Blog posts

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. ...

Saturday was Denison Witmer’s 30th birthday. I would have posted then, but we were keeping busy visiting his hometown. To celebrate he is offering 30 MP3s through a new website, www.happybirthdaydenison.com. The MP3s are free, but he suggests making a donation to a very deserving pair of health care charities. So belated happy birthday Denison, and happy Denison’s birthday to all of us.

Lately I’ve been working on Calvin’s campus each Thursday because of our regular Festival of Faith and Music meetings. I work in one of the main areas where students congregate and each week there’s a little bit more frustration and culture shock as I overhear bizarre conversations about current affairs. At the moment there is a guy sitting in the booth next to me holding forth on the state of the middle east. He is asserting quite forcefully that Iran is in the process of testing nuclear missiles and those around him are eating it up. ...

last.fm rolled out a set of new features today, including a flash radio player, free downloads, and an events system that will apparently include ticket sales options. You can see an event I’ll probably be attending tomorrow night here. The new features are as well executed as is to be expected, though there do seem to be a few problems with the operation of the option for event promoters to ’lock’ their events and it would be nice to know whether there is integration with any other event services such as eventful, upcoming.org and tourb.us. There are already far too many places for event organisers to list their events, and since those sites provide well structured data it would be good if there could be some sharing. ...