Live Streaming Comedy

I just watched an experienced comedian struggling with the live streamed experience. It's a different environment & simply not the same as performing before a live audience. You just have to imagine they are there & are reacting. Streaming through a medium like Facebook means you not only can't hear the audience reaction, but there may be a non-trivial delay before the audience even sees your video and hears your joke, IIRC you need to allow 30 seconds, which means you can't rely on text "ha ha" comments arriving at the right time.

Planned obsolescence in Smartphones. NOT!

Recently there was some online commentary on how every version of iOS makes older iPhones run more slowly. The conspiracy theorists like to see this as a deliberate action by Apple to force people to upgrade. I doubt this for two reasons, first the Apple fans are already super keen to upgrade to the latest and greatest iDevice and I can't see how Apple would benefit from the likely damage to its reputation from pulling a trick like that.

Smoking in the Magazine of The Ship of Fools

Well, it's officially the Christmas holiday for me and I'm not due back at work until the 5th, except that I committed some code changes just before leaving for the break and my conscience won't let me just leave potentially bad code in the pool for 2 weeks so I'm quietly monitoring things remotely. I simply didn't want to return to the new year with code changes from the old year half done if I could help it.

I'm also going to be checking for any urgent queries over the break. Hopefully nothing seriously difficult to deal with.

Other than that I don't need to worry about the wonderful world of printing for a couple of weeks.

I'm also 109 days into quiting smoking and just coming up to a portion of the year where everything is different. Between now and Anniversary day I have Christmas, New Year, 2 weeks holiday, one weeks work and then the 2015 Linux Conference of Australia ... held in the great Australian City of Auckland.

It's all good, but also the first time I've done any of these things since giving up and my experience of the last 109 days is that the first time I do anything since quitting, the addiction will trigger and try to convince me that it's time to have a cigarette. It's really weird how that works. I know I'm not planning on having a smoke but somehow the addiction thinks that just a little extra push and I'll crumble like a house of cards.

Perhaps a little more worrying is that I've been feeling a weakness particularly in the arms and legs; strangely not especially connected to my exercise routine but I have been feeling a desire to cut that short. For now I'm treating it as psychosomatic as it doesn't seem at all consistent, but if I end up taking a couple of extra days rest from exercise over the break it will be interesting to measure how that affects this weird little ailment.

How I follow webcomics

Recently The Frumps (NSFW), one of the webcomics I follow, asked how its readers used its RSS feed and if we preferred having a thumbnail or a full-sized cartoon. I started writing a reply to them then realised that I wasn't just explaining how I used their RSS feed, but how I follow websites in general.

I follow quite a few RSS feeds, originally I used Google Reader but when when that closed I decided that in future I would have control of my reading and not be placed at the mercy of a third party service that could vanish at any time. Eventually I decided to use a self hosted copy of Feed-on-Feeds as my RSS aggregator. I use it for following webcomics, news (e.g. newspaper sites), science blogs, some technology bloggers I enjoy, as well as social, political and environmental bloggers. Occasionally if RSS isn't an option I'll subscribe to email notifications for a really good blog, but never (so far) to a webcomic.

On a roll

I seem to be on a roll tonight. I had a good day at work documenting a part of our development process ... normally, like most developers, I can't stand doing documentation but this was developer documentation and partially involved writing some skeleton code to improve the way we develop.

The evening started off badly though, after cycling home I got straight off the bike to go for a 6km walk in practice for the Round the Bays this Sunday. I got about a kilometre down the road when the heavens opened. I sheltered under a shop awning until it eased to light rain and then walked briskly home arriving more than a little damp.

The Rat Is Back

Sometime around 1995 I started using "Kiore", the Maori word for "Rat" as my nickname for on-line bridge. It became my off-line nickname as well then my ISP email address and in 2000 I registered Kiore.com to get the email address I wanted. The url of this blog comes from the same source, the original name for the blog was My name/Kiore.

Starting a few months before I created the Muffins blog I had Kiore.com set up on my PC at home as a simple php-Nuke CMS that was mostly a blog as an experiment, I eventually exposed it (dynamic IP and all) to the public internet so I could demo it to friends. Eventually it migrated to the same storage as I later set the muffins blog on. Like a rat crossing the motorway, disaster befell it a couple of times, like the muffins site it had to be restored and rebuilt, eventually becoming a Drupal site before dieing badly early in 2007 leading to the, I won't say "abandonment" as I always intended to restore, but failure to actually restore. I still used the domain name, but only for mail until yesterday.

Revision 3 - R3: b2evolution server

After a not very fortunate attempt to set up the b2evolution blog software a few weeks back that was cut short by the 9:37 event, I had another go during the week. As always with these things it took quite a while to get it right. When I did I blew it away & started afresh.

The b2evolution software has multiple domain support built in, but based on what I learned from my experiments, it is clear that the first domain has special properties and I didn't really want my other domains relying on a real domain name, so as this is my third b2evolution install and I was informally referring to it as "R3" I deployed r3.co.nz and the site is now officially  "R3 (Revision 3)".

The worst of times, the best of times

There's an old saying "Just once I wish I could have the silver lining without the cloud?" well once again it wasn't my turn.

A week ago I mentioned how I was exhausted after cleaning up domains and sites. Well I continued cleaning and improving over the weekend and by Sunday night was ready for a distraction. I had an on-going problem that my VM was CentOS 4 and current versions of Mediawiki won't run on the XML library in there. I've been looking at upgrading to version 5 for a while but the documentation is scary and advises starting again from scratch. The problem is I didn't really have a good way of doing that, so I decided I needed a distraction. I decided to have a play with the b2evolution blogging software instead. What makes this interesting is that with some minor set-up in the control panel it can support multiple blogs in the one directory. Unlike its cousin (both descend from the now dead b2/cafelog) Wordpress they did this years ago with no add-ins, tweaks, etc. Just point both domains at the save virtual server & tell b2evolution about the blog and you're going.

Although not ideal, blog software will usually do service as CMS substitutes, and Wordpress is often used as a straight CMS so I think b2evolution should easily be able to be made to do the same.

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Unfortunately my experimentation was cut short by the arrival of 9:37 PM. Suddenly my site was dead. Not just the domains on b2, but all of them. Dead, dead, dead. I went to my hosting company's control panel & the log-in was broken. It flashed up something about not being able to contact the machine my VM was on then reloaded itself ... in a loop. I logged onto their CRM and raised a support ticket. Just over half an hour later they let me know that the disk had crashed hard and they were creating a new VM for me on a different node, what operating system would I like. I decided to ask for CentOS 5 ... at least Mediawiki should work :)

Bad Code Coming

(after John Fogerty)

I see the bad code a-coming.
I see trouble on the way.
I see corruption and crashes.
I see bad times today.

Don't compile tonight,
Well, it's bound to cause you strife,
There's some bad code in the pool.

I hear the crash logs a-spooling.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear access violations.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

Don't compile tonight,
Well, it's bound to blight your life,
There's some bad code on the disk.

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared for fright.
Looks like we're in for bad behaviour.
One byte is taken for a byte.

Don't compile tonight,
Well, it's bound to cause you strife,
There's more bad code on the rise.