I just thought I would pause to mention that the previous post, about Maritz’s column being on unplanned leave, is this blog’s 3,000th post. Not bad for a blog which has been active, for all intents and purposes, since the 17th of April 2005.
3,000 posts in 1,583 days. 1.895 posts per day. One post every 12 hours, 39 minutes and 50.4 seconds.
Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about those days where I wrote nothing. The busy days quite easily made up for them.
Apologies for the break in transmission. I’ve been pretty well snowed under with menial tasks for the last few days and haven’t felt like writing much here during my downtime. I was going to post photos of the Tuggeranong Weather Station this morning, but the upload scripts on the photo gallery seem to be broken, so after half an hour of being annoyed by that, I gave up.
I should also note that I know that I am behind in Sunday audio clips. I will catch up this weekend by posting two audio clips. On that front I have come to the conclusion that the backlog of airchecks to post is going to become quite annoying to manage if I keep posting them in chronological order. What I really need to do is produce a list, and start posting them at random like I do for the Musician(s) Of The Week award, whilst adhering to the “must be three months old” rule.
Normal transmission will resume shortly. Until then, here’s something which I found a couple weeks ago by accident, and which brightened my day considerably. Mike Jeffreys interviewing Scott Driscoll from The Retailers Association on 2CC on the 19th of June last year.
It would appear that I am still suffering withdrawal symptoms from a lack of Mike Jeffreys on the radio.
A sure sign that the government has too many bureaucrats. This ad, from page 17 of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph:
DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL COMPACT
The Australian Government, as part of its social inclusion agenda, is exploring ways to develop a stronger relationship with Australia’s third sector. One way to do this is through the development of a national compact. A second stage of consultations on the development of a national compact will begin on 3 August 2009. An online forum will be launched as part of this consultation. Interested people and organisations are invited to share their ideas about what a national compact should look like and what it will include.
To find out more or to register your interest to participate in the online consultation forum, please visit www.socialinclusion.gov.au or www.fahcsia.gov.au
The ad then continues with phone numbers, but doesn’t actually explain what it’s rambling about. So I went along to the social inclusion website, and found this:
Promoting social inclusion requires a new approach to developing and implementing policy and programs. This new approach requires strong partnerships between all levels of government, business and community organisations to address economic and social disadvantage in Australia.
Oh, so this is a socialist attempt at giving paper pushes the power to spread wealth around. I say attempt because, the amount of bureaucracy involved in this is bound to make it another expensive and confusing white elephant.
Many Australian Government departments are involved in the social inclusion agenda, and a number of them have established Social Inclusion Units to focus on this priority. The Australian Social Inclusion Board and the Community Response Task Force have been established to involve the community and business sectors at the highest level. A new National Compact, or agreement, is being developed between the government and the not-for-profit sector as a way to develop a new and stronger relationship, based on partnership and respect.
“A new National Compact, or agreement”…government double-speak before it’s even getting off the ground. This is just another “look, we’re doing something, we’ve got a review going, aren’t we wonderful” facade, aimed at preventing people from realising that nothing is actually getting done.
I have missed two of the last three days on this blog, after not missing a day since the 20th of June. It’s not as if I’m short of stuff to write about either.
Alas on Monday I was too busy to even put a few photos online and rejected Maritz’s weekly column, and yesterday I spent virtually the whole day in bed after falling down the stairs on Tuesday.
Stay tuned, I haven’t disappeared, although I am sorry that it has been so quiet here in the last few days.
I have a general policy that I do not reveal confidential sources, and do not engage in discussions and speculation as to the identity of said sources, however I feel that I need to make an exception on this one occasion, simply to clear the name of an innocent party.
I am losing count of the number of people who think that I have a confidential source within the Pyrmont Bunker (aka 2GB) with the initials MT. Let me state quite clearly that I do not have such a source…I know an MT, but they are not a source.
Due to a technical project, this blog is going in to “maintenance mode” for the next little while. Basically what this means from your perspective is that some things might not work as expected. At the end of it, the website should load more quickly and not have as many of the interesting little issues that it has had in recent times.
I was going to force comments in to the moderation queue during the maintenance period, but as I’m not sure how long it will take to complete the maintenance, and I will have to deal with some data inconsistencies later on anyway, I have decided not to bother. There will be a point in time when comments will be forced in to the moderation queue, but that will only be for a short period.
So, in advance, I apologise for any issues you have with the website during the maintenance period. Things should be much better once it’s all done.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for a few years would remember that, a few years ago, I started publishing highlights of the audio tapes I made when I was a child. Some of you may have been scarred for life by them, with one person commenting to me that they were “scary”.
