Blog posts

It turned out that the first version of MT::PastEntries was riddled with bugs that were quietly filling up my logs, so I’ve just released version 0.2. This version has been tested on a small blog of three entries and worked as intended. I suspect that on a blog of any size it would add considerable load when rebuilding static pages, so I’m going to move on to writing a PHP/Smarty version asap. Gavin suggested looking into integration with the ExtraFields plugin, so once the PHP version is in place that’ll probably be next on the ’to do’ list. ...

Calvin’s Student Activities Office, the people behind Calvin’s concert programme, the upcoming Festival of Faith and Music (buy tickets now!) and a whole variety of other events, have just launched their blog. In the first entry, Kate Bowman (who you may know from such blogs as Evangelical Expat) promises “content exclusive to the concerts and films we host at Calvin, such as excerpts from our ‘conversations with the artist,’ photos from our events, and behind-the-scenes peeks into why we choose certain musicians to perform at Calvin.” Definitely worth adding to your newsreader. ...

The re-emergence of Wealthy Theatre is definitely good news for us. For those not in the know, Grand Rapids Community Media Centr e have taken over the building and moved in all their operations (save WYCE). It’s a great old-style cinema. The screen is a little shabby but the quality of last night’s (DVD) projection was more than adequate and it’s still early days for the building’s rejuvenation. This weekend has seen the showing of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s The Take, an exploration of the appropriation of factories by unemployed workers in Argentina. The turbulent economic experiences of Argentina in the 1990s (largely a result of a religious following of IMF recommendations) led to the decimation of that country’s middle class through the closure of factories that were their livelihood. ...

March sees the release of (among many others) the new Over The Rhine and Beck albums, and the latest Anne Lamott book, and this past week has seen increasing press coverage for all three: Today’s New York Times Magazine contains this extensive feature, “Beck at a Certain Age”. Last week, Salon carried an extract from Anne Lamott’s “Plan B”. And the New York Daily News had this on Over The Rhine’s “Drunkard’s Prayer”. ...

Jason DeFilippo posts that Technorati have now added a ‘related tags’ feature. If you search for, say webservices you’ll see related entries for ‘web’, ‘google’, ‘soap’, ‘blogs’ and ’links’. Presumably the relationships are drawn by monitoring where tags have appeared together in pages. This is a big step forward in technorati’s support for folksonomies. The usefulness of tags are considerably increased when you can draw out a list of ‘similar’ terms, and that option has certainly been one of my favourite features of del.icio.us. What I’d love to see technorati add next would be support for searching by multiple tags, and perhaps access to the relationships using the API. The latter would allow those of us thinking of building sites with user submissions organised using folksonomies to access a broader range of data when offering relational links, making our local folksonomy support more useful ‘out of the box.’ ...

It was only a matter of time before libraries emerged to make use of XMLHTTPRequest increasingly transparent to web developers. Jesse Garrett’s coining of the term ‘AJAX’ (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) seems to have quickly caught on, and last night Anil posted on ProNet about a PHP toolkit called SAJAX. SAJAX is a nice first generation library. It allows the developer to register functions in their PHP and then produces javascript to allow the resulting page to make use of those functions. It’s lightweight (146 lines) and easy to use. The key thing that’s missing at the moment are a couple of wrappers that would allow it to integrate with templating systems — the only output functions print the javascript directly. ...

Last night saw us visiting the delightful Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts to see Jean Luc Godard’s latest: Notre Musique. In retrospect, a 9pm showing of this intense film may not have been the best of ideas, drained as were by the omnipresence of snow. It’s a complex film, structured in three parts (“Hell”, “Purgatory”, “Heaven”) each of which bombards the viewer with concepts and images. The pacing of the film shifts significantly between settings, and after an hour of purgatory, the relaxed pace and lush imagery of heaven is the welcome respite the concept suggests. ...

Following a request on the developers email list, technorati have added support for a new query: keyInfo. Each Technorati API key is limited to 500 requests per day and this query will allow you to check a given key’s status without using up any of that allocation. I’ve upgraded Services_Technorati to support that and upped the version number to 0.52. The latest package is here. The package is pretty much done. I’m hoping to find a bit more time to test the attention.XML support and then I will trigger a call for votes for acceptance into PEAR. ...

A little more work, and a little more discussion with Daniel Khan finally has my tools for interacting with PEAR::DB_NestedSet complete. There’s a mistake in the documentation for the moveTree method that had me thrown for a while. Since it’s taken a while to get to grips with this module, I thought a summary of how I’ve used it might be in order. Please note that this is a fairly hastily put together piece, which does not delve into all the intricacies of the package but should give an experienced PHP coder with a basic understanding of the theory behind nested sets with the information they need to get up and running. For some backgrounf on nested sets I’d recommend this article. ...

Yesterday, the BBC brought news of another apparent flip-flop on the part of the Bush administration, this time in their Iran policy. While senior administration officials have until now been denigrating the EU’s talks with Tehran, the White House is now apparently considering “economic incentives” should Iran kowtow to their demands and give up any semblance of a nuclear programme. That change of tone is certainly one for the better. There are clear advantages to Iran in having nuclear technology, whether for energy generation or for weapons, and the argument thus far presented of “but we don’t want you to have them” doesn’t carry much water. But the administration really should have thought of this approach a little earlier. Playing good cop/bad cop single-handed just doesn’t work – your opponent is unlikely to be fooled, and has a good chance of poking fun at your expense. ...