March 2005

Andrew Jones briefly answers a question about putting photos into your blog at : Mac, blog and photos. Both the suggestions cater for simple blogging - Blogger + Flickr or Typepad. (Flickr can be used with other blogging systems too - see here for the list).

Now that works probably for a lot of people but I’m thinking about setting up some photo galleries - with the option of using some of the images in a blog or two - but want more control for the set up. I already have my own web host with database, PHP/Perl and other features, and would like to configure the set up how I’d like. I’d also like to be able to provide access control - for viewing and for others to upload - and to set default parameters for maximum photo dimensions and file sizes etc. I’m also not keen of “giving” my photos to someone else to manage and then having people who need to access them giving personal information to a third party.

Enter Gallery which seems to do most of what I need, is open source and has some sort of integration with various CMSs and blogs like Movable Type (plug-in here). From the Gallery web site,

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

Now, I have all of my photos set up in iPhoto on my iBook where they have meta-data (comments, dates, times, titles etc.) linked to the photo. I don’t want to have to do the whole export photos from iPhoto to a folder (losing the meta-data), use the Gallery Java-based importer to upload them (slowly) and then have to renter the details in Gallery. So I was overjoyed to discover: iPhotoToGallery which is a plug-in for iPhoto (version 2+) that allows you to select your photo’s in iPhoto, select export from the file menu and send them to Gallery on the server (see screenshot). How cool is that? Now my only limits are disk-space and upload bandwidth.

Anyway, for those of you who have a technical bent, want more control over the look-and-feel of your photo sets, and access controls for others then this might work for you. I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks to see how it works but as always YMMV.

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is a web site that brings together information and links related to things like “transhumanism”, technological augmentation of human beings and technological approaches to longevity and immortality.

By promoting and publicizing the work of thinkers who examine the social implications of scientific and technological advance, we seek to contribute to the understanding of the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and societies.

To keep Paul happy I’m also posting the link to the Chiefs wallpaper.

Official Super 12 Chiefs Site : 2005 Poster

You can download the 2005 Hurricanes wallpaper and screensaver (Mac & PC) here .

Spent Easter up in the lovely Bay of Islands where we went to a family wedding and just spent a bit to time unwinding. Here are a couple of panorama shots at the place we were staying - The Pukeko’s Nest. Well worth effort to get there (it’s about 30 minutes off Highway 1 near Kawakawa but a lot of that is dirt road). Serene and safe surroundings (unless you’re a 2 year old with a desire to investigate the mangrove swamps) with no imposition of “modern life”.

Mangroves are a nice metaphor for Easter for me. There is this swampland, covered by the sea a high tide, that looks just like yucky, sticky, smelly mud. Yet out of this seemingly “dead” land life teems - mangrove trees grow up, crabs scuttle, pukekos nest - the place that looks initially uninhabitable is a rich, ecosystem. But you don’t know that unless you take time to “unwrap the grave clothes.”

Lawrence Lessig’s recent blog post never again links in nicely with the discussion Tim highlighted at SanBlogue: When copyright fails. In it Lessig comments on the restrictive nature of “Publication Agreements” and the loss of author’s copyright. His slant is that he will now “not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.” Interesting to see if it can be done.

Tim’s post here points out that sharing copyright with journal publishers does come with strings attached - as in you might not be able to submit it to an electronic repository (as hypothesised here a day or so ago).

See: SansBlogue : When copyright fails…

Might be interesting to see what the definition of a repository is. Tim and co’s idea seems to be for a place to upload files to. I wonder if instead each person is responsible for hosting the files (via department space or their own domain name) and then the “repository” merely provides an indexes to those files. A biblical studies Napster?

Following up from the posting about making theological vignettes on video, there might be an easier way to do it first up - via pod-casting. Have a look at : Wired 13.03: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star.

Read the following essay the other day on the train which seemed to link in with a number of other ongoing threads of discussion out there.