These highlights were in many ways a side-effect of the process of putting these tapes on CD, and the posting of highlights stalled because the conversion to CD also stalled.
All of the tapes are sitting on a computer at my house in wave format, waiting to be edited (mostly some noise reduction and splitting the tapes in to tracks based on the various segments), and I would like to get it done, but I’m not overly keen on spending the extra time creating highlights which I can then publish here. As such, I have taken a decision to not bother publishing highlights, but instead publish the whole tapes. There are 28 tapes and one audio CD, and I intend on publishing the tapes and CD in random order, one side of a tape at a time, on alternating Sundays, with Aircheck Sunday on the other Sundays.
This should mean that the entire collection should be online over the course of 114 weeks.
Tomorrow will be Aircheck Sunday, so the first side of a tape will go online the following week. This will be available as a podcast, and I’ll give you the details of that when the first one is published.
Yesterday morning, after writing my editorial about the banning of bottled water in Bundanoon, I received a great email from a Bundanoon local explaining why they want to ban bottled water. I understand why they want to do this, I just disagree with them.
I’m disappointed to report that the person who sent this email has declined permission to publish their email, which is a great shame as I think their email would make great reading. I have to say that their decision does strike me as a bit odd considering that there are a lot of people who don’t understand the reasons behind the ban, and the email does a great job of outlining the reasons.
The photo gallery is online again, having been offline since I moved the site in April.
I encountered an interesting problem when I brought the gallery back online where none of the links to the various photo albums were working properly. Links to the various administrative pages were working fine, and all of the images were loading properly, but clicking on a link to an album (for the purposes of this example, we’ll work with the “Old Cooma Road Bridge Upgrade” album) resulted in the URL in the address bar changing, but the home page of the gallery being served up. So, for example, the page at http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade was producing the same content as the page at http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/
To make things more bizarre, no errors were being produced in the site’s error log, so I really had nothing to go on, in order to work out what was going on.
On the previous server, the photo gallery was located in the directory /var/www/vhosts/samuelgordonstewart.com/subdomains/photos/httpdocs/ and I had already corrected the paths listed in the configuration files to the path on the new server, which is /home/samuelgo/public_html/photos, and I have moved the Gallery between servers and paths before without encountering this problem.
When I had a closer look at the directory structure inside the “photos” directory, I noticed that there is no directory with the name “OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade” (or any of the other album’s names, for that matter) and that they in fact live within the “albums” directory (for example, /home/samuelgo/public_html/photos/albums/OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade), and that the Gallery software must, therefore, be using Apache‘s (the webserver software) mod_rewrite functions to use nice URLs such as http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade instead of some archaic (and ugly) URL such as http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/albums.php?set_AlbumName=OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade
So, why was mod_rewrite failing to behave properly…time to check the .htaccess file at /home/samuelgo/public_html/photos/.htaccess which contains the mod_rewrite rules. Hmmm, that’s interesting, there are no mod_rewrite rules in it…so why am I getting the index page instead of a “404 not found” error when I visit something which physically doesn’t exist such as http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade?
Then it struck me, this is precisely the behaviour I would expect if WordPress‘ (the software which runs this blog) standard mod_rewrite rules were being followed…that is, if a given URL doesn’t physically exist, refer to index.php to find out what to serve up. None of the pages on this blog exist in physical files, they are all generated on request by the index.php (and others) file running database queries and extracting the required information out of the blog’s database. Gallery doesn’t work in quite the same way, and it definitely doesn’t understand the WordPress method.
But why was I getting WordPress’ mod_rewrite behaviour now, when I wasn’t getting it on the old server’s Gallery installation. Well that’s simple. The old server was running the Plesk control panel, which keeps primary domains separated from their subdomains. On the old server, this blog existed at /var/www/vhosts/samuelgordonstewart.com/httpdocs whilst the photo gallery existed at /var/www/vhosts/samuelgordonstewart.com/subdomains/photos/httpdocs. This server, however, uses the cPanel control panel which stores subdomains within the directory of the primary domain. So the blog exists at /home/samuelgo/public_html whilst the gallery lives at /home/samuelgo/public_html/photos.
The annoying thing about the way cPanel handles subdomains is that .htaccess files take effect recursively. This means that the .htaccess file which lives at /home/samuelgo/public_html/.htaccess has an affect on the public_html directory and all of the directories within it, and the directories within those directories, and so on and so forth. Annoyingly, this means that the mod_rewrite rules used by WordPress get applied to the photo gallery with disastrous results.
I was able to prove that this was the case by temporarily taking the blog’s .htaccess file out of commission, which resulted in virtually every link on the blog and the photo gallery producing a “404 not found” message.
