Posts filed under 'Blog News'
I am writing this to inform you that I have decided to close this blog, mainly because I no longer have time to adequately maintain it. I have been considering this for some time and I have finally come to the conclusion that it is the right decision.
To briefly summarise my reasons, I have lately had an ever-decreasing amount of free time to dedicate to this site, or my other tasks which have a higher priority. The list of things I want to write about is almost longer than my arm, most of it now irrelevant due to the “moment” for most of it passing. I’m struggling to keep up with the regular (eg, weekly and monthly) posts, let alone the standard day-to-day posts which make this blog worth reading. There are a number of things I would like to do with this blog, but they would take even more time than the time I can’t allocate for the current list of tasks.
This doesn’t even take in to account the time required to produce podcasts…something I would love to do more of, but just have absolutely no time for.
One of my main plans for this year was coverage and analysis of the ACT election. As much as I would like to provide a very intense coverage of the election, and the people and issues surrounding it, I just won’t have enough time to even come close to doing it justice.
Ultimately, the only fair things for me as the author of this blog, and you, as a reader who comes here expecting to see something, is for me to draw a line in the sand, and close the blog.
The decision has not come easily. I have enjoyed blogging and podcasting for the last three years (OK, so I’m a couple weeks short of the three year mark) and I had a number of plans for at least the next year, and I also recognise that I have been very fortunate with the number of people who read and contribute to this blog, a number far in excess of most personal blogs. I have also had the good fortune of a good Google Pagerank. Closing this blog will effectively mean losing both of these, something which will be quite detrimental if I ever decide to start again. I recognise that this decision is one I can’t really reverse, the effects are permanent even if I do resume blogging at some stage down the track.
I would like to thank you for your support over the last three years. A very small number of you have been here right from the beginning, the majority of you joined me more recently. Either way, you have all helped to make this blog what it is. I appreciate your support, I doubt that I would have made it this far without you.
For something that started as a journal of my time at Linux.Conf.Au in 2005 and evolved in to a personal blog, the level of interest has been staggering. Admittedly I had some (not always welcome) help in the form of publicity from other websites, many of which no longer exist, and most of the readers of those websites didn’t read this blog more than once, but the number of people who have stuck around is still pleasantly surprising.
I will leave this site online for a little while. All the posts and pages will be available via their current URLs, and the site will remain navigable via the category, calendar, archive and other links. In that regard, nothing will change for a while.
In the coming days I will replace this “dynamic” database driven version of the website with a static HTML version, with any luck you won’t notice a difference. The reason for the replacement version is that whilst this site continues to run on a dynamic version, any security flaw in WordPress (of which I am currently using a slightly outdated version, and do not wish to upgrade) could result in data loss. The static version will be a complete archive of the site, allowing me to keep a backup copy for posterity. It will also allow me to provide a downloadable copy, in case anybody actually wants a copy.
I haven’t quite worked out what I’m going to do with the site after that. At this stage I think I will probably continue to update the photo gallery periodically, I will probably take this website down and just leave the downloadable version. What I will replace it with is something I haven’t decided.
I’m sure that I will have some form of online presence to replace this one at some stage. I hope that some of you will find it of some use or interest.
Once again I would like to thank all of you for reading and contributing to this site over the last few years. I’ve enjoyed most of it and I hope I have been able to provide you with some entertainment and something to think about. A number of us have failed to eye-to-eye on a number of occasions and I’m sure that I will miss some of the debates which ensued, although my sanity, keyboard, desk and head will probably be thankful for a lack of debates.
Many thanks for your interest over the last few years, hopefully I will be able to stay in contact with some of you. Best of luck to all of you.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra
(samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com)
April 9th, 2008 at 11:31pm
To the moron out there who tried to use an SQL injection attack this morning to reset the admin password on this website…next time, try to attack a username that actually exists, and don’t format your attack so poorly that your shoddy hacking attempts end up as the display name on a comment automatically marked as spam.
If you’re going to break in, please try to cover your tracks a bit better.
