Blog posts

I’ve just released the first stable version of my XML_Feed_Parser library through PEAR. I’ve been working on the code for about 18 months now, it’s nearly a year since the first beta, and some time since I last had to make any significant changes, so it seemed like it was time to open it up to a wider audience. You can get it through the usual channels, either downloading it directly or using the PEAR installer, and PEAR provides a bug tracker should you find any problems or have ideas for enhancements. My time to implement enhancements will be very limited, so I’m also very interested in hearing from anyone who’d like to sign on as a developer to help keep the package moving forwards.

Another project I’d been working on launched without my noticing. After a month of delayed DNS transfers, the alliance for environmental sustainability site is live. It’s a pretty simple content management system/site, built on top of drupal, a system that designers (and my client) The Image Shoppe use for all their sites.

Chatting with Steve today I discovered that perhaps we had been a little less public about our plans for next summer than I had thought. As he was telling me about his latest blog entry on climate change I was telling him about our travel plans and realised he at least had not picked up on them. The plan has been formulating for some time. Our move to the UK means that Kari will be quitting her job and I’ll be looking for a break in some of my work. So it seemed a shame to not make the most of that freedom and do some travelling. So while our belongings are shipped eastwards we will be heading west, to San Francisco, then New Zealand, Sydney, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Beijing, Mongolia, Moscow and then on by train to London. ...

Yesterday we pushed the button and launched the new version of GOOD Magazine, a site I’ve been working on for the past couple of months along with the folks at Area17. It’s a relatively large Ruby on Rails system built on top of the ORGware system (refitted as an engine) and supported with a caching system built for Madame Figaro. Most of my work has been under the hood, but where I’ve touched the frontend I’ve tried to make use of microformats and other good practices. We’re providing a range of atom feeds (which will become easier to find over time as we make some refinements) but eventually I hope that we’ll have all listing pages using hAtom so that anything can be a feed. ...

For the past couple of months, any time spent writing here was time not spent working on the new version of the GOOD Magazine website. Today we pushed the button and took that new version live. I’ll probably write more about the experience on my other blog but suffice it to say that it’s been nice to have such interesting content to read while testing the site. We’re still working on a few bugs, so go easy on us, but if you’re reading this you’ll probably find the magazine worth a look.

In one way or another I’ve been waiting to see The Fountain for five years, ever since Darren Aronofsky’s last film, Requiem For A Dream left me wandering across London from Soho to King’s Cross in something of a daze and turning up at a party in a distinctly non-party mood. It’s been a long wait for his next offering, partly because of the (in hindsight fortuitous) withdrawal of Brad Pitt from the picture a few weeks before filming was due to start. Hugh Jackman’s performance leaves little doubt that the revised casting was a considerably better choice. ...

Ruby on Rails provides the very nice helper method highlight to identify search terms within a string. We’ve been using it quite a bit on a large project but recently began to notice that it broke the HTML in certain places. It turned out that our problem was that our search term was showing up within an attribute on a tag, and so highlight, oblivious to the content of the text it was parsing, was inserting tags in the middle of attributes, and all kinds of craziness was ensuing that just wouldn’t do. ...

There’s something a little strange about sitting in a large movie theatre on a Saturday night with only nine other people. And when the film is one of the year’s best reviewed it’s also rather sad. Maybe other showings had better turnouts? I found myself wondering how much of The Queen made sense to those in the US audience who haven’t kept a close watch on British politics over the past decade. Much of the humour seemed to rest on pre-existing knowledge of the Royals and of Blair’s team, and in such an empty room it was tough to get a sense of how anyone else was responding. ...

We made another of our all-too-short trips back home to England last week. It was great to see the people we were able to, though sad to miss so many others. We were left very much looking forward to living back over there, but there’s certainly a lot to take care of before we can make the move! Not many photos were taken, but a few of those that were are now up over on flickr.

Hell has frozen over. Or, I actually slightly wish I’d been at a sporting event. And it’s all because of the marching band. The Guardian’s music section has a piece today on Jay C Rees’ routine for the University of Arizona’s band which sees them performing a medley of Radiohead pieces, complete with all the usual marching formations. There are quite a few videos on youtube.