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The situation in the Middle East seems to be going from bad to worse as Ehud Olmert demonstrates that to him everything is a big nail to be hit with his military hammer, and the militants in Palestine and Lebanon show that that’s their preferred state of affairs. Here in the US we have the joy of receiving the news about the situation from such bastions of newstainment as CNN, who bring us this remarkably poorly written story (via Ed). In the midst of a story that does very little to explain much of anything, preferring to remind us that both sides are using threatening language, is this little treat of a link description: ...

A couple of entries back I complained about the problems I had getting up and running with MOG. According to their latest newsletter they’ve found the elusive database index needed to radically speed up their import process, but I have yet to find the inclination to give it another go. One of the reasons I found it quite so frustrating was that I’d recently been beta testing tourb.us, a live music website that allows you to build a set of favourite artists and will keep you informed on when those artists are going to be in your area. ...

The folks at Demos (“the think tank for everyday democracy”) have just relaunched their website with a new design and a number of new features. The design isn’t all that striking, but has a smattering of nicely subtle features and succeeds in getting out of the way and letting you see the content quickly. More worthy of note is the fact that they’re now making much more use of news feeds to help readers keep up to date, and have launched a podcast. The second edition of the podcast appeared today, featuring an interview with John Craig on Production Values and the future of ‘professionalism.’ It’s well worth the 15 minutes. ...

Sent to NPR this morning: Dear Sir/Madam, I was surprised and disappointed as I listened to Morning Edition this morning that your interviewer repeatedly allowed Nicholas Burns (State Department Under-Secretary for Political Affairs) to repeat the administration’s line—that they need to be convinced that Iran is serious about negotiations and that they are running out of patience—without challenge. The United States government has not been engaged in the negotiations with Iran that have occurred up until now due to its consistent refusal to take part in face-to-face talks with Iranian representatives. While the European governments attempted to conduct negotiations, the US administration’s consistent threats serve only to undermine those negotiations given the US’ recent track record of unilateral action. ...

Grand Rapids WiFi relaunched today with a change under the hood to Ruby Rails. The site has been through several iterations since I took it over in September 2004. It often functions as my testbed for new features I’d like to trial, and since most of my custom development is now rails-based, it made sense to make the switch. Feature-wise, not much has changed. A few URLs have changed slightly (with appropriate redirects provided by rails and lighttpd), there’s some caching in place, and there are a few new “ajax” effects, but otherwise it’s so far a straight port. And on the UI side the changes are also minimal. The use of microformats has increased somewhat, but the long promised redesign will have to wait a little longer. ...

Interesting tech events rarely come to Michigan, but it seems the local ruby users’ group has decided to do something about that and is organising RubyConf, MI to take place on August 26th at Calvin College. Having a Ruby conference about twenty minutes’ bike ride from my house would be very exciting, were it not that I’ll be 4000 miles away at Greenbelt…

The US government said it could not find the men that Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Mujahid believes could help set him free. The Guardian found them in three days. So starts a nicely timed piece in yesterday’s Guardian that probably ought to have made more waves than it so far seems to have. The supreme court’s ruling that detainees at Guantánomo Bay ought to be granted their right to proper hearings was a good step for due process, but the Guardian report demonstrates that a lot more scrutiny will be needed if those prisoners are to ever get the treatment any human being deserves. ...

It’s been two weeks since Bonnaroo and I keep failing to write about it. That’s been the way of my blogging lately; something will happen that seems blog-worthy but so much time will pass before I write about it that it no longer seems worthwhile. For those who aren’t aware, Bonnaroo is the US’ biggest grossing music festival, and also one of the largest around with 80,000 attendees this year. It grew out of the ‘jam band’ (Grateful Dead, Phish, etc) phenomenon, and still has roots there, but has diversified of late to have a wide range of indie artists. It was the lure of the latter that motivated us to drive south for ten hours (nicely broken up by a night in Nashville on each side). ...

Being fascinated with music-releated apps online, I was eager to try out mog.com and found a little time yesterday to give it a spin. Mog.com seems in concept fairly similar to last.fm of which I am an avid user. It builds an inventory of your ‘digital music collection’, allows you to create a profile and blog entries, and builds charts, recommendations, and inter-used networks based on your collection and listening habits. Installation on a mac is easy enough, with the mog software appearing as a new pane in System Preferences. It began by attempting to index the music I have stored on my laptop, which immediately struck me as a mistake. We have a mac mini with an external hard drive that we use to store all our music (around 160GB last time I checked) and I listen to that via itunes library sharing or on my ipod. Music on my laptop is almost all recently downloaded, and the laptop is just a stopping off point for tracks until I decide whether or not I want to add them to the main library. ...

It’s been gratifying to see a few PHP web service libraries emerging based on my Services_Technorati package. It’s particularly enjoyable when the writeup is in a language you don’t read… The latest to appear is a wrapper for the mag.nolia social bookmarking site. You can find it on Alex Sancho’s site. Hopefully he’ll propose it for inclusion in PEAR.