Migrate

I want to learn about linked data, ideally for use with online texts and library data, but that’s a big and complicated task and it makes sense to start with something smaller and better defined. So having an interest in family history I thought I’d try with data from 18th century West Country parish registers. Many of these were transcribed in the 19th century in a series published by Phillimore and are now available as public domain scans on archive.org. Marriages, only, unfortunately, which limits what you can do with them, but still more than enough to get started. Continue Reading »

If the exam went ok I should shortly be a ‘PRINCE2 registered practitioner’. The problem is that at first sight there is a total mismatch between the top-down approach of Prince2 and the Agile approaches Ruby is at home with.

“The core value of an egalitarian meritocracy runs deep in the agile movement”, according to one of the founders of the Agile Movement¹. PRINCE2, on the other hand, is all about control. Not only that, but even a quick glance at PRINCE2 diagrams shows its origins in the heyday of Waterfall methods.
Continue Reading »

1. Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management p.9 [↩]

I don’t usually like templating languages. Ones I’ve known before (like TT) are intended to keep both developers and designers happy, and tend to do neither: developers miss having a full language, and designers want to know why everything can’t just be html. Haml is different; it doesn’t pretend to be html (but is simple enough any html-er can read it), and it gives you access to the whole of Ruby (but encourages you to move code blocks into helpers). It’s just nice and elegant. But it’s also very fussy about layout.
Continue Reading »

After playing a bit with Ruby the language I decided to get a crash-start in Rails and turned up for the Ruby-on-Rails class run by Skillsmatter. We got
Jamie van Dyke from Engine Yard as our instructor. One of the good things about courses that is hard to pick up from books is getting a feel for the culture round a language – in this case it was soon obvious that Ruby culture is pretty heavily blog-based. And since Jamie also told us, ‘if you want to do Ruby, get a blog’, here’s mine.

Which isn’t to say that I won’t manage to squeeze a bit of openstreetmap and other topics in here from time to time