Samuel
March 21st, 2008 at 05:23pm
Ten days ago Davky asked “On another topic, Sambo, have you considered running an online talkback show (is this possible using skype or something?)”.
It’s an interesting question because in July last year I planned on doing this with Samuel’s Persiflage, only to find that Skype had issues with their Skypecast service on the evening that the live show was scheduled.
At the time I floated Talkshoe as a potential viable alternative, but I was a bit dismayed that the only way to participate at the time was on the phone, via a United States phone number. The software has matured since then, and the function which was under testing at the time (taking part for free with a microphone through the Talkshoe software) is now a standard function of the software. Talkshoe is a better application for a talkback style program because you can listen in a web browser without downloading additional software, and you can take part via a text chat facility. If you want to ring in, that is possible via phone (including VOIP applications such as Skype) or through the Talkshoe downloadable application.
Talkshoe can also automatically record the show which is rather useful, as has a better management system than Skype’s skypecast system
I don’t really have time to run a show at the moment, but I’m pleased to see some improvement in the software which would make it possible, and it’s something I will be considering when I have a bit more time on my hands.
Samuel
March 17th, 2008 at 01:17pm
The things which would normally appear on this blog on a Sunday night and the wee hours of a Monday morning may be abnormally delayed this week as I have recently returned home from an unexpected nearly-seventeen hour shift at work, which was preceded by an expected four hour shift with AIR News.
I am tired, and am going to sleep. I do have one fun thing to share with your from this interesting weekend, but it can wait until I am awake and remember where I put the file.
Enjoy the remainder of your weekend.
Update 25/Feb 3:24pm: As much as I would like to deal with the Musicians of the week award and the weekly poll today, it’s not going to happen. I’ll do it sometime between this evening and daylight hours tomorrow. End Update
Samuel
February 24th, 2008 at 11:21am
You may have noticed that I’ve made a couple minor changes to the layout of the website. The random quotes section has been removed for the moment as I never seem to get around to maintaining the list of quotes, it will either disappear completely or be replaced with a more automated system.
The image at the top of the page has changed slightly as well. I’ve been considering that change for about three months and finally got around to it.
There are a few more minor changes on the way, and if all goes to plan I may launch a new look on the 20th of April for the blog’s third birthday.
Samuel
February 18th, 2008 at 11:53am
The site maintenance that I mentioned half a week ago is now, more-or-less, complete. The important bits are done, and user registrations have been enabled again.
The user account audit has not been completed yet, but with 347 user accounts that is going to take a little while. I’ll set aside some time in the next few days to complete that task.
Any questions, let me know.
Samuel
February 17th, 2008 at 02:41am
Oh how I love it when people try to pass off my work as their own work.
Apart from an additional image that the beginning of “their” article, it’s a word for word, image for image copy of my editorial about magpies. I may never have known, but when they referenced an image from my website, Google’s blog search interpreted it as a link to this blog and displayed it as such on my administrative home page.
As per the licence for content on this website, they are free to use that article, as long as they link back to me as the source of it (or attribute it to me in any other way which may be agreed to). I will be contacting the publisher of the copyright violation to seek a link, hopefully they will be co-operative and I won’t be forced to report a copyright violation to Yahoo.
I have sent the following message to the person responsible for that blog via Yahoo’s message form system:
Subject: Direct copy of one of my blog posts
Hello,
I am writing to you as you appear to have copied one of my blog posts. My editorial about being nice to magpies, published in August 2006 at http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2006/08/be-nice-to-the-magpies-and-the-magpies-will-be-nice-to-you has been directly copied to http://au.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-JMop2G40Y6Mk_lwLaImw3pxaXYzQ2Co-?cq=1&p=536 without attribution.
