Blog posts

Little Miss Sunshine feels like a more mainstream sibling of films from last year like The Squid And The Whale and Me and You and Everyone We Know and unsurprisingly given the film’s wider distribution it doesn’t have the same psychological weight, deadpan humour, or dysfunction as those films. That may be just as well as several parents seemed to have chosen the film’s title above its ‘R’ rating and brought small children along to see it. Hopefully those children were able to enjoy the soundtrack—so well put together by DeVotchKa—and ignore the less appropriate scenes and language. ...

Last year I posted a few times about the aggregation code I wrote to allow Greenbelt to collect festival-related content scattered around the web and republish it. What I may not have gone into was how frustrating that code tended to be to work with, written in a rush before the festival and heavily patched while on site. This year, with longer to prepare, I decided to throw that one away and start again. I chose python as the language again, partly because I wanted to use some python libraries and partly because it seemed time to get some more python practice in. I also decided that rather than have the parsers for each service (currently technorati, del.icio.us, flickr, pubsub, and magnolia) each update the database, it was time for some abstraction and layering. ...

Jeremy Kemper has just checked in a change to Edge Rails that fixes my biggest frustration with has_many :through. Since it’s appearance a couple of versions back, has_many :through has been a great addition to the rails associations toolkit, making the use of join models infinitely cleaner. But until recently it was rather cumbersome to create those relationships. For example, if I wanted to add an author to a book where the relationship is defined as: ...

I’ve been rethinking a few aspects of XML_Feed_Parser following some discussion around the web, summarised in this post from Sam Ruby. Numerous aggregators appear vulnerable to attacks based on malicious HTML in the body of comments, and that includes any based on XML_Feed_Parser that do not do their own HTML filtering/output escaping. There was a brief discussion of the issue on the PEAR email list and I’ve decided to change the package’s default behaviour. In the spirit of PEAR, I’m going to make use of HTML_Safe to process any html or text content in the feed before returning it. There will be extra methods to access the raw content, but it’ll be an extra step so that people know they’re potentially getting dangerous content. ...

To pick up a theme from the previous post, I was very interested to hear (probably via cityofsound) a few months back that Bloomsbury were working on a new series called The Writer and the City. In their words: The Writer and the City is a series of beautifully produced, pocket-sized books featuring great authors writing about cities they know best. Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town is the first I’ve had a chance to read and it’s a great collection of three short stories set in New York City, moving from the tragedy of the War of Independence (when much of the city was burned to the ground), through the bustle of the city’s explosive growth as a financial center in the 19th century and on to the tale of a psychiatrist dealing with her own feelings about the destruction of the World Trade Center as she seeks to manage a patient’s situation. ...

This weekend saw me making my first proper foray into Canada, having previously not been further across the border than Windsor, Ontario, and that only for lunch after having my green card approved. This time we headed to Cameron, Ontario on the far side of Toronto for Culture Is Not Optional’s Practicing Resurrection conference. The conference seemed to go extremely well and was a great time away with friends and meeting new people. It took place on a farm owned and operated by Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat and Henry and Sarah Bakker. Their experiment in sustainable farming provided a great location that was also appropriate for the conference which, whether purposefully or not, ended up adopting an agrarian theme. ...

After TechCrunch posted about the new version of blogger (currently in beta) I decided to give it a look, particularly to see what was going on with their feed support as TechCrunch claim that blogger would be switching to RSS2 for its feeds (revisiting TechCrunch it seems they’re now saying RSS2 will be offered in addition to atom so I don’t know if I misread that or it’s been updated. Personally I don’t see the point of adding RSS2 when you have Atom, and wonder if it might be confusing for some users, but I guess someone must disagree). ...

It’s always an interesting challenge to take a system you are familiar with and try to use it in an entirely new way or context. That’s what I’ve been getting with PHP of late. As more and more of my web development work moves to Rails, I’ve had the chance to work on PHP embedded within Filemaker Pro as I’ve tested and explored Scodigo’s new Smart Pill plugin. For those of us used to programming in full-fledged languages, writing scripts and functions in filemaker can be quite a challenge. Writing and debugging all that recursive code is a time-consuming process, and communicating with external processes isn’t really worth the work without plugins. Smart Pill changes all that, by opening up the entire PHP (5.1.4, including many extensions) engine for use within Filemaker. ...

In the current climate it’s difficult to believe that anything that should give pause to the US administration (or public, for that matter) will. Nevertheless, it’s still good to see such things getting some attention and maybe something will gain the critical mass and longevity to really make a difference. The latest is Harpers Magazine’s coverage of a document thought to be from the safe house of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (either the mastermind of the Iraqi insurgency for many months or a buffoon, depending on which day’s governmental press releases you chose to read) stating that: ...

It used to be said that no two countries in which McDonalds had set up its “restaurants” had ever been to war with one another. I suppose it was some sort of capitalist mantra about how global trade makes us aware of our interdependence, rather than simply suggesting that all the chemicals ingested at McDonalds’ reduced our inclination towards warfare. This morning it occurred to me to check the ongoing veracity of that claim. There are/were nine McDonalds’ in Lebanon, and there are more than 80 in Israel.