Blog posts

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… ...

Remodeling should now be complete and a slightly cleaned up version of jystewart.net now live. Quite a few URLs have changed, but so long as apache does its job, that shouldn’t matter too much. In redesigning the site I’ve tried to make my web development work and availability more explicit. For now, the writing section is hidden away, to be resurrected if time allows me to start doing that more seriously. Instead, the code section has been pulled forward. That latter section is actually still a bit of a mess, so I hope to clean up the layout before too much longer. ...

In the car on the way to Dana’s church this morning (we’re spending Easter in Chicago, staying with Dana, Kari’s sister) we passed quite a number of orthodox Jews, on their way to school and work. I was reminded of studying Judaism in school and chuckling at the thought that the orthodox will not travel more than a mile on the Sabbath. In retrospect, I was too quick to join in the laughter. There’s a lot to be said for a rule that ensures the congregation and place of worship live in close proximity. Naturally there’s a chance that those who are not among the faithful will be driven from the area, but at the same time it enforces a commitment to the locality, means that the act of attending weekly (or thereabout) gatherings does not involve consumption and environmental degradation, and ensures that the community of faith is also a community of daily life. An appealing notion. ...

Discussion of ’the Semantic Web’ and ‘Web Services’ rarely dies down, but it seems like there’s been more than usual of late. As analysts yet again predict that this year will the “The Year of Web Services” more people are beginning to agree that such hype isn’t making any real impact on the use of service-based architectures. One of the better comments of late is Danny Ayers’ call to start seeing web applications as “features of the web” rather than standalone entities. The Semantic Web will never evolve if we merely see web services as ways to escape writing certain pieces of code ourselves; we need instead to be trying to grasp at how the whole might work. ...

Brandon pointed me to this piece on how Zach Kinkaid from the excellent Matthew’s House Project was fired from Oklahoma Baptist University because of an editorial he wrote. As the editorial loaded up, I was expecting it to be a response to some controversial theological issue, but discovered instead that he lost his job for criticising a wealthy church’s decision to flee the inner city in favour of a more comfortable suburban setting. Such ‘white flight’ seems to have been a fixture of the USian church experience for some time. In a culture where the success of a church is measured on numbers it makes sense to make it a comfortable place, and to find cheap land for huge (and generally ugly) expansions. But it’s ironic that a demographic that was so much in favour of Bush’s “faith based initiatives” is fleeing the very areas that need such initiatives. If there’s one argument I’d use against routing urban redevelopment funding through churches, it would be that churches by and large couldn’t care less about the urban poor. ...

If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death. ...

For the past few years, and particularly during the US Presidential election last year, the media have been trying to set up an adversarial debate between blogging and journalism. The idea has propagated that blogging might be ’the new journalism’ and once they’ve established such a concept, traditional media have then sought to undermine this strawman blogging. As many have commented, if current affairs blogging has an analogue in the traditional media it’s probably the comments page, not the headlines. Occasionally bloggers break a story, but the only real threat to the traditional journalist’s investigative role is the abject failure of many of them to exercise it. ...

Looking to the future of the Grand Rapids WiFi site, I hope to see it become part of an integrated set of local websites supporting and promoting community development and local business. Geolocation seems to be the topic du jour, and while the site has for several months featured geodata about all of its locations the time seemed right to develop it further. Today I’ve been adding RDF representations of almost all the data on the site. I’ve extended the RDF descriptions of each location to list all the comments on that location. The vocabulary for that is one I found over at FilmTrust and it means that almost all the useful content of the site can now be represented using RDF. ...