The openWeather Wiki is now functional with some skeletal content. If you want to edit a page, simply log in. You must be logged in to edit, but registration is open to everybody.
Now that I have a separate blog for openWeather, this blog will be more focused towards Cocoon.
I’d like to formally introduce the openWeather Blog, which is going to be the main information source for the openWeather project. I’m running WordPress with the comments turned off until I find a reasonable fix for comment spam.
Anyway, all openWeather-related postings will happen over there instead of on this blog which attempts to be Java and Cocoon-related.
It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S., and that means visiting relatives, family, and lots of turkey. Blogging will be light for a few days.
In the mean time, enjoy this;
The National Weather Service is now publishing a very useful RSS feed of XML service changes.
I also noted that they’ve published a list of possible conditions which occur within the web service data. I was looking for something like this to build a form off of for openWeather.
Well, I thought I’d take ten minutes and reply to this article post on TSS asking what was so special about PHP. I’ve been using PHP since well before 4.x came out, and I consider myself very experienced.
Most of the reasons I can come up with for using PHP focus around pure speed of development, as well as having a fairly low barrier to entry for learning. The syntax is simple, and all you need to learn is a language, as opposed to learning about Java, JSP, Servlets, containers, etc (see above).
However there are many cases where I *wouldn’t* use PHP, which perhaps I’ll write about later. Here’s a hint: I like Cocoon a lot :)
While browsing the ever-fun JavaBlogs, I found a Spanish-language “review” (If you want to call it that) of Cocoon. I don’t speak Spanish, so I ended up pasting the post paragraph-by-paragraph into BabelFish. One translated sentence did stand out perfectly clear, however:
This is an objective that the designers of Cocoon persecute almost obsessively.
(via The Fishbowl)
The country is divided. We know it. But it’s not just red states vs. blue states. It’s neighbors vs. neighbors. The only reason we’re divided in half is four years of a president who only thinks about issues in black and white. Either you’re with us or the terrorists. Either you’re for abortion or not. Either you’re for gay marriage or you’re not. The country is more grey (or purple in this case) than anything.
The easy thing to do is blame the entire country. “How could you be so stupid?” we’re asked. The problem is that such a small, simple majority can ruin the party for the rest of us, and the rest of the world. 51% of Americans who voted believed that George W Bush would be the better president than Kerry. 49% believe in some form of equal rights for gays or a the right of a woman to choose abortion.
The problem lies when you think about why people would vote for him in the first place. Then you get very sad. Of that 51%, enough of them agree in some form that gays shouldn’t be married, that women shouldn’t be able to have abortions, and that the Iraq war was justified. Then some of them voted for him just because he was a Republican.
These are the same people who don’t give a shit about what other countries think. It’s America, after all, why should we listen to anybody? We’ll do what we want. This is the same level of stubbornness brought about by the president.
They have turned it into a moral issue by saying they want to protect the sanctity of marriage, and wanting to preserve life. We need to turn it into a larger moral issue of equal rights and personal freedom. We can out-moral them. What good are religious or moral beliefs if they take away the equality and freedom of others? This is a civil rights issue, and the people in power who say gays shouldn’t be married are the same people in the 1960’s who would say blacks shouldn’t be allowed on the same bus or in the same schools as white people.
So, I’m sorry what happened, everybody. I did the best I could. But when the country is run by people who govern by their faith, and they’re voted in by people who vote with their religion, all sorts of fucked up shit is going to happen. I guess it’s a case of freedom of religion, as long as it’s the right one in the first place.
Our morals need to be universalizable, not exclusionary.
