Blog posts

I’ve joked many times about the fact that my status in the US represents “taxation without representation.” I am not eligible to vote, but am required to pay for the government that that those around me elect. Today I was reminded of a rather less amusing side of my status. Those males immigrating to the United States within a certain age bracket are automatically enrolled for the Selective Service and today my enrollment card arrived. Naturally I won’t be fighting in any wars this country fights in. If the reasoning for future wars is anything like that lately demonstrated, chances are I’ll be too busy opposing them. But I can be called upon. ...

Written in response to this post on Laurence’s blog, chiefly based on his reference to this Observer article. I’ve read a number of articles such as the one quoted from the Observer (though not, I confess, that one, yet), and agree that it’s something to keep an eye on, but it often feels like those writers are watching from the sidelines and not getting involved in what’s happening amongst the early adopter community. ...

There have once again been several stories about Iran in the press this week. Primarily they’re once again focussed on some heinous human rights abuses, though the long running nuclear dispute is once again raising its head. In the midst of that comes this excellent report in the Guardian. The tag-line sells the piece a little short: Iran, with its unabashed nuclear ambitions, is top of the US’s next-to-invade list. Is the mood in the country fearful or defiant? James Meek sounds out hardline clerics, Tehran liberals, mosque-goers, workers and the near-destitute - and finds surprising resonances with their superpower enemy. ...

For a current (PHP) project I need a highly flexible authentication and permissions management system. Having heard plenty of mentions on the various PEAR lists I decided to try out LiveUser, which seems to currently be the most comprehensive such system for PHP. It’s a large codebase that seems to cover most of the necessary permutations and includes a number of prominent coders amongst its developers. What I hadn’t taken into account, of course, was the lack of documentation. I spent quite a while trawling through their wiki and googling before concluding that the best way to work LiveUser out would be to work through the code piece by piece. And since that’s a long, slow process it seemed worth documenting here. I’m going to do that step by step, starting today with configuration and instantiation. ...

It was with some despondency that I woke up to the news that CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) passed the US House of Representatives last night. The extracts of the floor debate that made their way onto Morning Edition did not make pleasant listening, and it was particularly disappointing to hear that our local representative, Vern Ehlers, voted for the bill. Some of the more encouraging commentary today has focussed on the fact that the Bush administration had almost made this vote a vote of confidence in his presidency, twisting the arms of many Republican members of the house. At some point some politicians need to start standing up to the increasing tendency of embattled leaders to make any vaguely significant vote a “confidence” issue, but it is heartening that a vote cast as being so crucial came so close to going the other way. ...

For a while now I’ve been wondering about setting up a ‘planet’ style aggregator for discussion of ‘participatory politics’ type tools. Over the past few months I’ve been building lists of such tools at del.icio.us and on a wiki, as well, of course, as in my newsreader. But there’s something to be said for the ‘planet’ approach which allows interested parties to quickly get an overview of who the accepted figures in a given field are and where the conversation stands. ...

I’ve been using Audioscrobbler for about a year now to keep track of my listening, see what others are listening to and pick up recommendations. It’s been good to see the service stabilise a little and features evolve – right now I’m particularly fond of the ‘under appreciated artists’ recommendations as a reminder of areas of my collection to revisit – but every now and again there’s still the odd glitch. ...

Since the late German was invoked by Steve in the comments on this post, now seemd a fitting time to link to BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and their current featured episode, which is a profile of Karl Marx. I doubt Steve would be interested, but anyone looking to understand the impact Karl Marx and the materialist dialectic have had on subseqent economic and political thought (from both left and right) may well find it fascinating listening. ...

Discussing Hotel Rwanda with friends and acquaintances earlier this year, I was struck by how much more informed about the Rwandan holocaust it seemed I had been than most of those around me. It seemed that even the UK media’s extremely poor coverage of those events entirely dwarfed that provided by US network news. That conversation popped back into my mind when I read the following in an email forwarded by a friend: ...

Posted as a comment on this entry at Jeffrey Overstreet’s blog in response to another commenter. Jeffrey’s post was a link to this article by Kate Bowman Johnston. Gabe - if CCM really did simply exist to perpetuate a sort of music that wouldn’t be accepted in the mainstream because of the way it “edifies the body, lifts God up in worship, and presents Bible truth in good lyrics” then I’d say you had a point. But CCM left those boundaries a long time ago. Even if we could put aside the theological triteness of much of its output (which in itself undermines all three criteria), a few minutes at GMA week will show that it has long since moved on to seeking to present an ‘alternative’ to mainstream culture. ...