Pie Palace

Blogawa.ca is now reposting for XUP and Coloured Marbles.

piepalace and blogawa have been down on and off for the past few days. Piepalace has been smacked with thousands of hits (more than 44,000 today alone), and has goosed up its load much higher than usual. Dreamhost has been shutting us down for excessive load. I’d originally thought that I was being DoS’d but the traffic looks reasonable: valid urls, different agents, spread across a wide range of IPs. Hopefully the load will stay reasonable over the next little while. Although I probable should install wp_cache.

Blogawa.ca has two new contributors: OCInfo, a website about OC Transpo and it’s forays into the online world; and Real Grouchy, a blog that makes my curmudgeonliness look like an affectation (and follows swap boxes).

On Friday I spent a couple of hours combing Ottawa blogs to invite new contributors to the Blogawa fold. Sadly, my response rate is abysmal. For every three invitations I send, I get one response.

Are there any blogs you would like to see added to Blogawa’s blogroll? If so, please leave a comment on this post.

Here are a few pictures of the demolition of the south side stands at Landsdowne Park. The City has a short video from the north side stands.

Photographic observation de jour:

1. Make sure your batteries are fully (and freshly) charged before heading out to an event. I was using batteries that were at 50% (according to my camera) and dicked around trying to replace them just before the stands went boom. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
2. For fast events that are happening at a known location, use a tripod. If I’d been six inches lower that branch obstructing the top of the stands wouldn’t have been in the way. I knew that when I was setting up, but I was too rushed (due to battery idiocy) to scootch. A tripod would have ensured that my photographs were set up properly. Hell, even a monopod would have done the trick.

The Citizen reported on Kitchissippi Councillor Christine Leadman’s new transit proposal yesterday. Ms. Leadman repeated Clive Doucet’s proposal: with the eastern train heading down Carling, instead of following the Parkway.

Interestingly, Nancy Schepers (city manager for planning, transit and the environment) says that her department didn’t seriously consider Carling as one of the potential routes the train could follow. Which isn’t surprisingly, considering that the four plans were essentially identical. Ms. Schepers also says that the Carling route would be “far more expensive” than the parkway route – which is odd, given that we haven’t seen a detailed cost analysis of the parkway route yet.

It’s a pity that this proposal didn’t go anywhere, because Carling has many of the attributes that make mass transit work: it’s surrounded by housing, and it has existing “destinations” along the route (Carlingwood mall, various medical centres, and a mix of stores). The Parkway is an easy route to follow since there isn’t any development there, but that’s precisely why it makes a lousy transit corridor.

Update: I forgot to credit the photo author. The photograph was taken by paulshannon.

I’d like to switch blogawa.ca to use more standard aggregation software (a) so that I don’t have to maintain the codebase, and (b) so that I can add microformat parsing to the aggregator so that other planet sites will be able to detect microformatted postings.

There only seem to be two popular planet implementations: Planet Planet which is written in python, features 9,503 loc and output generated by a templating engine; the other implementation is planet-php which is written in PHP, with 608 loc (plus 1202 lines of XSL, ugh), and features output generated by XSL.

Given my aversion to templating engines, my dislike of XSL, I seem to be stuck. I either bite a bullet, or I keep up the opensource tradition of forking, splitting, and generally reinventing the wheel. =(

Linux Hater’s Blog is offering interesting critiques of open source philosophy. It’s nice to read a blog about free software that’s critical (and informative).

On a similar topic: I’ve only been able to find one blog post about someone’s experiences with an OpenMoko cellphone. It’s quite damning. Too bad. Perhaps whoever is running the company will port Android to it and call it a day.

Blogs are pretty neat. They allow a user to produce a stream of time-specific posts, that automatically appear in subscribers’ RSS readers. But every post on a blog looks the same.

That doesn’t make sense. Let’s say that I write movie reviews on my blog – I want every review to include the movie poster, a link to the movie’s website, and a star rating. With Wordpress, I’d have to hand craft every post to contain that information. Hand crafting is easy to screw up, boring to do, and hard to change in future.

What if we give each post a skin? When the user is writing the post, they can say “this is a movie review”, and Wordpress is smart enough to ask for the website link, star rating, and link to the movie poster. When Wordpress serves that post up, it’s wrapped in a special blob of HTML that renders the links and stars properly.

You’ve noticed that I’m talking movie reviews. Does that ring a bell? Perhaps about microformats? If we’re careful when we sculpt the skin for our review, it can include a hReview, meaning that a web crawler can detect a review and index it appropriately.

chameleon is a first cut at skinning. It’s missing a little javascript goop (to show movie posters and hide some stuff on the post editing page), but it’s functional, supporting hReview and hCalendar by default.

Here’s one to file under the odd links category: The Canadian Gazette publishes a list of unclaimed bank balances. One wonders how to go about claiming a balance, and if there are regulations as to who can make the claim.

Today’s word is inedia. It would be funny, if it weren’t for the deaths. (Okay, it’s still a little funny)