Posts filed under 'Blog News'
The new and “evolved” Samuel’s Persiflage has arrived, with episode number fourteen just waiting to be downloaded . There is also a low quality version for the bandwidth impaired here.
If you so desire, you can even listen to it online, just click the play button below.
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/SamuelsPersiflage/persiflage014.mp3]
The new feature is an editorial, slightly based on the format of Editorial Echoes, and I have even used the Editorial Echoes intro for the Persiflage Editorial, except that it is now in stereo! The editorial for the month focuses on telemarketers.
De facto US correspondent Bill Grady and I discuss the Virginia Tech shootings, how the media affects peoples perceptions, security for world leaders, the world of advertising, and the new feature involving listeners…one could say that Bill is actually a bit of an expert in the new feature…the feature word of the interview is “crazy”.
Bill Grady’s podcast is You Are The Guest, and his other website is Create Ads That Work.
There are two ads this month, and both are promoting advertising on radio. It’s quite interesting to compare how the US and Australian radio industries promote themselves to advertisers.
There is also a bit of feedback, including someone calling me a scoundrel.
All listeners are invited to send in more feedback, both in written and audio format. As per usual feedback can be sent to podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com (text, MP3, Wave or Ogg Vorbis), spoken feedback by clicking here or on the button below would be great, or leave a comment below.
You can also send feedback by post
Samuel’s Persiflage
PO Box 1272
Dickson ACT 2602
Australia
The Samuel’s Persiflage #14 file itself is available here, and is 1:15:35 in length (69.2MB) at 128kbps stereo. The 128kbps format is used so as to provide you with a high quality and good sounding podcast. I do, however, acknowledge that this is just unreasonable for dial-up, so a 16kbps mono file is also available here. The sound quality isn’t as good, but is much better for those on dial-up or with small download limits. The low quality version is 8.65MB
For those of you who are using podcast software to receive your podcasts, the feed can be found here and if you are using iTunes you can subscribe to Samuel’s Persiflage by clicking here.
The next episode of Samuel’s Persiflage will be in a couple weeks.
Enjoy the show!
Samuel
May 23rd, 2007 at 03:36am
Please accept this as my temporary retirement from predicting when I will get things online. I suspect that fifteen cats fighting over a violin would be better at it than me.
Message from the cats: The Sydney photos will be online tonight and the series may be a day behind the latest schedule…but you were expecting that weren’t you?
Samuel
May 9th, 2007 at 08:14am
I don’t really have time to go in to the story behind the delay right now, but the revised schedule for the Sydney photos is as follows:
Monday AM: Tonight or early tomorrow morning
Monday PM: Tomorrow
Tuesday AM: Thursday
Tuesday PM: Friday
Samuel
May 8th, 2007 at 06:51am
Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, yes there is a heap of stuff that I have planned to write, but very little that I have actually written. I’m sorry about this but I don’t always have as much time to do things as I plan, and the last couple days have been like that.
I’m starting to think that I should just permanently change the byline of the site from “It’s just not normal” to “Delayed”.
At this stage it looks like I’ll have time to write quite a bit tonight.
Samuel
May 1st, 2007 at 12:41pm
As you would probably be aware, I have a whole heap of photos and things to post from my trip to Sydney earlier this week. On previous occasions I have posted these all in one big lot which is very effective, so this time I’m going to trial separating it in to four posts, one for Monday AM, one for Monday PM, one for Tuesday AM and another for Tuesday PM. I’ll probably spread them out over four days so that you’re not all inundated.
This will allow me to focus on writing more about the trip than I would have done if I was to cram the whole trip in to one post, and provide more relevant links back to the correct post when referring to a part of the trip in the future.
I haven’t actually processed any of the photos or audio from the trip, although I have established that the videos aren’t worth posting (except I am holding out hope that a Sunrise promo may be heading my way…it looks promising but we’ll wait and see, and if so, I’ll post that).
I’m looking at starting the series on Monday morning.
Samuel
April 27th, 2007 at 01:40pm
I have been pleasantly surprised over the last few months to see that the number of hits on the Samuel’s Persiflage feed have not dropped, and that despite the lack of recent episodes people are still subscribed and looking forward to more episodes.
I’m pleased to be able to announce that Samuel’s Persiflage returns later this week with a new episode, and I’m sure that for people who don’t read this message, it will be a pleasant surprise in return for their loyalty.
