Blog posts

There’s likely to be much debate in the coming days (on U2 email lists, if nowhere else) on how ticketmaster could more effectively handle hugely popular ticket sales without more debacles like Saturday’s (we didn’t get tickets, btw, despite having 4 browsers across 2 computers searching for close to an hour). In the quest to find an email address for the CEO of Ticketmaster.com in order to register my disgust, I found myself thinking quite a lot about the inadequacies of that service. ...

It can sometimes be tempting to believe that receiving a ‘cease and desist’ is a rite of passage for bloggers. If it is, then mine came today as Brian Mayes made a claim that I have been making false statements (apparently Christian Music Makeover is not controversial in the slightest) and threatened to contact his lawyer should I “continue to make false statements, slanderous comments or personal attacks.” Make of that what you will.

For quite some time I’ve pulled away from the bizarre world of “Contemporary Christian Music.” Having spent a lot of time writing increasingly critical reviews of much of the dross released through that industry I got burned out and pulled away almost completely. But of late I’ve been reading a few more news sources from that world and as anyone who reads this blog will know, ranting at length about some of its more distasteful initiatives. ...

One of the PEAR modules I’ve been making extensive use of is DB_DataObject. For a while I toyed with writing a custom DataObject system for the current project, but PEAR’s offering seemed to have pretty much everything I was looking for. Overall, it’s made the development process much more straightforward than it would otherwise have been, but I did run into one unexpected problem. I have a lot of table links specified in the configuration file and I suddenly discovered that some of those links weren’t being made as I expected. It turns out that DataObject loads all the links into an associative array, indexed by the field being linked. This means that if, say, you have a member id linking to a whole variety of tables then only the last link specified will be recorded. ...

For the same project as I posted about yesterday, I’m making extensive use of Smarty. Today I wrote a plugin that will convert the output of NestedSet into a nicely formatted HTML list. The one thing that took a while to work out was that if a smarty ‘modifier’ plugin is applied to an array, it will be applied to each element of that array. I wanted my modifier to be applied to the array as a whole and to do that I had to prefix the modifier call with an ‘@’. ie: ...

I was very pleased a couple of months ago when I was told that Wealthy Street Bakery had finally switched on their wireless router. Wealthy Street serve the best sandwiches in Grand Rapids, along with a range of great sweet foods. But somehow we’ve never had occasion to stop here for any length of time since then so I hadn’t been able to test it. Till now. The connection speed is very similar to Four Friends, rating at 344kpbs up/274kbps down when I tested it. Everything has been running smoothly, though I’ve not been making any substantial data transfers or doing any remote working. From my limited use of FTP I’d guess working via SSH would be an option. ...

Needing to be at Calvin for lunch but not really caring to set off at the crack of dawn to travel in with Kari, today seemed like a good opportunity to try out the bus system. I’ve picked up from a few people that travelling on the town’s buses can be a little daunting for those who’ve not tried it before, so I thought a few words about the experience would be in order. ...

For a current project I’m trying to get a better idea of what’s available in PEAR. PEAR has come on a long way since I last explored it in any seriousness. Today’s undertaking was an exploration of DB_NestedSet. Up till now I’d had a simple parent-child category map but I needed to make it a little more flexible, reduce database overheads and simplify maintenance. Using NestedSet looks like a solution to all of those, though some refactoring may be in order. The key thing that’s missing is good documentation and it did take a fair bit of googling to get things going as I’d like. ...

The final speaker in the 2005 January Series was also the best received. Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopalian Priest from New York with one of those genteel southern accents I’d only previously heard in movies, took on the most politically charged issue in modern America and did so impressively. As she began to laud evangelicalism while critiquing theological liberalism I was rather concerned. In the context of a series which has had a clear conservative bent and a talk entitled " Christian Right, Christian Left: The Polarized American Religious Scene" the danger of an hour on the merits of legalistic theology was very apparent. Thankfully, that apprehension was quickly subdued as it became clear that Rutledge was not interested in tight definitions but was looking for theology that surpasses the narrow confines in which modernist liberalism and conservative evangelicalism both languish. ...

Each year on Oscar Nomination Day I find myself lamenting the difficulty of getting hold of the short films that get nods. This year, with all the talk about film downloads (word got out yesterday that Napster is planning to offer video downloads, and that google is to launch video search) I’m left wondering why no-one was poised to announce that they were offering downloads of the ten shorts. The best I’ve found so far is this teaser of Gopher Broke and this one of Ryan. Walt Disney Pictures aren’t even advertising their Short Film (animated) nominee on their homepage… ...