Uncategorized

I’m now ready to move this domain to its new home. Apologies in advance if you experience any interruption in services.

Voting was complete on my Technorati package a couple of weeks back, but I’ve been waiting to announce it until I was able to upload an initial version to PEAR. The package was approved today, and you can now find version 0.5.5 at the PEAR website. It’s currently set to ‘devel’ so to install it from the command line you’ll need to use: % pear install Services_Technorati-devel Changes in the latest release mostly arise from voters’ suggestions, with the key one being the change of a number of method names to remove the superfluous word ‘query.’ I’ll hopefully be moving it out of ‘devel’ soon, probably once I’ve made the final few tweaks to bring it in line with the PEAR Coding Standards and/or when Technorati finish overhauling the attention.XML API. ...

This evening I tried to SSH into grwifi.net only to discover that my SSH access had been disabled. Contacting my host, sitehq.co.uk, I was informed that they had changed their policy on shell access and hadn’t informed me before making the change because they’d been busy fixing another server. That is not the level of service I expect from a hosting company, most of whom would give some notice _before_ making the change. They are not willing to change their policy and are unapologetic for the lack of notice, so I fear the time has come to move again. ...

On Friday I presented a session at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Music on indications of where the music industry might be headed. The session went well, with a reasonable turnout and some great questions, and seems to have fostered considerable further discussion. I covered the current state of the industry, subscription/download services, recommendation systems, and a few related concepts. You can find a PDF of my slides, along with a number of links at this location. ...

A few months ago, I stumbled across consultationprocess.org, a site exploring the potential of blogging tools to open up public documents for discussion. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Gavin Bell and asked if I’d like to be involved in such a project to present the proposed European Union Constitution as a blog/wiki for ease of commenting and annotation. Today, Talk Euro is live. I’m not sure that any contributions from me are in this launch version, but I’m hoping to contribute more as we extend the platform to handle further documents and to scale for longer term use. Regardless, it’s a great resource. Gavin has an announcement. ...

A few months ago, I stumbled across consultationprocess.org, a site exploring the potential of blogging tools to open up public documents for discussion. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Gavin Bell and asked if I’d like to be involved in such a project to present the proposed European Union Constitution as a blog/wiki for ease of commenting and annotation. Today, Talk Euro is live. I’m not sure that any contributions from me are in this launch version, but I’m hoping to contribute more as we extend the platform to handle further documents and to scale for longer term use. Regardless, it’s a great resource. Gavin has an announcement. ...

As a review on IMDB remarked, some films benefit from an art cinema showing. The couple who talked (loudly) through the entire first half of Off The Map were evidence of that charge. Off The Map is in many ways typical of USian independent cinema. It has vast, beautiful landscapes aplenty, characters whose quirks are remarkable and endearing (but not focal) and a story of the healing found in shared experiences. But while it may be at times derivative and rarely atypical, it is also evidence for the wonderful films that are often borne of that genre. ...

Remodeling should now be complete and a slightly cleaned up version of jystewart.net now live. Quite a few URLs have changed, but so long as apache does its job, that shouldn’t matter too much. In redesigning the site I’ve tried to make my web development work and availability more explicit. For now, the writing section is hidden away, to be resurrected if time allows me to start doing that more seriously. Instead, the code section has been pulled forward. That latter section is actually still a bit of a mess, so I hope to clean up the layout before too much longer. ...

In the car on the way to Dana’s church this morning (we’re spending Easter in Chicago, staying with Dana, Kari’s sister) we passed quite a number of orthodox Jews, on their way to school and work. I was reminded of studying Judaism in school and chuckling at the thought that the orthodox will not travel more than a mile on the Sabbath. In retrospect, I was too quick to join in the laughter. There’s a lot to be said for a rule that ensures the congregation and place of worship live in close proximity. Naturally there’s a chance that those who are not among the faithful will be driven from the area, but at the same time it enforces a commitment to the locality, means that the act of attending weekly (or thereabout) gatherings does not involve consumption and environmental degradation, and ensures that the community of faith is also a community of daily life. An appealing notion. ...

If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death. ...