Christopher Merle

Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Category: General (Page 35 of 55)

I didn’t like Uncategorized so I changed it to General. A catch-all category.

Thanksgiving

November 26, 2008 /

Tomorrow I go to two Thanksgiving dinners. I’m already 40 pounds over my ideal weight, though if I lost just 20 I’d be a lot better off. I’m right around 200 lbs. I was actually down to 160 in early 2004 and my weight has slowly crept up as I stopped exercising on a regular basis. Other than that I’m in good health though if I don’t start taking off the pounds again I will have problems in the future.

Anyway, here is my favorite movie clip about Thanksgiving:


But if you really want to know what I’m thankful for this year check out these pics.

The New Ozymandias

November 23, 2008 /

I saw this powerful adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias on DailyKos yesterday. Today someone else was so moved by it, they turned it into a slideshow and posted it on YouTube.

People have notoriously short political memories and if it does not affect them they forget about it.

Showing an image becomes a political act when someone else doesn’t want you to see that image. Should we show pictures of the flag draped coffins of our fallen soldiers returning home? Both sides know that images such as those have power. One could show them, say yes war is brutal, and we must not forget those who make the ultimate sacrifice for us. One could show them, and say say our soldiers are dying for oil. It matters not to the dead how they got that way or why the pictures are shown. Does context matter?

No. Free speech is guaranteed by the US Constitution. It makes no judgment on why an image is shown, only that we can. If the military disallows the taking of such images for security reasons, that is understandable. Not having the enemy know how many of our soldiers killed is a valid reason. If the politicians don’t allow it for political reasons then support for a war isn’t that strong and may not be justifiable.

It is not a black & white issue. Pictures are powerful. Words are powerful. We live in a relatively free country. The only way to keep it that way is for us to know the real reasons what our soldiers are dying for and not to flinch from showing the fallen. Because if the cause is just we will mourn them and honor their memories. If it is not, our anger should not be contained.

Planet Plone

November 20, 2008 /

To keep up on the Python universe I follow Planet Python which is a blog aggregator and to keep up on my two favorite Python products Django and Plone I follow Django Community and Planet Plone respectively.

I sort of fell into Python through Zope when I started working at my current job as a web administrator. Python has a fairly gently learning curve and you can become productive for simple programming tasks fairly quickly. Zope on the other hand has a very steep learning curve. I’ve probably mentioned this before in previous posts, but I was tasked to upgrade the website and after looking at dozens of PHP based content management systems I decided upon Plone. Due to legacy Zope applications the current website is a hybrid of Zope and Plone. I’ve seen Plone evolve from version 2.0 to 2.1 to 2.5 to 3.0 to version 3.1. I think with version 3.x Plone has finally come of age as a content management system and would pit it against high end commercial CMSes. What I really like about Plone is its security, workflow, and it’s shallow learning curve for end users.

Plone is open source and is used by a number of high profile sites, Oxfam America,Discover Magazine and University of Louisville come to mind. Plone also has a steep learning curve and it’s a little frustrating when you have relearn how to customize it from version to version. There wasn’t as much of a change from 2.x to 2.5, but the change to 3.x was pretty big. When I did a test migration from a 2.5 site to a 3.0 site it broke all of my template customizations. I relearned how to redo the customizations and I like the 3.x way better.

You do have to keep up Plone developments and one of the best ways is to read Planet Plone which is a blog aggregator of Plone/Zope/Python blogs. I have yet to attend a Plone conference but I have attended three Pycons 2006, 2007, and 2008 and I plan to attend 2009.

I have devoted some attention to Django which is a very nice web framework and I’ve used it to replace a number of outdated Zope applications. I’ll go into more detail about it in a future post. I see it as having a different workspace than Plone does. Anyway, back to Planet Plone. I found a few posts from it that I wanted to share to show how useful it is to follow.

Plone Conference 2008 Video Offerings

Plone Replaces Sharepoint, Red Dot, and Vignette

And last week was World Plone Day to raise awareness of this underappreciated CMS, but that is changing.

World Plone Day After Action Report

And gay marriage hurts us how?

November 17, 2008 /

I just watched this narrated slideshow about forced marriages in Afghanistan. The photojournalist discussed how these women were immolating themselves to get out of bad marriages. Some of them survive. WARNING! Some of these pictures are graphic (NSFW).

So how does this help the institution of marriage? The traditional marriage between a man and a child bride. You might say, well, they are backwards and violent. The Mormon mindset which is not so far removed from these Afghans are the ones who funded Proposition 8. How many times have we seen in the news about a Mormon being arrested for having multiple wives? Some of these brides aren’t even old enough to drive.

There is a reason why we have separation of church and state. Marriage is a religious concept that has devolved into a secular one. The state has no business defining marriage. It can and does recognize them, but it should recognize them for what they are, a committed economic partnership between two individuals, not as between a man and a women to be treated as chattel and whose sole purpose in life is to be a baby factory.

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