sadara.be

as you’ve maybe noticed, i’ve changed the theme on my blog. the new theme, called ‘viala’, was written by david garlitz, who has made it freely available under the GPL licence – generous man. you can download it here.

also new is the flickr plugin, which is ‘Flickr Photo Album‘, written by joe tan, seen here asleep on a plane. this is a great plugin; i’ve tested quite a few flickr plugins over the last 2 or 3 years and this is the most comprehensive and trouble-free i’ve come across. installing it was a breeze – for which i’m very grateful. i stumbled a little when it came to customising the photoalbum pages to fit the viola theme, but in the end it was very simple.

jona took this with his own camera when we stopped on the afsluitdijk on the way to schiermonnikoog – what a great photo! don’t you think?

a fascinating profile in the guardian today of a US journalist operating in iraq. there’s a brief discussion of the problem of journalistic ‘objectivity’:

In the introduction to his book ['Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq'], [Dahr Jamail] quotes the story of an indigenous Canadian hunter who was called to give evidence at an inquiry into a planned dam that would flood his homeland and destroy his traditional way of life. The hunter was asked to swear on the Bible that he would tell the truth, but he had never seen a Bible and wondered how this miraculous truth-telling instrument worked. “He spoke with the translator at length,” writes Jamail, “and finally the translator looked up at the judge. ‘He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows.’”

this story would make most epistemologists blanch. but so much the worse for most epistemologists.

link to an interesting site for independent journalism on iraq – electroniciraq.net

i don’t know about you, but as soon as i read about the possibility that micro$oft would take over yahoo, i began to search for an alternative to flickr.com (part of yahoo) to host my photos.

there’s google’s picasa, of course, but i’ve always found it appallingly slow and it seems to insist on running programs on my computer to inventarise and manage all the images on my hard drives. this i don’t want. i just want somewhere to put my photos where anyone (i choose) can get at them.

but there’s 23hq.com. i’d never heard of it before but it seems to have all the main features a modest user of flickr like me would need. there isn’t an API, which means little chance of swish facebook applications, but there is an RSS feed and even a wordpress plugin called ‘23hq integrator‘ (which i have yet to test).

23hq is also danish, which somehow feels like a breath of confidence-inspiring fresh air.

and … del.icio.us is also part of yahoo. now the search for an alternative to del.icio.us …

today, by a rather circuitous route, i came to read an interview with nicholas shakespeare about the background to his novel ‘the dancer upstairs’. the article, which originally appeared in the buenos aires herald in 1994, is quite fascinating and i’d recommend it to anyone who, like me, is nostalgic for the days when the prospect of joining what would now be termed ‘a terrorist group’ seemed almost attractive – or at least preferable to joining normal society. the interview is here. and i recommend the film made from shakespeare’s novel: http://imdb.com/title/tt0118926/