Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
The thinkers at Ekklesia have published a report that provides a very sensible overview of the issues in the ongoing debate around Christian Unions and Student Unions. You can find out about it on their site. (via Maggi Dawn)
Having put quite a bit of time into unravelling the issues between the Students’ Union and Christian Union in Reading, I was dismayed to see The Times today reporting that some Christian Unions in the UK are considering legal action against the Student Unions on their campuses because: Christian Unions claim that they are being singled out as a “soft target” by student associations because they refuse to allow non-Christians to address their meetings or sit on ruling committees. ...
It seems likely that the dominant theme of the next two years in US politics will be which party can emerge least scathed from a withdrawal from Iraq. If the democrats can be seen to force the President’s hand in withdrawing from an unpopular conflict, they may be able to leverage that in the 2008 elections. If the Republicans can manage a withdrawal that looks orderly and maybe even victorious, or if they can spin Democrats’ urgings as being weak on defense, then maybe they can salvage something from this ridiculous venture. ...
A change of plans yesterday led to quite a bit of time in the car mid-afternoon, and a chance to listen to Ted Koppel promote his new documentary about Iran on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. I was very impressed with Koppel’s apparent grasp of the nuances of the Iranian political situation, of the shades of opinion within the country, and particularly with his commitment to educating people about it given its ongoing importance in world affairs and US foreign policy. The documentary airs on the Discovery Channel on Sunday and you can find the Talk Of The Nation interview here. ...
Kari and I are both helping out with the Festival of Faith and Music again this year. We’re hoping to have some really exciting lineup news to announce very soon, but it’s already coming together very well and we have Sufjan Stevens, Anathallo, David Dark, Lauren Winner, and many others lined up to join us. For now, given the frustrations that Internet Explorer caused Rob I’m just delighted to be able to announce that the website is now live. ...
A recent comment reminded me of an old entry proposing yet another project I never had time to follow through with: Using Trac and Subversion with Social Documents. The idea there was to make use of subversion’s utility for version control and trac’s existing frontend for browsing that to present versioned documents. In hindsight, I don’t think trac would actually be a good frontend for this unless the intended audience was entirely techies. Trac works for those of us who use it every day to follow a variety of projects, and its ability to combine a wiki with version control of the ‘official’ versions of documents provides some interesting ideas, but the interface just wouldn’t work. ...
I just rolled and released a second release candidate of XML_Feed_Parser. Mohanaraj Gopala Krishnan had pointed out to me that the parsing of atom text constructs wasn’t quite as flexible as the RFC allows for and was kind enough to supply an initial patch to improve support. Since HTML_Safe isn’t stable yet my plan is to put clear security advice in the manual and then if there aren’t any new issues with this release candidate to release it as a stable version. Once HTML_Safe stabilises I’ll revise the manual, work in support for that and release a new version.
With such a wealth of music (over 2 million songs) available on emusic it can be hard to know where to start should you want to dig beyond the latest releases. They have a number of features designed to help you explore their catalogue, but my favourite to date is the new partnership with the Independent Film Channel which is profiling a dozen artists, songs, videos and venues through a selection of interviews, music videos, and other visual means. ...
This year’s midterm elections saw a huge range of online campaigning innovations. None of them was truly revolutionary, but from candidate profiles on facebook to coordinated text messaging campaigns and use of youtube, the emphasis on reaching out to voters online continues to grow. With all the worries about polling irregularities, projects like Polling Place Photo Project (via Zeldman) were also a nice addition to the toolkit. So it’s especially surprising that it’s so hard to get good information on the results, particularly on the night. We were at the home of a local state senatorial candidate switching back and forth between the local public access TV and the NBC affiliate, and seeing huge discrepancies between the two. Typically the public access programming, was displaying more of the local results, but it was never clear whether their results only applied to the city or covered a broader audience and their windows-based system frequently froze. ...
In a political system as complex as that of the US it’s never going to be possible to have a clear emotional response to a set of election results. While the Congressional results and the outcome of the Michigan gubernatorial race are heartening, there’s a bitter taste left by Tennessee’s tacit support for the racist tactics of Bob Corker, the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2 (banning affirmative action) and more locally the fact that David LaGrand lost in his race for State Senate. ...