Samuel
April 18th, 2007 at 01:55pm
Today was supposed to be a happy day, with the birthday of this blog and Australian talk radio, but as this blog has a growing audience in the US I feel that there is minimal room for frivolity today.
At the time of writing this message there were up to 32 dead and nearly as many wounded in the worst school shooting in the US to date. I would like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere condolences and best wishes to everyone who has been affected by the Virginia Tech University shooting today. It is truly terrible news, and it really does make the case for Australia’s gun control laws.
There will be a low key celebration of the second birthday of this blog later today at the birthday moment, however I will not be conducting the other planned celebrations today.
I will, however, leave Australian talk radio to do what it has done so well for the last forty years, cover and discuss a breaking news story of massive magnitude.
This, unfortunately, is a very sombre day.
Samuel
April 17th, 2007 at 06:08am
Some of you have been concerned enough to send me emails about my well-being, others have just been concerned, and the rest of you are wondering what I’m babbling about.
I have not been well this week, I was rather ill during Easter due to a combination of mild food poisoning and general ill health, and have been mildly better during the week. I have been well enough to work a midnight to dawn shift during which a minimal amount is required of me, and then sleep pretty much all day in an effort to feel a bit better and not put up with constant nagging headaches. The one upside that I can think of here is that I don’t have to use up any sick leave for this to work, and I can still feel somewhat useful and productive. On the other hand, you could call me insane.
This should explain why I haven’t posted anything here for about a week. Even now I have no intention of writing much, and probably won’t write much at all until next week. I will, however, make an effort to post some video excitement here tonight or tomorrow for your entertainment.
In the mean time, here are my footy tips for this weekend. Eventually I will get around to writing the results from last week.
NRL Round 5
Bulldogs V Sea Eagles
Dragons V Storm
Panthers V Eels
Rabbitohs V Knights
Raiders V Roosters
Titans V Broncos
Warriors V Cowboys
Tigers V Sharks
AFL Round 3
Magpies V Tigers
Blues V Bombers
Power V Crows
Saints V Bulldogs
Dockers V Eagles
Swans V Lions
Demons V Cats
Kangaroos V Hawks
As a footnote, I haven’t forgotten that on the 17th this blog will officially turn two years old, and you may be interested to know that on the same day, Talk Radio in Australia will be 40 years old.
Samuel
April 13th, 2007 at 04:34pm
With Easter this weekend, the football starts a day earlier than usual and therefore you get my tips a day earlier than usual.
NRL Round 4
Rabbitohs V Bulldogs
Roosters V Broncos
Knights V Storm
Cowboys V Tigers
Eels v Raiders
Sea Eagles V Warriors
Panthers V Titans
Sharks v Dragons
AFL Round 2
Lions V Saints
Tigers V Swans
Eagles v Magpies
Cats V Blues
Power v Kangaroos
Bombers v Dockers
Bulldogs v Crows
Hawks V Demons
Samuel
April 5th, 2007 at 02:32am
What a good question…I’m glad five people have felt a need to email that question to me in the last three hours.
Long story short, they’re invisible and will remain that way until I write them. This week has been a bit out of the ordinary for me and unfortunately at 2am the only thing that had any appeal whatsoever was sleep, and plenty of it.
The radio reviews will come in time, and if you ask very nicely Kevin Woolfe might get ACTTAB to open a market on it…although I suspect that they will appear long before ACTTAB even consider it.
If you’re wondering why I keep planning on writing the radio reviews and keep putting them off, it’s because they each take over an hour. Reviewing an hour of radio takes a bit longer than an hour, and requires my full concentration. There is no point in me doing it when I’m going to be distracted or fall asleep.
Samuel
March 28th, 2007 at 11:38am
It looks like we finally have everyone looking at the new server, so I would like to take this opportunity to apologise for the mess last week during the move to the new server. For most people it happened within hours, but some of you have ISPs with DNS servers which only update once every quarter of a blue moon…even worse, the ISPs who do that tend to run transparent proxies, so using different DNS servers doesn’t help either as the proxy uses the out of date DNS servers.
Anyway, it’s all over now, you’re all here on the new server, I’ve had fun talking to a few ISPs about their DNS servers, and I’ve still got to copy the favicon across.
I’ll see about getting the footy tipping results online some time in the next twelve hours, and tomorrow is going to be a triple radio review Wednesday!
Samuel
March 27th, 2007 at 02:44pm
Today is the day as you probably already noticed at the top of the page. The server migration is underway, and there will be no new content appearing until after it is completed.
