My local (grade II listed) cinema, the Ultimate Picture Palace has a fascinating history. It was built in the Edwardian era, and for many years served as a furniture warehouse.

Nowadays its a thriving cinema showing a mixture of mainstream and arty cinemas. You can read more about it on CowleyRoad.org. There’s even a movie about it featuring Ian Hislop and Brian Aldiss among others.

One of the more interesting stories is that in the mid-90s it was squatted for a month or so, but a collection of activists, and some homeless young people, who called it the Section 6 cinema after the piece of legislation that forbids forcible entry into premises and hence protects squatters from illegal eviction.

They showed films and organized community activities and built an autonomous space on Cowley Road.

Anyhow, the other day my pal dug up some old magazines I'd stashed in his attic back in the day. Among which was the Industrial Workers of the World house magazine, Burning Fuse. And in that magazine was an article about the occupation written by some participants.

Its a fascinating glimpse into the radical politics of the time and a thoughtful analysis of what the occupation was like for people involved in it.

I wanted to put it on CowleyRoad.org but I don’t actually know who holds the copyright. If you’re the copyright holder and don’t want it to be up here, give me a shout.

Twitter recently got rid of the ability to get search results as an RSS as part of their API update of 11 June 2013.

I found those feeds rather useful, so I made a little screen scraper that reimplements the functionality without needing to auth against their API (it just pulls the results out of the web search page). I guess this will be good for a while longer, like enough time to switch to statusnet, identica, or whatever.

It might be of use to some others in the monastry and illustrates the power of HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath.

One of the gotchas with Riseup.net’s crabgrass install is that it is very much a pull technology. You have to remember to check your Crabgrass. I am forgetful sometimes. So I made a script called crab2mail to pull your crabgrass inbox into your email Inbox. This is a first release, hosted over on my gitorious. Do let me know if you find it useful or you'd like changes. I’ve at least one improvement in mind already.

Here is a poster for the OARC screening of "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" on Sunday 14 November. More about the film on the Real Dirt on Farmer John site.

My flatmate Graham is working on a new Third World First website . Third World First was the progenitor of People & Planet, for whom I work, and for whom Graham used to.

Keep watching the site - there isn't much there yet, but I've seen the previews and it's going to be cool!

Nb. copyright on the site is G's, not mine.

Its been busy web-wise at P&P in the last few months. My Ruby on Rails rewrite of the organizational intranet launched in January. And now Rich's new version of peopleandplanet.org, which went live on Friday 2006-04-07 at 19:48.

It was 'fun' upgrading to mysql5 on our webserver and messing with various rewrite rules to prevent any downtime. The new site has a CMS and is really quite amazingly pretty as well as being valid xhtml.

Actually this is a shameless plug for People & Planet rather than anything I wrote! (Text © P&P, not me).

"Oxford Brookes Students Union's People & Planet Society presents the biggest, most vibrant student event in Europe on poverty, human rights, and the environment."

OARC is a radical community social centre, based in East Oxford. I did the design for their website. I was quite chuffed with the tabs in this one ;-)

The Oxford Activist Rescouce Centre is a cool social centre/activism centre that I'm involved with. This is a link to their wiki, which I set up.

I helped my lovely friend Rose put together a site to show her art to the world. It's called rosecairns.org.uk.
There's some pics in the image archive of me and her walking the Ridgeway