Blog posts

I’m in the process of moving all my sites and configuring the bytemark server. So far so good. It’s a good chance to prune some of the sites, removing a few files that were only meant to be online temporarily and cleaning up after configuration changes. One tutorial has been invaluable in setting up my email system. I’m still in the process of testing, but following Christoph Haas’ “ISP-Style Email Service with Debian-Sarge and Postfix” has saved me a lot of time. Not having used linux in any serious way for a couple of years, I’d forgotten how much good documentation there is out there. ...

Voting was complete on my Technorati package a couple of weeks back, but I’ve been waiting to announce it until I was able to upload an initial version to PEAR. The package was approved today, and you can now find version 0.5.5 at the PEAR website. It’s currently set to ‘devel’ so to install it from the command line you’ll need to use: % pear install Services_Technorati-devel Changes in the latest release mostly arise from voters’ suggestions, with the key one being the change of a number of method names to remove the superfluous word ‘query.’ I’ll hopefully be moving it out of ‘devel’ soon, probably once I’ve made the final few tweaks to bring it in line with the PEAR Coding Standards and/or when Technorati finish overhauling the attention.XML API. ...

This evening I tried to SSH into grwifi.net only to discover that my SSH access had been disabled. Contacting my host, sitehq.co.uk, I was informed that they had changed their policy on shell access and hadn’t informed me before making the change because they’d been busy fixing another server. That is not the level of service I expect from a hosting company, most of whom would give some notice _before_ making the change. They are not willing to change their policy and are unapologetic for the lack of notice, so I fear the time has come to move again. ...

On Friday I presented a session at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Music on indications of where the music industry might be headed. The session went well, with a reasonable turnout and some great questions, and seems to have fostered considerable further discussion. I covered the current state of the industry, subscription/download services, recommendation systems, and a few related concepts. You can find a PDF of my slides, along with a number of links at this location. ...

A few months ago, I stumbled across consultationprocess.org, a site exploring the potential of blogging tools to open up public documents for discussion. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Gavin Bell and asked if I’d like to be involved in such a project to present the proposed European Union Constitution as a blog/wiki for ease of commenting and annotation. Today, Talk Euro is live. I’m not sure that any contributions from me are in this launch version, but I’m hoping to contribute more as we extend the platform to handle further documents and to scale for longer term use. Regardless, it’s a great resource. Gavin has an announcement. ...

A few months ago, I stumbled across consultationprocess.org, a site exploring the potential of blogging tools to open up public documents for discussion. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Gavin Bell and asked if I’d like to be involved in such a project to present the proposed European Union Constitution as a blog/wiki for ease of commenting and annotation. Today, Talk Euro is live. I’m not sure that any contributions from me are in this launch version, but I’m hoping to contribute more as we extend the platform to handle further documents and to scale for longer term use. Regardless, it’s a great resource. Gavin has an announcement. ...

What seems like positive news about the future of 28th Street emerged in yesterday’s Grand Rapids Press. According to the report, the City Commission have been revising their ‘master plan’ for the first time in a decade. Parts of the plan share intentions to make 28th Street more pedestrian friendly, giving the suburb of Kentwood more of a sense of place, improve transport links, and potentially make ’land-use modifications’ which could imply changes to the zoning laws that currently maintain large portions of 28th Street as ‘commercial property only’ and result in a street that is effectively one big strip-mall. ...

As a review on IMDB remarked, some films benefit from an art cinema showing. The couple who talked (loudly) through the entire first half of Off The Map were evidence of that charge. Off The Map is in many ways typical of USian independent cinema. It has vast, beautiful landscapes aplenty, characters whose quirks are remarkable and endearing (but not focal) and a story of the healing found in shared experiences. But while it may be at times derivative and rarely atypical, it is also evidence for the wonderful films that are often borne of that genre. ...

The increasing reports of horse-trading between the EU and the US in recent days have made it look increasingly inevitable that Paul Wolfowitz would be approved as President of the World Bank. And so it has come to pass. The suggestions are that the EU has been guaranteed a high-level representative within the World Bank and/or Paschal Lamy (current EU Trade Commissioner) as the next Director-General of the WTO. What doesn’t seem to have been discussed at any point in the proceedings is whether a man with such tragic, high-profile blunders in his recent past is right for the job. ...

In between frantic work periods (there’s a chance I’ll launch/complete five sites this week…) I’ve been exploring the new features at upcoming.org. The site’s potential has certainly taken a leap forward with the addition of REST-based webservices, tags, SMS alerts, and private events. It’d be great if as a next step we could see some geolocation data added for the venues listed, making it even easier to integrate with other tools/sites like the ones I was describing previously. In an ideal world, we might even see the site picking up its content from feeds scattered around venue, fan, and other sites, but for now we’re still lacking the standardized vocabularies to smooth that process. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be too hard to write a script that parses local feeds and uses the event.add call to ensure they’re on upcoming… ...