Blog posts

T Longren trackbacked to my last entry on debt cancellation. I’ve never been fond of trackbacks from entries that don’t in turn link to me, but this post got my attention because it seemed to misunderstand the origin of the debts which the G8 has announced plans to cancel. The debts which are to be cancelled are not the result of overseas development aid. While it’s true that some of what rich governments describe as ‘aid’ is in the form of loans, most of the debts are the result of loans (explicitly described as such) granted in the 60s and 70s. Those loans were granted on terms derived from an economic situation which quickly deteriorated and many argue that they were only granted because the west was at the time cash-rich and wanted to turn much of that cash wealth into investment wealth. ...

This month’s round of developments at Grand Rapids Wifi was the first to be completed since I started using the combination of subversion and trac to manage the site, and I have to say that I’m fast becoming a firm fan of that pairing. While at the moment I’m keeping access to them restricted (until I finish reworking the configuration storage) it’s been a massive aid in keeping track of work to do. ...

Salon is carrying a piece (reprinted from the Guardian) about philosopher, novelist, and Canada’s Vice Regal Consort, John Ralston Saul, largely focussed on his new book, " The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World." The interview provides some interesting insights into the formation of the G7 (now G8) and why its focus has so long been on seeing the world through economic eyes, laying the blame at the feet of former French President Giscard d’Estang (notable of late as the writer of the proposed EU constitution). ...

At long, long last, we are beginning to see some real progress on debt relief. Every year, a few weeks before the G8 heads of state/parliament meeting, finance ministers from the G8 meet to hold some discussions which will inform the agenda for the later meeting. This year, the focus was heavily laid on poverty reduction initiatives and reports are that a deal has been reached for enhanced debt relief. Larry Elliott’s coverage in the Guardian is worth a look and Jubilee Debt Campaign have a good breakdown of the deal, but in simple terms what has been agreed is total debt cancellation for countries reaching completing the HIPC process. Until now, completion of HIPC only led to a reduction of the debts to ‘sustainable levels’ (often anything but sustainable) and many of the highly publicised ‘debt cancellation’ deals were in fact little more than deferments of loan repayments. ...

I’ve been playing with the new Technorati design on and off since we got back from the UK last week. The new design is a huge improvement, making it much easier to get to information and seeming to me to make the site much more approachable for a newcomer. It’ll be interesting to see what feedback they get on that count now the beta’s gone public. Dave Sifry and Niall Kennedy have the lowdown. ...

I think I’d taken the BBC far too much for granted until I left the UK. The current podcast trial that lets me listen to The Today Programme’s (by no means to be confused with NBC’s Today Show) key interview at my leisure each and every day is ever so welcome, where once I rarely tuned in as I expected to hear the key points repeated ad nauseum throughout the day. Via Dan Hill’s excellent City of Sound I came across this transcript of a speech new Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson made recently at the Churches Media Conference. It’s proof that careful quoting of Desmond Tutu will lend any speaker a degree of gravitas, but it also displays an encouraging grasp of the breadth of issues confronting mainstream media. Think what you will of the departure of his predecessor, or the drastic measures he’s tried to take (and I’m still not sure what to make of either of those) but he’s clearly worth listening to. ...

One of the many things keeping me busy of late has been the process of transferring the many tapes (!) of the various talks at this year’s Festival of Faith and Music into a digital form. We’re going to be making them available for download over the next few weeks. You can find the first three installments – David Dark’s first keynote, David and Sarah’s joint workshop, and Steve Stockman’s contribution on “U2 and Justice” – at the Calvin Student Activities Blog. ...

One of the key arguments regularly levelled against anyone who openly critiques capitalist structures is that viable alternatives are hard to come by. While this argument is often poorly targetted as there is a legitimate role for many in calling out the failings of existing systems, one strong theme in much anti-capitalist activity over recent years has been that a single overarching alternative is not what is needed. Instead, many argue, we should be looking for a finer grained approach to socioeconomic structures that empowers communities to find what works best for them, and then thinking how those systems can work together. ...

For a while now I’ve been talking about writing some classes to ease use of Atom in PHP, primarily as a base for an implementation of the Atom Publishing/Editing Protocol. I’ve been putting it off, partly due to time restrictions, and partly because the Atom Syndication Format isn’t quite an approved standard yet and I didn’t want to have to spend too much time keeping up with drafts. Atom is rapidly approaching stability, and a little time over the weekend has led me to start work on some code. Rather than just write a parser for Atom I decided to follow the lead set by Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser, which makes working with feeds in python a breeze, and have begun to shape some classes that I hope will provide a similar level of flexibility and abstraction for PHP coders. ...

It’s been too long since Anne Lamott last had a column up at Salon, and the new book, while wonderful in parts, was largely recycled material. So I’m deeply grateful to Josh Marshall ( Talking Points Memo) that he’s included Ms. Lamott among the participants in his new project, TPMCafe (“Politics, Ideas & Lots of Caffeine”). You can find her three entries to date right here. This brings me to a second point about which I care passionately: How does a nice Christian girl like myself help foment revolution? ...