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There are many things about the current administration that are hard to believe. Their nomination for Ambassador to Belgium. It seems he was a major ($50,000) donor to the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” group that attacked John Kerry during the last presidential election. From Salon’s coverage: OK, then, Kerry asked, so why did you give money to a group that tried to do just that? “When we’re asked, we give,” Fox replied. He said later that he couldn’t remember who had asked him for the contribution. And while he said that he thinks 527s should be outlawed and that he’d never give money to any group “if I thought what they were printing was not true,” he also said that he “personally” would have “no way of knowing” whether a group’s representations will turn out to be true at the time he’s giving it cash. ...

With only three and a half months left in Grand Rapids, it’s time for me to start passing along one of my few locally-based responsibilities. Building up Grand Rapids WiFi has been a great way to get to know the city and to learn a few new coding tricks, and I hope to keep enhancing the code, but it needs someone locally based who can keep their finger on the pulse of new wifi hotspots and make occasional visits to keep the site up to date. ...

While one of the most popular posts on this blog is the instructions I wrote up for compiling and installing Ruby and Rails at 1&1, I never actually got as far as deploying a full application there. I was helping a friend admin that server and hosting a few sites there that we work on together. We’ve got a rails app or two in the works, so I wanted to be ready, but I was never entirely comfortable with the idea of hosting there. ...

The geographical illiteracy of much of the US population is something of a joke both in-and outside of the United States. But it’s a shame that it’s shared by so much of its media, particularly when they’re frequently sending reporters to distant lands. For their assistance: Distance from Baghdad, IraqTehran (Iran)442 milesDamascus (Syria)466 milesWashington DC (U.S.A)7000 miles (approx) or to put it another way, where is the USA on a typical map of the middle east. ...

Rails is great for many things, but for very small apps, it can definitely be overkill. That’s where why the lucky stiff’s Camping micro-framework comes in. Where rails gets you started with a clearly defined structure and generally presumes you’re going to want to use a database, Camping makes no such assumptions and just provides a few nice hooks for micro apps. I got started using Camping a couple of months ago. With a lot of travel coming up, I’m eager to keep up to date with special deals on flights and frequent flyer miles, and stumbled across milemaven.com which seemed a great source of that information. But it doesn’t provide feeds and I have no desire to visit the site every day, so I decided to dust off hpricot and combine it with Camping to scrape the site and deliver the contents to my news reader. ...

Documenting the hypocrisies of the Bush administrations claims about “spreading democracy” in the Middle East can be a thankless task, and to do so on an ongoing basis would quickly become repetitive and dull. Every now and again, however, it’s time for an article covering that ground and providing a sense of what democracy might actually mean on the ground in the Middle East. Ken Silverstein’s “Parties of God” in Harpers’ March 2007 issue is just such a survey and well worth reading for a more nuanced understanding than is otherwise readily available. Hopefully it’ll be online soon. ...

I’ve read through Gavin Bell’s slides from his BarCamp London 2 presentation " Time, History and the Internet" a couple of times now, and they’ve certainly provided food for thought. Gavin’s asking questions about how we describe and search for content based on both its own time of origin, but also the events to which it refers. His references to documentation around the current war in Iraq are probably easiest to digest, how do we distinguish between reporting from 2002, reporting about 2002, and information from 2002 that has only come to light in 2006 or 2007? How do we show the build up of information, the layering of understanding, in a now-centered internet culture. ...

In an effort to tidy up various older projects that were never quite completed, I’ve turned my attention to my first PEAR module Services_Technorati. It’s a very simple wrapper around the Technorati API, but the PHP4 version never reached a stable release as it depended on some other packages which were also never stabilised. So it seemed time to make the simple step of converting the code to be PHP5-only and use simplexml for their XML parsing. That removes the dependencies which were slowing me down, and should result in improved speed along the way as the XML parsing is now handled in C rather than PHP. I just released 2.0.0alpha1, but the code should be pretty stable and I’m hoping to run through the steps and get a stable release out very soon. ...

By far the most popular (and most versatile) plugin for working with payment gateways from rails is ActiveMerchant. I’ve used it in a couple of places, and it’s been a joy to work with, apart from one slip-up which was largely due to inadequate documentation. So I’m very pleased to note that they’ve release their 1.0 and launched a website, which bodes well for improved documentation and support.

I had an email the other day asking about my experiences with a particular shared hosting company (not dreamhost). I’ve worked my way through a few companies for smaller projects, and thought I’d throw some thoughts out there. Dreamhost are one of the cheaper hosting outfits around, and seem to inspire either love or hate, depending on your experiences. Their setup for rails is apache+fcgi, which isn’t the optimal configuration, but works well enough for a low-demand application or one where a lot of content can be cached. ...