Blog posts

This entry would have been sooner coming, but a few details leapt in the way and this week has been no calmer than the last. It’s definitely good news that the Festival of Faith and Music went so well as it did. This festival was always going to be a different experience for me than the last: not having a 28-hour journey and the associated jetlag was a big bonus, and it was never going to be quite so life-changing as my first visit to Grand Rapids. But while none of those who were at the inaugural event could claim quite such an impact as it had on Kari and I, it was clear that there had been some repercussions, as evidenced by the warm friendships between people who had first met two years ago, and Daniel Smith’s statement from the stage that he had felt freed up to “try some new things.” ...

I’m now ready to move this domain to its new home. Apologies in advance if you experience any interruption in services.

Mosaic Springs is the name Linda Sack has chosen for her business selling the mosaics she specialises in, running mosaic workshops, and producing art by commission. Today I’m very pleased to be able to launch the latest iteration of the associated website: www.mosaicsprings.com. As with all newly launched work, the site isn’t quite finished. There will be some new images creeping in over the next little while, and maybe another section, but it’s available for the world to see. The design is based on a logo Linda had commissioned, but the focal point is very much the photographs of the vibrant mosaics Linda has produced lately. Enjoy!

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. ...