I’ve been thinking about templating systems a lot recently. By templating systems I mean technologies that allow you to mix some data with some fixed text to produce some kind of output. One obvious use is in creating dynamic web pages where, for example, you would create a row in a table for each item… Continue reading Templating Systems
Category: tech
Social Dilemmas
It’s always the same isn’t it? You wait all year for a decent geek night out and then two come along at once. So where shall I go on December 12th? London 2.0 or the Backstage meet-up. Decisions, decisions…
Unreliable Authors
Have you ever been reading something that you are enjoying when suddenly you come across something which is so stupid that you lose all confidence in the author and can no longer take anything they write seriously? It happened to me this morning as I was reading the introduction to Open Source 2.0. In the… Continue reading Unreliable Authors
Dixonsvision
A new word for the 21st century. Many people now own widescreen TVs. Most new TV programmes are made in widescreen. However TV stations still like to broadcast some older programmes that were made before programmes were made in widescreen. This gives you two options. You can either watch the programme in the correct aspect… Continue reading Dixonsvision
Interesting Open Source Books
A couple of interesting books on Open Source Software that I’ve read recently. Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software should be essential reading for anyone involved in an Open Source project (or planning to get involved in an Open Source project). Fogel has been an important contributer to a number of major Open Source projects… Continue reading Interesting Open Source Books
Web Frameworks Night – Report
So last night was the Web Frameworks NIght. A great time had by all. Many thanks to the organisers. We had talks on three frameworks – Catalyst, Django and Ruby on Rails. My overwhelming impression was how similar all three frameworks are. There really seems to be little to differentiate them. As always the Perl… Continue reading Web Frameworks Night – Report
Java Programmers Embrace Ruby
Bruce Tate’s book Beyond Java has been published and there’s quite a lot of publicity for it appearing on the web. For example this article by Chris Adamson on the OnJava site. In the article Adamson interviews a number of well-known Java programmers about the future of Java. The replies seem pretty unanimous that Java’s… Continue reading Java Programmers Embrace Ruby
Spying on You
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I’ve started spying on you all. A couple of days ago I added Google Analytics tracking code to a few sites I run, including this one. So now I can look at loads of pretty graphs telling me who you are, where you are,… Continue reading Spying on You
London Web Frameworks Night (Update)
The London Web Frameworks night has proved to be very popular. So popular, in fact, that the organisers have had to change venue. It will now take place in the New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University. See Dean’s post for more details. This means that signup has been re-opened for the time being. But… Continue reading London Web Frameworks Night (Update)
Recording TV
At home we still record TV the old-fashioned way – using video recorders. It’s all very 20th century and we should really think about updating our methods. Here are the things we’re considering. Buying a hard disk based system, Something like a Tivo. You can’t buy a new Tivo in the UK any more, but… Continue reading Recording TV