller extraordinaire, on taking some lessons from approaching travel to how you should live your real life. Definitely worth your time to watch the whole thing.

Best quote: “Life does not reward you with free time, you need to create it.”

Let’s face it, no one really knows what scientists mean when they refers to a one metre rise in sea levels. Information is beautiful tries to make it clear for everyone through the Guardian’s Data Blog .

Just wondering where Vancouver and Sydney would rank on the graph.

Fantastic presentation from Derek Silvers’ 3 minute TED talk.

The best way to start a movement is to be that first follower.

Leveraging the total and well justified outrage at the banks over their massive bailouts, The Robin Hood Tax project rebrands the Tobin Tax idea (and prior to that Keynes’ idea of a tax on all financial transactions) to try to divert bailout money and questionably speculative activity (rather than wealth creation) to assist in social causes, combatting climate change and other social priorities.

Totally love this idea, even as a former economist. I’d love to see it pushed despite practical difficulties. Oh, and absolutely fantastic performance by Bill Nighy in the Curtis directed short (and how can you not love seeing the Gherkin in the background?).

Missed this video when it was making the rounds a while back. Interesting way of viewing the history of human rights, but I think its initial question that is posed is a valid one; how many of us could name the human rights we and the rest of the people on the planet are heir to ?

via my brother (of all the people you’d never think would send something like this.)

My new place is moving from being a startup to having to put in places some things you need for the longer term running of a charity. So, I’ve been fiddling with a few apps. I’d deployed one which works perfectly in dev and test and one of my staff, when I said i was about to spin up an EC2 instance to host it, mentioned it was small enough we could run probably run it for free on the everyone-gushes-about-it Heroku (which is something I’ve thought about some of my other personal apps).

OMG, this is awesome. Yeah, ok so that first degree of mine is in Economics and Political Science, so I’m totally geeking out on this, but it’s actually really good as well as theoretically accurate. So, listen close.

If you don’t know anything about economics, the scary thing you should take away from this is how heavily opposed in advice these two approaches are and that supporting one or the other is fundamentally a question, when you strip everything down to fundamentals, of belief. Pretty spooky, huh ?

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.

Most astute thing I’ve heard about Apple’s success yet.

While I think it may be a wee bit over the top, you have to love Umair Haque’s latest “The Builder’s Manifesto” on the need for Builders instead of Leaders. Definitely an idea here.

This relationship isn’t working out. Its time for us to explore other government opportunities. We’ve tried to make it work. But it’s not us — it’s you (really).

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately. Specifically: why, today, when a wave of crises is sweeping the globe, does leadership seem to be almost totally absent?