Blog posts

One of the discussions going round the web over the past couple of days has been a discussion on the wordpress trac about dropping RSS0.92 and 1.0 support from future versions as they are seen as redundant. Dropping RSS 0.92 support seems sensible. It’s an old format and there are considerable advantages to using a more recent, better developed standard. RSS 1.0, on the other hand, brings to the table a number of advantages lacking in its higher-numbered cousin. ...

I took a look at Responsible Travel, following a link from Year Of Living Generously. Their system claims to take into account all the emissions of planes (not just CO2) and they offer a very simple calculator for working out the offsets required for a particular journey. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite so well for our needs, as we are attempting to offset 50,000 miles (3 rountrips to the UK for Kari, 4 for me, plus 2 flights back from New York and 2 rountrips to Colorado), and there’s no obvious place to insert the number of miles should you already know it. ...

I promised more work on XML_Feed_Parser this month and am pleased to say I found the time. The first beta, version 0.3, is on its way into PEAR. Two key developments in this version are support for the ‘content’ module in RSS2 and fix of a serious bug in the main __call method. I was accessing the compatMap variable (that handles the mapping of element names between different syndication formats) directly, and calling array_pop on it. That threw up problems if you wanted to access the same element multiple times, so I’ve added in a temporary variable to fix that. ...

Next up for carbon offsetting is our household heating and electricity usage. For some of the past year we were on a renewable energy program with Consumer’s Energy but they changed their arrangements and we haven’t quite gotten around to re-enrolling, so I decided to try and offset 50% of our electricity usage (which totalled 3944kwhs in 2005) and 100% of our natural gas usage (907 therms): a total of 16.44 tons of carbon. ...

I’m not really one for resolutions, but the New Year does seem an apt time to clear away a few of those tasks I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. First up is carbon offsetting: the practice of investing in projects that attempt to reduce the planet’s production of environmentally harmful carbon products by an amount equivalent to that you generate. It’s been difficult to find appraisals of the quality of the various services out there, so I’ve decided to split our investment a few ways to give us a chance to try out each of the services and with the hope that at least some of the money will be well invested. ...

Paying projects have kept me away from XML_Feed_Parser for the past couple of months, but today finally brought time to get a new release into shape. The main focus has been on working through the tests that come with The Universal Feed Parser. I have a (rudimentary) script that converts those tests into PHP and makes some syntax conversion to bring them into line with my package. There’s still some hand tweaking required to get the tests running properly, but for the time being that seems preferable to writing a full lexer. ...

This week saw the launch of the project that’s been occupying more of my time of late than any other. SimplyGiven is a new venture on the part of local firm General Motivational, who specialise in customised products, often for corporate reward schemes, and marks their entry into the consumer market. The site is all developed using PHP5.1 and is my first project to launch using MySQL5. At present it doesn’t make much use of the new features that came with MySQL5, but there’s a good chance that the next revision will. Behind the scenes it’s linked in with a FileMaker Pro database that allows for a sophisticated interface for the staff maintaining the catalogue. The FileMaker database was developed, and the project managed, by Micah Woods of Woods IT.

Following our usual pattern of catching big releases on a Sunday night to avoid the hordes of children and teenagers who might otherwise fill the theatre, we saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this past weekend. My expectations had been cautiously optimistic, but just as with the Lord of the Rings movies, this first viewing was almost entirely taken up with cautiously observing discrepancies with the books. That prevented any real assessment of the film in its own right, but I was impressed with the casting and performances of the children, and generally enjoyed it. ...

Those who are already enjoying Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas recordings may like to check out a recording featuring a number of his label mates. You can find links to Krismus Karuls here. In case you missed them, and can take more of Sufjan, this bootleg of a show back in July is well worth a listen, as is this show from Belgium (courtesy of Opus)

One of the highlights of our last visit to Nashville (way back in April) was getting the opportunity to hear Will Campbell speak. I hadn’t known much of the man beforehand, but his incredible stories had a deep impact. His outspoken critiques of the Southern Baptist Convention’s hijacking of USian Christianity may also have had a role in endearing him to me… The Nashville Scene recently had a great profile of Campbell that’s well worth a look. Now I really must get round to checking the library for his books. ...