James MacAulay Has An Internet!

I grew up here in Ottawa, and I have fond high school memories of going to the Mayfair Theatre with friends to experience its wonderful atmosphere and unique blend of off-the-beaten-path programming. One memorable evening was Mayfair’s 3D triple-bill, which provided old school 3D glasses and included the likes of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Just about every month there would be a screening of Baraka (likely as part of a double bill with Microcosmos). Another particularly inspired bit of scheduling was the Pi/Eraserhead/Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb triple-bill night. I mean, Jesus. Anyone who’s seen those three films can appreciate the noteworthiness of a theatre that will put them together like that.

The trouble was that starting around 2001 or 2002, the programming really went downhill. The second-run screenings of hollywood flicks that had always played a necessary but minor role in the Mayfair’s schedule started becoming the major focus of the theatre, and I quickly lost any motivation to keep up to date with the theatre’s monthly schedules. There were still worthwhile things going on at the Mayfair, like the raucous annual halloween Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. But the glory days of eagerly anticipating the next monthly schedule to see what treasures lay in store were sadly long gone.

A few months ago I heard that the theatre was going out of business, and my sadness was both for the end of the theatre and for the fact that its best times were so far in the past.

Imagine the smile on my face when I learned that the business was being bought by a group of local filmmakers and film aficionados with the promise of bringing the old spirit of the Mayfair back along with renovations to the theatre itself. I went to their grand re-opening on Friday, and was not disappointed. It was a free screening of a recent 35mm print of Metropolis, preceded by a collection of short films from Ottawa filmmakers. Hors d’oeuvres and cake were laid out for the lucky ones who actually came early enough to get into the theatre (there were a couple hundred waiting outside to get in for Metropolis, apparently, hoping for some of us to leave). Beer was served, which I believe will now be a regular occurrence at the Mayfair.

The real kicker, though, was the live band accompanying Metropolis with music based on the original score to the silent film. The band was mostly members of the Hilotrons, and their roughly two-hour-long performance was exceptional; they were spot-on throughout the whole film and they didn’t have any breaks or intermissions to catch their breath. I shot up in standing ovation as soon as the credits started rolling.

The schedule so far is looking great (Eraserhead this Friday at midnight! James Bond double-bills all month!), and also happens to be available as a Google Calendar. Very smart. They’ve got an active presence going on Facebook. Et cetera. Basically the new management is doing a lot of things right, and I hope it is enough to keep them in business showing interesting films for a long time. If you live in Ottawa, or are ever here for a visit, do yourself a favour and see what’s playing at this beautiful cinema.

I'm pleased to say that jmacaulay.net is now running on my favourite web app :) I used the Shopify API to transfer all the articles and comments from Mephisto, and to set up redirects from all my old URLs to the new ones.

I'm using a customized version of Cliff Spence’s Minimify theme; I switched up the typography and some of the colours, and overall made it much more centred around the blog.

To top it all off, I am submitting this post via email with the new Shopify integration in Posterous. Indeed, we are truly living in the future.

Posted via email from jamesmacaulay's posterous

Subject:  Support for the Coalition
Date:     December 2, 2008 11:39:49 PM GMT-05:00
To:       "Paul Dewar" <Dewar.P@parl.gc.ca>,
          "Stéphane Dion" <Dion.S@parl.gc.ca>,
          "Jack Layton" <Layton.J@parl.gc.ca>,
          "Gilles Duceppe" <Duceppe.G@parl.gc.ca>,
          "Stephen Harper" <Harper.S@parl.gc.ca>

Dear members of parliament,

I am writing to express my support for the proposed coalition of a Liberal-NDP government led by Stéphane Dion and backed by the Bloc Québecois. There is a lot of talk coming from each of the parties right now about the exact nature of the mandate given to the current government by the people of Canada. I can sympathize with many members and supporters of the Conservative Party when they protest that no one voted for a coalition like the one being proposed; it's true that very few people could have anticipated this turn of events and indeed, no Canadian successfully managed to mark that non-existent option on their ballot. However, each and every one of us who voted in October did decide to put a certain amount of trust in other people to represent our individual and collective interests, and I for one am glad that the opposition parties have chosen to band together and do what needs to be done.

I did not vote for either the Liberals or the NDP or the Bloc in this recent election. I am very grateful, however, to be represented by Paul Dewar of the NDP here in Ottawa Centre. Each Canadian has a rich and complex set of opinions about how this country should be governed which can rarely be reduced to single party's platform and certainly not to a single "X" on a ballot. I have confidence in the opposition parties to successfully lead this country in a coalition and I hope that such a government will address the systemic issues in our electoral process which underly all this confusion about what the Canadian people really want.

Sincerely,

James C. MacAulay

Ottawa, Canada

Active Shipping is now available under an open source license. It’s on GitHub, here. Active Shipping is an extension for Active Merchant which I wrote to let Shopify users provide carrier-calculated shipping rates to their customers. You can easily include Active Shipping in your Rails project as a plugin (or in any other ruby project, for that matter) and start doing things like this:

It’s under active development and more details for contributing to the project can be found in the README.

Part of my work at jaded Pixel a few months ago was development and writing for a new “brochure” site at www.shopify.com. The current site, like the old one, is built with the fantastic Radiant CMS and uses a modified version of the rss_reader extension from BJ Clark, Loren Johnson, and Alessandro Preite Martinez.

We are using it to grab feeds that we publish in other places and re-display them to fit with the design of the site. For example our screenshots page is generated from our blog’s Shop of the Moment feed, and our list of supported methods for accepting payment is fed directly by Shopify itself.

Here is a modified version of the extension, available for your enjoyment and scrutiny:

Update: the extension is now on GitHub.

The modifications that I made add a few new features and, thanks to Tobi’s help, improved the robustness of the feed fetching code quite a bit. So for example, now you can order the feed however you want using a syntax similar to SQL’s ORDER BY:

You can also do headers to mark off sections:

This would show the code within the <r:feed:header /> tag if and only if the “creator” attribute of the item is different from the previous item in the list. Thus, it would only make reasonable output if the feed were ordered by creator with the above method. Another more obvious grouping for headers would be the item’s “date” attribute. Yes, the date of a feed item has hours and minutes and seconds, but I made it so that a new header only appears on new days of the month.

You can sort items and group headers by date, title, content, creator, or link (i.e. the URL of the item). There are a few other options for the feed tags that I haven’t mentioned here but which are documented within the code.