In his essay ‘Web of Babylon’* on the nature of fan fiction Kurt Lancaster ponders the nature of power relationships within publishing and the generations of new micro communities. [Fan fiction is where writers take aspects of an existing literary world - say a television show like Babylon 5 - and create a new but derivative work that expands upon the canonical literature. So you might take character behaviour demonstrated in the TV show but place it into another unvisited context.] So the original text isn’t simply produced and consumed only as directed. Rather as Lancaster notes it is transformed and transforms the readers.

‘Fandom here’, media scholar Henry Jenkins tells us, ‘becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community’. Fans may create new cultural texts, but they do not necessarily build a new full-sized community. In anything, what evolves out of their creative productions are micro-communities. (p.309)

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Just had the video of Alain de Botton’s Philosophy : A Guide to Happiness out of the library for the week (I don’t think it ever made it onto NZ TV). It’s a television version of his book The Consolations of Philosophy where he summarizes what six different philosophers said about things like love, self-esteem and anger (one philosopher per topic) and how that might give wisdom for living in the everyday.

It was the format of the episodes (30 mins each) that attracted my attention (the content did too). Started wondering whether you could do that same thing with theologians - pick 6-8 theological figures and then look at how each one might relate to an aspect of the Christian life. Turn each into a short video for use in class or with discussion groups. Emphasis upon the practice of faith.

BTW - my favourite part of the video was in the Epicurus on happiness/good living episode where an advertising agency is approached to develop ads that counter consumerism.

Interesting article in the Guardian on religion and politics brought to my attention by Jonny Baker: act justly. Nice to get an alternative point of view from the typical argument I’ve frequently encountered that if your’re Christian in NZ you should vote for a centre-right (neo-con) type party rather than the centre-left (neo-lib) ones. At the end of the day though both are “slaves” to the market. See Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Don’t hand religion to the right.

For a related political posts see: Harbinger’s recent Evangelicalism & politics and Postmodernbible’s Abortion and All. As always read the comments.

Open-source programmer alleges Linux misuse | Tech News on ZDNet is an article that notes one man’s crusade for the GPL covering Linux to be upheld by those embedding it in consumer products.

Following up from Somethings wrong somewhere and the laser printer/consumable issue the old inkjet printer (~1996) Kim uses ran out of a colour (yellow?). Now new cartridge costs $75 - new printer with cartridge costs $70-80. The cost is replacing the whole cartridge even if most of the other colours are still not depleted - too wasteful in my reckoning.
So looking for a new printer that has individual replaceable colours, MacOSX/WinXP compatible and won’t break the bank. So far the Epson Stylus C65 comes close but when one colour runs out it won’t print at all until that cartridge is replaced. There are some old Canon S520’s floating around cheap too, as well as the Brother MFC210c multifunction thing that seems to do that same thing with ink. The old printer still works and I have several unopened black ink cartridges so it may end up going to a student for essay printing.

Pondering upgrading MT to a later version for a variety of reasons - nested categories being one of them and fixing the CSS Windows IE problems being another. Given AKMA’s problems doing this (see here) I’m thinking a clean install might be the best thing after doing an export and full backup. The CSS might look plain for a while before being “greenified”. If you have comments about the readability of the site (fonts, size etc.) now would be a good time to make them (That means you, Stu).

STUFF : TECHNOLOGY : DIGITAL LIVING - STORY : Blogs of our lives has a survey of new blogging technologies that will increase the amount of personal information that needs to be managed.

While the multimedia diary will continue to be stored across a number of devices, the real challenge, says the CSIRO’s Science Industry manager, Dr Ross Wilkinson, will be how we organise and access it.

“In some sense where it is stored and how it is stored is going to be less important than ‘Can we find the stuff?’. It is hard finding things on a messy desk just as it is hard finding things on a messy computer. How do we get support for that?”

