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Ruby on Rails provides the very nice helper method highlight to identify search terms within a string. We’ve been using it quite a bit on a large project but recently began to notice that it broke the HTML in certain places. It turned out that our problem was that our search term was showing up within an attribute on a tag, and so highlight, oblivious to the content of the text it was parsing, was inserting tags in the middle of attributes, and all kinds of craziness was ensuing that just wouldn’t do. ...

There’s something a little strange about sitting in a large movie theatre on a Saturday night with only nine other people. And when the film is one of the year’s best reviewed it’s also rather sad. Maybe other showings had better turnouts? I found myself wondering how much of The Queen made sense to those in the US audience who haven’t kept a close watch on British politics over the past decade. Much of the humour seemed to rest on pre-existing knowledge of the Royals and of Blair’s team, and in such an empty room it was tough to get a sense of how anyone else was responding. ...

We made another of our all-too-short trips back home to England last week. It was great to see the people we were able to, though sad to miss so many others. We were left very much looking forward to living back over there, but there’s certainly a lot to take care of before we can make the move! Not many photos were taken, but a few of those that were are now up over on flickr. ...

Hell has frozen over. Or, I actually slightly wish I’d been at a sporting event. And it’s all because of the marching band. The Guardian’s music section has a piece today on Jay C Rees’ routine for the University of Arizona’s band which sees them performing a medley of Radiohead pieces, complete with all the usual marching formations. There are quite a few videos on youtube.

The thinkers at Ekklesia have published a report that provides a very sensible overview of the issues in the ongoing debate around Christian Unions and Student Unions. You can find out about it on their site. (via Maggi Dawn)

Having put quite a bit of time into unravelling the issues between the Students’ Union and Christian Union in Reading, I was dismayed to see The Times today reporting that some Christian Unions in the UK are considering legal action against the Student Unions on their campuses because: Christian Unions claim that they are being singled out as a “soft target” by student associations because they refuse to allow non-Christians to address their meetings or sit on ruling committees. ...

It seems likely that the dominant theme of the next two years in US politics will be which party can emerge least scathed from a withdrawal from Iraq. If the democrats can be seen to force the President’s hand in withdrawing from an unpopular conflict, they may be able to leverage that in the 2008 elections. If the Republicans can manage a withdrawal that looks orderly and maybe even victorious, or if they can spin Democrats’ urgings as being weak on defense, then maybe they can salvage something from this ridiculous venture. ...

A change of plans yesterday led to quite a bit of time in the car mid-afternoon, and a chance to listen to Ted Koppel promote his new documentary about Iran on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. I was very impressed with Koppel’s apparent grasp of the nuances of the Iranian political situation, of the shades of opinion within the country, and particularly with his commitment to educating people about it given its ongoing importance in world affairs and US foreign policy. The documentary airs on the Discovery Channel on Sunday and you can find the Talk Of The Nation interview here. ...

Kari and I are both helping out with the Festival of Faith and Music again this year. We’re hoping to have some really exciting lineup news to announce very soon, but it’s already coming together very well and we have Sufjan Stevens, Anathallo, David Dark, Lauren Winner, and many others lined up to join us. For now, given the frustrations that Internet Explorer caused Rob I’m just delighted to be able to announce that the website is now live. ...

A recent comment reminded me of an old entry proposing yet another project I never had time to follow through with: Using Trac and Subversion with Social Documents. The idea there was to make use of subversion’s utility for version control and trac’s existing frontend for browsing that to present versioned documents. In hindsight, I don’t think trac would actually be a good frontend for this unless the intended audience was entirely techies. Trac works for those of us who use it every day to follow a variety of projects, and its ability to combine a wiki with version control of the ‘official’ versions of documents provides some interesting ideas, but the interface just wouldn’t work. ...