Links & notes for this month

• • ESV Bible Blog » Blog Archive » Mechanical Turk Recap -- The ESV Bible team crowdsourced their interlinked search database to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. That turned out quite well for them. | amazon crowdsourcing distributed mechanicalturk outsourcing processing
• • GigaOM : » StartUps Embracing Amazon S3 -- S3’s early success makes you think that if the on-demand infrastructure can be delivered at an affordable price, the cost of setting up an online business is going to decline even further, perhaps prompting a whole cycle of new entrepreneurial activity. | amazon s3 startup storage webservices
  • Refactoring to REST -- So, by adding a few controllers, I cut the total number of actions by almost twenty. That’s a pretty big deal, because actions are like moving parts in a machine—the more there are, the more can go wrong. | development patterns rails refactoring rest ruby rubyonrails
• • Luke Redpath » Blog Archive » Testing your Rails views with Hpricot -- Because, you know, if you're going to test models and controllers, test the damn views! | html programming ruby rubyonrails testing validation
  • A Rails Feature You Should be Using: with_scope -- Yes - I definitely should be using this. Will refactor some code to take account of it at the weekend. A really elegant construction. | activerecord development rails ruby rubyonrails scope tips
• • Ultimate Exposure Computer -- Complex, comprehensive, worth going back to; interesting for those times when you don't want to use the light meter. | camera exposure howto photography useful
• • Labnotes » Blog Archive » Scraping with style: scrAPI toolkit for Ruby -- Wow. This totally comes in at my level of competence, and works pretty much how I'd want it to. Time to futz around with some prototypes... | code markup microformats parser programming ruby screenscraping script
• • [giantJoystick] by Mary Flanagan (2006) | -- "Inviting users to play classic arcade games by collaboratively moving on and controlling a 9-foothigh joystick (modelled after the 1980 Atari 2600 one), Mary Flanagan highlights the spatial and social role of the interface." Fun! | art games giant interface technology
  • SCIFI.COM | The Amazing Screw-On Head -- Awesome - animated Mignola to watch. | animation free lovecraft mignola mikemignola scifi
  • MySpace parser -- Tom Dyson writes a MySpace parser in Python out of Beautiful Soup. Delightful - and really, really useful. | html myspace parser python scraping
• • cookin'/relaxin': On the nature of time-based media -- "Fractals are common in nature and show a repeating, self-similar structure and there is a similar kind of structure here from schedules to programmes to music and speech." - some great visualisation from Tristan Ferne. | audio broadcast media music visulisation
  • Battleship:GoogleEarth (a 1st Life/2nd Life mashup) -- Awesome - Julian starts building a game of Battleships played out in the real world and Google Earth, using a mobile phone as a geolocator. It'll be interesting to see how this develops | battleships games locational maps research technology
• • thinglink blog: Design patterns for building with web APIs -- MattB on fine form - an exceptionally clear explanation of the potential design patterns of building an API into your application | api application design development patterns thinglink web
• • M@ McCray » Comatose, a Micro CMS Plugin -- Comatose is a tiny CMS that you drop into other Rails apps as a plugin | cms plugin rails rubyonrails
• • Fast Company Now - Google, Innovation and the Web -- What defines a project? Sometimes there are small projects. Google News took a team of 3-5 people. If you take a pool of engineers and put them in teams of three, you can actually do 100 projects. | business development google innovation process
  • Ruby Linguistics - Trac -- Going beyond just pluralize. Cute. | gem language linguistics ruby
  • Interactive Fiction: First-Timer Foibles -- A nice look at some common stumbling blocks in IF | design fiction game if interactive writing
  • Raph’s Website » 40 ways to be a better (game) designer -- Matt B is right; it's not just about game design, it's about any system - code, rules, perhaps even mechanical. Really, really cracking. | design development games play