As per the copyright notice linked to at the bottom of that page, and every other page, on my blog (see http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2006/10/copyright-licence-etc) you are free to use my content as long as you attribute it to me. I therefore request that you place a link to my blog on your entry about magpies, or contact me so that we can reach a mutual agreement about this issue.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com
Samuel
February 17th, 2008 at 01:48am
Originally posted February 16 at 9:50am
Due to scheduled maintenance by this website’s hosting provider in the early hours of Saturday the 1st of March, this website may be difficult to reach between midnight and 3am. The maintenance is expected to take this site offline for up to an hour over this period of time.
From 11:30pm on Friday until the completion of the maintenance, comments, polls, user registrations, and other dynamic aspects of this site will be suspended to avoid any potential data loss.
I will bump this advisory to the top of the page on Friday night for your reference.
Normally I wouldn’t bother notifying you of the midnight maintenance carried out on the server hosting this website as they are generally over within a few minutes, but the impact of this maintenance is higher than usual and you deserve to be informed.
Samuel
February 16th, 2008 at 09:50am
Yes, it’s been a bit quiet here lately. I’m not going to go in to the reasons why, but it will pick up again tomorrow.
Tonight you may notice some minor disruptions as I upgrade WordPress and perform an account audit. A security hole which allows a registered user to edit the posts of others exists in the version of WordPress currently installed on this website, and it certainly explains the large number of suspicious registrations lately. Account registration has been temporarily disabled and some obviously automatically created accounts have been deleted. I will be going through the rest of the accounts tonight, those that have not posted any comments since signing up may be removed.
If you have recently signed up for an account but haven’t posted any comments, your account may be removed in this process. Please feel free to sign up again or contact me to have your account reinstated. A database backup will be taken before any action is taken, so reinstating an account should be a simple matter of reimporting it from the backup.
Samuel
February 12th, 2008 at 08:05pm
As I sit here having a cup of coffee, I’m trying to work out how much sleep I’ve had in the last few days…at this moment it amounts to three hours of sleep in the last 54 hours, and seven hours of sleep in the last 58 hours.
At 11:30pm on Thursday I woke up from a four hour sleep and went to work, the next time I slept was 9:30am to 12:30pm yesterday; I haven’t slept since then and I won’t be getting to sleep until at least 10am, by which time the counter will have reached three hours of sleep in the last 58.5 hours, and seven hours of sleep in the last 62.5 hours.
It’s also safe to say that I have had a fair bit of coffee in the last few days…at least five on Friday, seven or eight yesterday, and I’m already on my third for today. The coffee isn’t keeping me awake…I’ve just had too many things to get done in the last few days to get any sleep (I’m definitely not used to working midnight to dawn on the weekend), the coffee has been helpful in keeping me alert to some extent though.
The upshot of it is that I am once again interested in running my sleep-o-meter and coffee-cup-o-meter, starting yesterday. I’m going to declare yesterday a “7.5 cups of coffee” day and start from there. As long as I remain interested in the project, updates will be posted on a weekly basis.
Samuel
January 27th, 2008 at 05:33am
If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you probably would have noticed a decline in the number of posts I have written over the last few weeks. There have been a few reasons for this including my desire to take a few weeks off from regular blogging.
I’m back on deck properly now and things should return to normal over the next few days. I will try to produce a couple episodes of Editorial Echoes per week, although one will be the limit this week, and the weekly poll returns on Sunday.
It seems funny to me that for months the “Create New Post” screen in the WordPress admin section was almost my most visited page on the Internet, and I’ve barely seen it over the last few weeks.
I have also done a tiny bit of housekeeping, removing the Samuel’s Persiflage portion of the sidebar and replacing it with a link to the Samuel’s Persiflage index page. I may place a shorter Editorial Echoes entry on the sidebar.
Also while I think of it, happy birthday to Tim for yesterday.
Samuel
January 15th, 2008 at 10:59am
On Sunday, Tuggers left a couple comments and I haven’t replied to them yet. I think the comments and the replies are of general interest so rather than simply replying, I will reproduce the comments here, and reply to them.
