Blog posts

The other day I came across a tool called worldkit which builds maps by plotting points taken from an XML file onto a jpeg based on their co-ordinates. It seemed like just what I’d been looking for to further extend the geographical information provided at Grand Rapids WiFi. Having expected to spend quite some time putting it all together, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that those who are so inclined can now see the WiFi locations in Grand Rapids plotted onto a map here. ...

The BBC is reporting that Gordon Brown is calling for 100% debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries by the end of 2005. He was speaking at the World Economics Forum (WEF), an annual gathering of business and political leaders that seems to have had a much stronger emphasis on global poverty this year. As yet, there don’t seem to be many details of the content of Gordon Brown’s speech. The WEF blog has this piece about the final plenary at which “South African activist Kumi Naidoo of Civicus and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty chastized the World Economic forum for not doing enough to address poverty and inequality.” But the UK Treasury doesn’t yet have the speech in its archive and little analysis is yet to be found online. ...

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. ...