Here is a rough timeline and status of events:
[DONE] Backing up data from old server
[DONE] Uploading data to new server
[DONE] Replicate email settings
[DONE] Lock Comments on old server and disable plugins
[DONE] Move database from old server to new server
[DONE] Installing up-to-date WordPress on new server
[DONE] Redelagate domain and begin domain propagation (Domain is now propagating as of 6:26pm GMT+11. You should start to see the new site within the next few hours.)
Update: Apparently the domain delegation didn’t go through on any of the three occasions I tried it on the Bluehost control panel…something to do with my domain not having been transferred to their registrar system yet. I have called them and domain propagation is now officially underway as of 10:13pm GMT+11. Sorry about the delay. End Update
Further Update: As of 10:16pm, a.gtld-servers.net (one of the big boss servers of the .com domain) knows where the new server is! End Update
Another Update 10:54pm: Most Australian ISPs have now picked up the new server. TPG’s DNS servers are next updating at about 1:30am and look like they might be among the last in the world to do so…good thing I have other DNS arrangements in place right now! (TPG transparently proxy, so I am being forced to use another Internet connection). End Update
Yet Another Update 1:32am: DNS has now propagated to TPG’s servers, and it looks like they were at the tail end of the cycle, so anybody utilising at the very least a semi-decent DNS server should be seeing the new server now. End Update
[DONE ON NEW SERVER] Enable plugins and comments.
[IN PROGRESS] Post-transfer cleanup and maintenance, see any problems? Email me if you do. I have some file permissions to fix but otherwise it’s looking good.
The data transfer isn’t a huge issue as this is merely the images, mp3s etc which are linked to in various articles. The only thing that is of real concern there are the Blix theme files and plugins…once they have copied across everything should be fine.
Things that will make a noticeable difference are locking comments and disabling plugins…during this time the website may look very strange. Depending on exactly what order everything happens in, you may see a generic server migration page on the new server after I transfer the domain across. As long as everything goes roughly to plan, everything should be up and running by about 10pm (Canberra time, GMT+11) at the latest It’s done! Just waiting for DNS to propagate now.
Links may also appear broken after domain transfer as I will have to force a rebuild of the mod_rewrite rules which handle all of the addresses on this site (just about everything here is a virtual link). Update: Fixed on new server. End Update
If you have any concerns or questions during the transfer, please feel free to email me…due to email settings replication, no emails will be lost during the migration.
Samuel
March 20th, 2007 at 09:47am
Last week I mentioned that Internet Explorer 6 was not rendering this website correctly. This is not an uncommon problem with WordPress blogs, but is by no means confined to them, they are just more likely to have the problem as they generally employ a column style layout with a sidebar.
Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 (and previous versions) doesn’t handle overlapping columns, so whenever things in the main column stretch over in to the sidebar, Internet Explorer 6 decides that it doesn’t like things overlapping, and moves the sidebar to the same spot horizontally, just below the main content column. This happened last week (and for part of the week before) when I wrote an article with a very long title. That length of title isn’t a problem, but when it is all one word it is.
There is no solution to this problem as IE6 is a standards-ignorant browser, but there are workarounds, one is that I could ensure that nothing overlaps, and that’s not going to happen and wouldn’t help with other sites anyway, the other is that you don’t use Internet Explorer 6 and earlier…IE7, Firefox, Opera and Safari don’t have the problem, and are all better from a security standpoint than IE6 anyway.
Samuel
March 19th, 2007 at 10:39am
But only server, not address.
It’s been nearly a year and seven months since this blog moved to paid hosting with Bluehost, but the time has come for me to move hosting company, to the Australian (and seemingly a lot more reliable) AussieHQ.
The move will take place this week, but unlike the move from free to paid hosting, the address will not change, whilst this is a good thing as it won’t break links and email addresses etc, it will cause some semi-downtime while the server change propagates around the DNS system. This will mean that some people will see the new server long before others do, and unfortunately Bigpond users will probably be among the last to make the move as Telstra are notoriously slow at updating DNS.
If you understood the last paragraph, skip this one…the DNS system is what holds the Internet together, it converts domain names like samuelgordonstewart.com to IP addresses like 69.89.18.35, which in turn allows your computer to find websites. Generally your computer will find out IP addresses from a DNS server run by your ISP, and due to the sheer number of DNS servers out there it takes a matter of hours for them all to be updated. Some, like the ones at Telstra, are setup to take longer than others.
