Blog posts

For the past few weeks I’ve been responding to Fred at Slacktivist’s requests that his readers select a particular section of the alphabet and post in the comments any songs whose titles fall in that range that we enjoy and he doesn’t have in his list. Since I’m making the list anyway, I thought I’d post the results here. Today it’s songs whose title begin with the word “Don’t”, and the list that follows represent the playlist from my iPod, which is a small fraction of our overall collection. ...

UPDATE (10/2008): This plugin is no longer maintained. I’d recommend looking at one of the newer alternatives such as acts_as_amazon_product if you need this functionality. I’ve been procrastinating on getting my first Ruby on Rails plugin (first anyone else might be interested in, at least) out the door, mainly due to some configuration problems with Subversion, but finally I have that all sorted out and the plugin ready to go. loads_from_amazon is an ActiveRecord Mixin that works with the Ruby/Amazon library to let you populate an ActiveRecord object with the details of a product listed on amazon. In the README I use the following example: ...

The more I hear about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the harder I find it to understand her reputation as a figurehead of liberalism in the United States. Even once I get past the fact that most of those considered ’liberal’ in US politics would barely be considered centrists in most of the rest of the democratic world, there’s the fact of her vigorous support of the administration’s hawkish tendencies in the Middle East. ...

If this transcript of an accidentally amplified conversation between Messrs. Bush and Blair gets you down (and aside from the satisfaction of ’told you so’, it probably should), perhaps the new Gnarls Barkley video will provide a little cheer. Tags: gnarls barkley, tony blair, george w bush

NPR’s foreign correspondent, Deborah Amos, was interviewed on Morning Edition this morning about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Particularly interesting in her report was a comment that for many on the street, Hezbollah’s action has united Sunni and Shi’a muslims. Hezbollah is a Shi’a organization, but the Sunni population of the region is largely supportive of them. That’s particularly significant in the broader current context, since one of the distinguishing features of Iran (within the region) is it’s Shi’a government and population. Some hawkish commentators have suggested that other Middle Eastern countries would welcome western intervention in Iran, and that religious differences would hold them back from becoming involved. What those commentators miss is that while the fault lines between Sunni and Shi’a are very real, Middle Eastern and Islamic identity will always trump that division once outside forces become involved. ...

It only took a couple of days, but I’ve already made the switch to using Firefox 2.0b1 as my default web browser. Not only is it considerably more responsive than 1.5 ever managed (not quite up to Camino, but getting close) but it’s already helped me enormously thanks to its crash recovery options. My generally wonderful MacBook Pro has been playing up of late, you see. It’s not unusual for it to require a restart once a day, and sometimes more. While I work out a time where I could bear to be without it for a few days while it gets repaired, I have to find ways of working that aren’t too heavily disrupted by the occasional unexpected reset. The new firefox’s ability to remember which tabs I had open is a considerable help. ...

The situation in the Middle East seems to be going from bad to worse as Ehud Olmert demonstrates that to him everything is a big nail to be hit with his military hammer, and the militants in Palestine and Lebanon show that that’s their preferred state of affairs. Here in the US we have the joy of receiving the news about the situation from such bastions of newstainment as CNN, who bring us this remarkably poorly written story (via Ed). In the midst of a story that does very little to explain much of anything, preferring to remind us that both sides are using threatening language, is this little treat of a link description: ...

A couple of entries back I complained about the problems I had getting up and running with MOG. According to their latest newsletter they’ve found the elusive database index needed to radically speed up their import process, but I have yet to find the inclination to give it another go. One of the reasons I found it quite so frustrating was that I’d recently been beta testing tourb.us, a live music website that allows you to build a set of favourite artists and will keep you informed on when those artists are going to be in your area. ...

The folks at Demos (“the think tank for everyday democracy”) have just relaunched their website with a new design and a number of new features. The design isn’t all that striking, but has a smattering of nicely subtle features and succeeds in getting out of the way and letting you see the content quickly. More worthy of note is the fact that they’re now making much more use of news feeds to help readers keep up to date, and have launched a podcast. The second edition of the podcast appeared today, featuring an interview with John Craig on Production Values and the future of ‘professionalism.’ It’s well worth the 15 minutes. ...

Sent to NPR this morning: Dear Sir/Madam, I was surprised and disappointed as I listened to Morning Edition this morning that your interviewer repeatedly allowed Nicholas Burns (State Department Under-Secretary for Political Affairs) to repeat the administration’s line—that they need to be convinced that Iran is serious about negotiations and that they are running out of patience—without challenge. The United States government has not been engaged in the negotiations with Iran that have occurred up until now due to its consistent refusal to take part in face-to-face talks with Iranian representatives. While the European governments attempted to conduct negotiations, the US administration’s consistent threats serve only to undermine those negotiations given the US’ recent track record of unilateral action. ...