On “Yep, the nation’s water has been spiked” Tuggers left this comment:
Ok Samuel. The flu epidemic has passed, the election is over (Wasn’t it your first one? Very brave of you to consider standing then…) John Laws and Peter Fitzsimons have resigned from 2UE and the ACT Government is still plodding along. How about you make some more comment about Canberra thngs and even pick up the radio surveys notion again.
Tuggers, I suppose this has something to do with the lack of content on this blog recently. I’m the first to admit that I haven’t been producing anywhere near as much content as usual lately, it’s partially to do with a lack of time, and partially to do with a lack of motivation. A lot of the problem has to do with me wanting to write lengthy articles, not having enough time, and not bothering to write anything at all as a result.
The article you responded to was one I wrote on Friday, it was very short and was based around a news story I spotted and wanted to write about. I wrote a few similar articles on Friday, and the format appeared to work…I made my point in a short space of time and provided enough of the relevant news story to put my comments in context. It all happened because I spotted the news stories during the day and had a few spare minutes to make a comment…it works better than my other system of spotting something I want to write about, jotting down a couple notes and never finding time to write my article until a week later, by which time it is irrelevant, so it doesn’t get written.
I will probably continue with this shorter format as my spare time seems to have changed from being a small number large blocks to being a number of shorter blocks.
As for Canberra stories…I had about half a dozen topics last week, and I only remember one of them. My point on that topic has been mentioned by many others in many other places…but I might still write about it. I do agree that I need to write more about Canberra-centric issues though.
Yes, it was my first election…oh, there’s a second topic…must find the email that’s story is based on…
The radio reviews didn’t work very well. I just didn’t have the time to commit to it…and I think people know what I think of most formats anyway. It would probably be worthwhile running random reviews occasionally, but I don’t think I can commit to a proper series.
I have been considering comparing various international radio stations…it might be interesting to compare the breakfast shows of commercial talk stations in different countries. I think it is fair to say that I am more qualified to compare commercial talk radio than any other format.
Tuggers wrote the following in response to a cryptic email I wrote to 2UE’s Stuart Bocking.
Samuel. Since you email 2UE presenters in the middle of the night or on the weekend, there is a better than average chance many of your readers don’t know what you are talking about. How about prefacing your emails before stapling them to the blog?
This is another message that is just as confusing as the star jump business.
I should be more selective about the emails I copy on to the blog. Basically the way it works is that I will send them to the presenter and send a BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) version to the blog. A script runs every half hour to check for new messages. I have considered making the script add some text about the email being one of my contributions to talkback radio, but that wouldn’t help to put the emails in context. It would probably help if I either copied the more ambiguous emails separately with some explanatory text, or added in some explanatory text after the email appears online.
To explain that message, Sarah is the producer of 2UE’s Drive Show and for one promotional reason or another she was sent on a train trip across Australia. Part of the promotion was that presenters would cross to her on the train, so she asked Clive Robertson what time he would like to talk to her…he said 4am and she (for some unknown reason, maybe she thought he was joking) agreed. I next heard Sarah talking to Stuart Bocking at 9:30 that night, and noticed that she sounded bright and bubbly on both occasions.
As for the “star jump” stuff. The short version of that is that Glenn Wheeler abseiled down the 31 storey Stockland Building in Sydney to raise money for the starlight foundation. More details (including videos) are available on Glenn Wheeler’s highlights page and the MyTalk star jump page. For the record, I donated $50 to the cause.
Anyway thank you for your suggestions Tuggers. They’re constructive and useful, and I appreciate them.
Samuel
December 11th, 2007 at 07:39am
Just looking back through the AAP articles to see if I missed something.
Kerrie Tucker conceded defeat in the senate at about 10pm.
November 24th, 2007 at 11:34pm
John Howard expected to concede defeat it ten minutes.
November 24th, 2007 at 09:36pm
The coalition currently have a two seat advantage in Queensland, which isn’t going to be enough to get the Liberals over the line and we are very likely to see Kevin Rudd declare at 9:30. Channel Nine have just given the election to Labor.
National (46%):
Labor: 62
Coalition: 41
Independent: 1
November 24th, 2007 at 08:33pm
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