This move is the reason there is no weekly poll this week, as the poll relies on the database on the server running this website, and it would be pointless to have two servers running the same poll and receiving votes from a different set of people. Other disruptions this week will occur in comments, once I initiate the transfer comments on the old server will be disabled as I really don’t feel like copying a whole heap of comments between servers. Email shouldn’t be affected as I forward email to Gmail anyway, and will set up those forwarders on the new server ASAP. From a viewing perspective, there should be minimal disruption on this website as I will schedule things to appear on both the new and old servers prior to the migration.
So why am I moving the website? Well I have a few reasons…
Firstly, whilst Bluehost have generally been good, their reliability has diminished over the last few months. I have noticed an increase in the number of times the webserver has not bothered to respond, and the FTP server is getting slower and now seems to be randomly freezing. It’s been a while since this site has gone down completely, but when it does, it does it in style. Bluehost don’t handle this downtime very well either, trying to get information from them about outages is incredibly difficult, they usually claim there is no outage and never bother to inform anyone of scheduled maintenance.
Last time there was a major outage it was due to scheduled maintenance (no attempt was made to notify customers) where they were moving between data centres, or something to that effect. They botched it, and were offline for hours. I’m also not at all convinced that their promised backup generators exist…when the power went out on a separate occasion, so did they, on multiple occasions…they supposedly had enough power for the servers but not the air conditioning, so they didn’t run the servers for fear of over heating. I would probably have done the same thing, but I have to wonder why they only had enough generators for the servers.
Secondly, Bluehost are in the US, the vast majority of the readers of this website are in Australia. The time it takes to transfer data to and from the US might not be particularly long, but for the vast majority of readers, connecting to a Canberra based server would be much faster. I also have reason the believe that AussieHQ’s servers are much more responsive than Bluehost’s, so any extra data transfer time for anybody overseas should be more or less offset by a better performing server.
It is my personal opinion that Bluehost is an example of what’s wrong with the massive super-cheap US hosting industry. When I joined Bluehost they were still relatively small, had a good offer, and kept their promises. The problem as they have grown is that to remain competitive they have to keep their prices low and increase the service offered…economically speaking, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t provide them with the room to improve their services or upgrade their servers in a logical manner, instead they are forced to put as many people on the same server as they possibly can.
It’s not their fault, it is the US hosting industry in general which seems to be suffering, but none of them want to publicly admit to it…instead they all (Bluehost in particular) make a lot of noise about how they are optimising this that and everything else in in the Linux kernel and other parts of the server to make the servers run better, but you can only push a server so hard before it starts to have issues. Apparently the server this website is hosted on is one of the more reliable servers…and that’s a worry as it isn’t exactly running brilliantly.
There may be a few minor glitches in the changeover, especially if you happen to be one of the lucky people who use a DNS server which gets the new IP address in first hour or so of the new server being in operation. During the first couple of hours there may be a bit of downtime while I make sure things are working as they should, and finish off uploading everything.
To ease the transfer, the notification area at the top of each page will indicate whether you are looking at the new or old server. I will also schedule a bunch of articles to appear on both servers simultaneously so that the site doesn’t come to a complete halt.
With any luck, the migration will be pain-free, and you will all be looking at the new server not long after it is up and running.
At this stage I haven’t decided whether to start the migration tomorrow or on Wednesday, although I am leaning towards tomorrow.
If you’ve got any questions about this, now is probably a good time to ask them!
Samuel
March 19th, 2007 at 06:00am
There isn’t going to be a weekly poll this week as the website is moving to new hosting, and there would be no reasonable way to regulate voting during the migration. I’ll explain the reasons soon, but first here are the results from last week’s poll.
Has Jon Stanhope done a good job as Chief Minister of the ACT?
Total Votes: 55
Started: March 10, 2007
Not surprisingly Jon Stanhope did not fare well in the poll, receiving what a Newspoll would probably call a “38% approval rate”. I did find it interesting that very close to the end of the week, votes started to sharply turn in the Chief Turnip’s favour. It’s fairly well known that Stanhope has a bunch of loyal followers who try to rig this kind of vote in his favour, so I do have to wonder if they were involved in the late turn in Stanhope’s favour.
The weekly poll will return next week when the migration to a new server is well and truly over.
For a list of all previous results, see the Weekly Poll Results page.
Samuel
March 18th, 2007 at 08:43pm
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