So the problem now was how to get the Gallery installation to produce its mod_rewrite rules again. My theory was that if I disabled Gallery’s use of mod_rewrite, and then re-enabled it, Gallery would need to reproduce the mod_rewrite rules. Unfortunately I had already gone through the Gallery configuration wizard to see if there was anything I had missed (alas, there wasn’t) and noticed that using mod_rewrite is not optional. If mod_rewrite is installed on the server, Gallery will use it. This didn’t completely kill the idea though.
I decided to manually modify the configuration file which controls whether Gallery uses mod_rewrite, and tell it not to use mod_rewrite. This worked, as it forced Gallery to use archaic URLs such as http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/albums.php?set_AlbumName=OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade which were working fine. I then ran the configuration wizard again, which noticed that mod_rewrite is installed on the server, and thus decided to enable Gallery’s use of mod_rewrite, and write the mod_rewrite rules as needed.
It wrote the following in to the photo gallery’s .htaccess file, and normal Gallery URLs started working again:
# BEGIN Gallery section
# (Automatically generated. Do not edit this section)
# Note: still under development, so format may change.
# If you edit this file, make a backup before runnng the Config. Wizard.
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Another one of my odd dreams. This one occurred at what can only be described as a badly mangled version of the old Belconnen Bus Interchange, mixed with a derivation of my primary school. A few copies of the interchange’s bridges exist, with the interchange itself being replaced by the school canteen.
For some reason in this dream I happen to be a student in a Year 6 music and dance class at my age, which makes me ten years older than any of the other students. The task for the day is that the teacher will play three songs, and in pairs we must all sing along and dance to the songs…and if we don’t, we fail and must start primary school again.
I recognised two lines of the first song (Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”) and didn’t recognise the other songs at all. I tried to inform my partner of this but she wasn’t in the least bit interested, so I tried to break away from her and chase the teacher who was on on of the other bridges and was yelling about how naughty I was being.
Eventually I broke away, much to the disappointment of my partner, and chased the teacher through large crowds on these tunnels, and eventually caught up to her in the canteen as the songs were finishing. I informed her that I didn’t recognise the songs, which annoyed her as they were her three favourite songs. She informed me that my punishment would be lunchtime detention, in which I would have the songs played to me continuously until I knew them well enough to write the lyrics accurately without hearing the songs.
I walked outside and started reading the canteen menu to decide what to eat for lunch (although the teacher was quite angrily yelling “no eating during detention”) when the partner who had refused to let go earlier came over and apologised to me.
I then decided to resign from primary school on the grounds that I didn’t really need to graduate from primary school, after all the last time I graduated from primary school I didn’t want to graduate and broke down in tears at the end of the ceremony.
It’s a few days behind schedule thanks to the weather, but it’s finally happened, James Scott is broadcasting live from a hot air balloon this morning on Canberra’s 1WAY FM, 91.9 and 94.3 FM.
Having spent the last few days dealing with wonderful and persistent migraines, its nice to be back in the land of heads which don’t hurt.
I’ll be catching up on a bit of a backlog of blog posts over the next day or so, and things should quieten down a bit again on Monday or Tuesday. Actually I have some videos which I might hold over to Monday seeing as I’ll be on the road for most of that day.
The award for the week goes to Soft Cell, and the feature song is Tainted Love.
Sometimes I feel I’ve got to
Run away I’ve got to
Get away
From the pain that you drive into the heart of me
The love we share
Seems to go nowhere
And I’ve lost my light
For I toss and turn I can’t sleep at night
(chorus)
Once I ran to you (I ran)
Now I’ll run from you
This tainted love you’ve given
I give you all a boy could give you
Take my tears and that’s not nearly all
Tainted love
Oh…tainted love
Now I know I’ve got to
Run away I’ve got to
Get away
You don’t really want any more from me
To make things right
You need someone to hold you tight
And you think love is to pray
But I’m sorry I don’t pray that way
Once I ran to you (I ran)
Now I’ll run from you
This tainted love you’ve given
I give you all a boy could give you
Take my tears and that’s not nearly all
Tainted love
Oh…tainted love
Don’t touch me please
I cannot stand the way you tease
I love you though you hurt me so
Now I’m gonna to pack my things and go
Tainted love (ooh) tainted love
Tainted love (ooh) tainted love
Tainted love (ooh) tainted love
Tainted love (ooh) tainted love
Touch me baby, tainted love
Touch me baby, tainted love
Tainted love (ooh)
Tainted love (ooh)
Tainted love
Tainted love
There is an interesting early demo of the song on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsMz9vIaLwQ&fmt=18 which sounds a fair bit different to the released version of the song.