Blackkettle

So… first green fields Major Project in a while. It’s a Rails app, but I’m shifting to PostgreSQL and Amazon EC2/S3 for a bunch of it, so there’s going to be a fair amount of new learnings here.

It also feels slightly odd to be jumping back into Rails again. I’ve not done any new Rails work for a little while; the majority of my consulting has been on apps frozen at 2.1, so it’ll be good to be working on the fresh code-base.

I’ve shut down Other People Work for the next couple of weeks to get this project out of the door, although I reckon that what with various travel and visiting plans, I’ve only got about 2/3rds of that time to play with.

No time to hang around here blogging, there’s work to be done!

Wow.

Now I just need to generate some spare time to think through what’s possible with all this.

Also, intriguingly, the Ordnance Survey has released an API that mitigates my old post somewhat.

IWR Blog – information industry insight from www.iwr.co.uk – Individual Archives
and
The Graun

The Ordnance Survey, those charged with measuring the British Isles, seem to have a particularly backward view of the internet and the democratisation of content. For now, it’s really annoying. Genuinely white-hat projects are getting canned because the OS is stuck in the (relative) dark ages. Five years from now, it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Either they will have opened up, or they will have been supplanted as the primary open mapping service in the UK – if not over the whole UK then at least in London. In that time I expect Google to have photographed everything, and someone’s bound to come along and do something very clever with Photosynth to get high-accuracy metrics out of those images.

Even if it’s not Google that does it, the market pressure is high enough that someone is going to offer the service that the OS doesn’t want to, and it’s only going to get cheaper for them to do it as time goes on.

This is good for a giggle, from Metafilter:

Why FireFox is Blocked
How to block FireFox
FireFox is now blocked from this and many of my other sites

The short story: disgruntled webmaster blocks FireFox because he notices that AdBlock can’t be detected, because “Accessing the content while blocking the ads … would be no less than stealing.” Then he procedes to mount a mini-crusade against internet thieves

Bollocks to that.

Get it into your skulls, content providers: this is my computer, and I will decide what it does. If you decide that by exercising that right I shouldn’t be allowed access to your content, so be it, but please, drop the righteous indignation. Calling me a criminal is hardly likely to endear me to your cause.