Wilkinson points to the likelihood of an artificially intelligent electronic helper that will learn from our digital habits and favourites, decide what to record in our digital cache and then organise the information into our life story.

Like the messy desk image. I’m always looking for stuff on mine.

Some thoughts and reflections by Brian McLaren on Stanley Grenz. See Brian McLaren Remembers Stan Grenz.

Some statistics on the growth of Red Hat’s Fedora community-driven Linux distribution for web serving. Of interest to me as I used to administer and use some Red Hat web servers, though with Mac OS X on the desktop now I tend to use that for testing web stuff (e.g. various flavours of Movable Type are installed locally for testing and potentially to maintain a personal blog/database of research information).

Anyway, see Netcraft: Fedora makes rapid progress

For a breakdown of web servers by server type see March 2005 Web Server Survey Finds 60 Million Sites.

AKMA : You want this points to the free CityULike service for organising references and citations online, as well as forming virtual communities around research interests. The experimental import from BibTex format looks helpful as does the ability to set up watch lists on various journals.

Progressive evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz died of a massive brain aneurism about 4am 12th March. I first encountered Grenz’s work in the class “Gospel in Post-Christian Society” when his primer on postmodermism was prescribed reading. Over the years I’ve picked up various of his books, and have used bits of his understanding of the imago Dei in my own research. His book co-authored with Roger Olson “Who needs theology? An invitation to the study of God” is recommended to my students as a good example of someone who holds that theology is essentially linked with pastoral ministry. Much of my own theological journey has been accompanied by his writing - challenging me and getting me thinking about theology.

I’d always wanted to meet him. Praying for his family, friends, colleagues and students.

Disturbing. Very disturbing. Oh well, all those Amazon affiliate/associate links on people’s blogs probably aren’t contributing to the evil empire, are they? The irony of a blog pushing gender-equity having links to Amazon products that might suggest gender stereotyped gift-wrapping.

Amazon patent thinks pink | CNET News.com

Reading this paper this morning and this quote stuck out,

Humanity created in God’s image-and the church as the renewed imago Dei-is called and empowered to be God’s multi-sided prism in the world, reflecting and refracting the Creator’s brilliant light into a rainbow of cultural activity and socio-political patterns that scintillates with the glory of God’s presence and manifests his reign of justice.

Middleton, J. Richard. “The Liberating Image? Interpreting the Imago Dei in Context.” Christian Scholar’s Review 24, no. 1 (1994): 8-25.

Middleton doesn’t really unpack how the church is the renewed image of God in the article beyond the it being the rule of Christian life. The bulk of the paper being a call for theologians to take the OT consensus about the image seriously but I imagine his new book will flesh out the “body of Christ” metaphor in relation to the image of God in more detail.

Wiki Becomes a Way of Life has been linked to over the blogosphere in the last few days. I’m happy there are other people out there like me.

Walking in the local mall today I saw the local Trade Aid shop (Asanti) had a big sign up for Trade Aid : No Sweat sneakers.

Its here! the only 100% union made sneaker in the world! Sweat shop free from Jakarta, Indonesia where it is union made instead of Nike owned. Fair Trade for a fair price - Buy yours today and help us make history.

Anybody know anything about them? Anybody have a pair? (I see there’s more information at No Sweat Stuff (Australia)

Today will be spent attacking the cupboards in the office at home in order to reclaim some storage space. Primarily that will involve going through the boxes of computer parts, old software that hasn’t been used in years and the nest of cables and creating a pile to get rid of to a good home. With the new space a better storage area than the floor becomes available for files, papers and books.

I’m a magpie when it comes to hoarding stuff that might be useful one day. Truth be told though the parts are probably of far more use to others than me at the moment.

I spent a large chunk of today checking some of my footnotes in the section I wrote 18 months ago on the theological interpretation of the image and likeness of God in Christian history. All fine until my footnote for a reference to Justin Martyr arguing that the human body was valuable in God’s sight was incomplete - Lost Fragments should have read Fragments of the Lost Work of Justin on the Resurrection. Erk. Spent a while skimming Lost Fragments wondering what I was on when I wrote that part.

