Blog posts

Grand Rapids WiFi relaunched today with a change under the hood to Ruby Rails. The site has been through several iterations since I took it over in September 2004. It often functions as my testbed for new features I’d like to trial, and since most of my custom development is now rails-based, it made sense to make the switch. Feature-wise, not much has changed. A few URLs have changed slightly (with appropriate redirects provided by rails and lighttpd), there’s some caching in place, and there are a few new “ajax” effects, but otherwise it’s so far a straight port. And on the UI side the changes are also minimal. The use of microformats has increased somewhat, but the long promised redesign will have to wait a little longer. ...

Interesting tech events rarely come to Michigan, but it seems the local ruby users’ group has decided to do something about that and is organising RubyConf, MI to take place on August 26th at Calvin College. Having a Ruby conference about twenty minutes’ bike ride from my house would be very exciting, were it not that I’ll be 4000 miles away at Greenbelt…

The US government said it could not find the men that Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Mujahid believes could help set him free. The Guardian found them in three days. So starts a nicely timed piece in yesterday’s Guardian that probably ought to have made more waves than it so far seems to have. The supreme court’s ruling that detainees at Guantánomo Bay ought to be granted their right to proper hearings was a good step for due process, but the Guardian report demonstrates that a lot more scrutiny will be needed if those prisoners are to ever get the treatment any human being deserves. ...

It’s been two weeks since Bonnaroo and I keep failing to write about it. That’s been the way of my blogging lately; something will happen that seems blog-worthy but so much time will pass before I write about it that it no longer seems worthwhile. For those who aren’t aware, Bonnaroo is the US’ biggest grossing music festival, and also one of the largest around with 80,000 attendees this year. It grew out of the ‘jam band’ (Grateful Dead, Phish, etc) phenomenon, and still has roots there, but has diversified of late to have a wide range of indie artists. It was the lure of the latter that motivated us to drive south for ten hours (nicely broken up by a night in Nashville on each side). ...

Being fascinated with music-releated apps online, I was eager to try out mog.com and found a little time yesterday to give it a spin. Mog.com seems in concept fairly similar to last.fm of which I am an avid user. It builds an inventory of your ‘digital music collection’, allows you to create a profile and blog entries, and builds charts, recommendations, and inter-used networks based on your collection and listening habits. Installation on a mac is easy enough, with the mog software appearing as a new pane in System Preferences. It began by attempting to index the music I have stored on my laptop, which immediately struck me as a mistake. We have a mac mini with an external hard drive that we use to store all our music (around 160GB last time I checked) and I listen to that via itunes library sharing or on my ipod. Music on my laptop is almost all recently downloaded, and the laptop is just a stopping off point for tracks until I decide whether or not I want to add them to the main library. ...

It’s been gratifying to see a few PHP web service libraries emerging based on my Services_Technorati package. It’s particularly enjoyable when the writeup is in a language you don’t read… The latest to appear is a wrapper for the mag.nolia social bookmarking site. You can find it on Alex Sancho’s site. Hopefully he’ll propose it for inclusion in PEAR.

I met Andrew Beaujon briefly at the Festival of Faith and Music last year and have been looking forward to his book ever since, so I was very pleased when Kate emailed to say that " Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside The Phenomenon of Christian Rock" was now available, and even more pleased when the first shop I tried had several copies in stock. The book is the result of a year-long exploration of ‘Christian rock’ that Beaujon (senior contributing writer at Spin, contributor to the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, the Guardian and Salon.com) undertook last year. He openly acknowledges that amongst his colleagues in the industry there is a rather snide or dismissive attitude towards artists who are identified as Christians, and that for himself “I consider atheism too much of a commitment.” That context makes the sympathetic and insightful tone of the book quite remarkable. ...

For seven or eight years, I ran a website called Britlinks. Over that time, it grew from a simple list of links gleaned from altavista, usenet, and greenbelt programmes into a pretty hefty database of information about bands based in the UK and Ireland with some form of affiliation with the Christian faith. I tried to use the site to tread and promote the thin path of asserting some value in community between Christian musicians, but avoiding most of the trappings that plague ‘Contemporary Christian Music.’ That attempt met with mixed success, and its results are still difficult to judge, but it certainly drew quite a number of visitors and built up sizable mailing lists. ...

For seven or eight years, I ran a website called Britlinks. Over that time, it grew from a simple list of links to bands’ sites gleaned from altavista and usenet postings, to a large database of music resources with well over a thousand pages, and a sizable chunk of traffic. It let me cut my teeth with databases (first mSQL and then MySQL) and PHP, and to play with early versions of RSS for use on ‘my netscape’. It was also one of the earliest sites of its size to switch to an entirely XHTML/CSS set of templates, somewhere early in 2001. ...

It’s only been a year since I read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but it quickly established itself as one of those books it feels like I’ve always known. For nearly fifty years, Jacobs was not only the grand dame of urban planning, but a true public intellectual with a power to find and explore innovative thinking in the interests of society. She died today, aged 89. Kottke was my first source for the news, while Dan Hill provided a link to this obituary at archinect.com. ...