Somewhat ironically, for the missing reference speaks of a rejection of those who would spurn the earthly life, the answer was found on the internet. Incarnational, embodied reference found excarnationally. Here’s the source I used to find it: www.earlychristianwritings.com/. Tomorrow I’ll go to the library and haul out a paper tome to peer at.

For years and years we’ve been getting our milk delivered to our house by the local milkman. Just put out the appropriate plastic token and at about 5pm there’s milk in the letterbox. Tomorrow that all ends when they make their last delivery to our street. Apparently there aren’t enough of us left having home delivery in this area to make it worth their while delivering here. It’s been great. With our milk consumption being high through the children and entertaining it’s always been reassuring to know that several times a week we can stock up without having to make a trip to the supermarket or dairy.

As a child I remember bread being delivered the same way, and when we came to NZ and lived out Templeton way near Christchurch way back in the early 70’s the butcher would turn up in his van every few days or so. Where Kim grew up the milk was delivered by horse float (even up until we got married). So it feels like something good is now missing in the weekly routine. I guess advocates of the market economy will argue that it’s cheaper and there’s more range at a our local supermarket but it was nice to have some sort of ongoing relationship with the deliverers. Plus when you try to only shop fortnightly at the supermarket (vegetables and fruit from the local greengrocer) it’s a pain to go more than you need to.

Tim and I were talking yesterday about my comments to his post SansBlogue : Hell wants him. Heaven won’t take him. Earth needs him and I’ve decided to turn them into a post over here in response to that. Bear in mind my comments are more about the genre of comic books than the movie (which I have yet to go and see). Tim wrote,

It’s no wonder that the distributors thought a couple of free tickets should be thrown to the School of Theology… I was the theologian”, and my (still just) teenage son was the representative of the likely target audience. Well, the plot and script was based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer so I assume teenage boys are the target

(Immediate response - how come Tim got the tickets!? More considered response follows.)
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Article about Matt Nagle (25) who is a patient in a trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease. Basically the device in the brain identifies the brain activity associated with moving limbs and responds electronically effecting a response in the world. See Wired 13.03: Mind Control.

A friend of mine wrote this a while back but it’s just gone online : Reality - Issue 66 - Reclaiming Mary by Rosemary Dewerse.

Today Mary is still accorded a very high place by Roman Catholics, while amongst Protestants — who have inherited the aversion of their forefathers — she is a victim of conscientious neglect.
But is this neglect fair to the Mary of Scripture? Could it be possible that the Protestant tradition has, in fact, starved itself of a potentially significant contributor to our understanding of faith, discipleship, and (to borrow a phrase from Radford Ruether) the “feminine face of the church”?

Suspension of Disbelief : A Fact-Check for the Four-Color World is a group blog reality-checking comic stories. “Incredible stories in a realistic world” might be their slogan.

Thus, in the spirit of educating the public and the publishers, we here have created this group blog. We’ll complain when creators get the facts wrong, and congratulate when they get them right (and we expect there will be no shortage of the former). Some may call it nitpicking; we prefer to think of it as accuracy. It’s one thing to read about Gorilla Grodd kidnapping the President of the United States, but that same talking gorilla story suffers if the story has him abducting a supposed U.S. Prime Minister. Comics regularly expect us to believe the impossible. Making the real-world backdrop that they’re set against truly realistic makes those impossibilities easier to handle.

Maybe there’s a similar opportunity for a group blog for fact-checking sermons - I hate it when preachers assert things about the real world in order to create a world for their sermon point. There are incredible stories to be told but it’s better if they’re not set in fairyland.

Tim’s had some thoughts on the movie “Constantine” over at SansBlogue. Added my 2 cents in the comments there.