Written By: - Date published: 12:47 am, March 15th, 2010 - 4 comments
My absence this weekend from moderation and posts has partially been because of going to the excellent Fabian seminar today. However it has largely been due to trying to get a workable search system running. One that didn’t bring the whole server crashing around my ears every few months and cut the issue of everyone having to stop receiving data for up to a minute when someone used search. One that allowed comments to be accessed as easily as posts.
It looks like it is finally working correctly, but I’d like feedback on any errors that show up.
Updated: Several different server and site updates.
Written By: - Date published: 5:03 pm, March 6th, 2010 - 15 comments
This looks to be a fascinating set of lectures. I’ll be going – will you?
Economic orthodoxy continues to fail New Zealand. This failure is systemic, not cyclical. Despite this, prevailing political and economic orthodoxy has become almost immune from scrutiny. It seems that policymakers have yet to comprehend that the status quo will inevitably lead to economic collapse.
Written By: - Date published: 4:09 pm, March 4th, 2010 - 6 comments
This is the shortened and lyrical version of the policy.
Written By: - Date published: 2:41 pm, March 3rd, 2010 - 4 comments
Well the discussion keeps going on, and as you know I like marking these occasions as the database steadily grows (and my backup nightmares keep increasing). The 150,000′th accepted* comment was by Lanthanide here at just after midday. He was explaining the real world politics to someone who preferred their own myths. When the 100,000th …
Written By: - Date published: 8:57 am, February 28th, 2010 - 16 comments
The alert has now been downgraded to an advisory (4:30pm), though surges and rapid changes in sea level could still occur for the next 24 hours.
According to Newsroom “A series of ongoing large offshore earthquakes continue to rock South America with widespread destruction in Chile…
Written By: - Date published: 9:08 pm, February 25th, 2010 - 14 comments
I’m about to start sweeping the blogroll for dead or moribund sites over the next week. The general rule is that I mark sites private if the recent posts are inactive for more than 3 months (or I can’t read the site). If anyone wants to get their site added (or re-added) then use the …
Written By: - Date published: 6:03 pm, February 20th, 2010 - 1 comment
There will be some maintenance going on this evening starting about 7pm and hopefully not lasting long.
The new site seems to be stable, so I’ll be removing the old site at www2. That will allow the new site to start using widgets and to move from the temporary ads to the final advertisement systems.
Written By: - Date published: 3:29 pm, February 13th, 2010 - 11 comments
There will be up to 15 minutes of maintenance around 5pm. I have to shove some directories around to better structure the server filesystem. The site will have to be off while that is happening. Unless I’m mistaken, everything is back to normal after my system work for the new site. There should be captcha …
Written By: - Date published: 6:30 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 63 comments
Enough of all of this politics. Lets look at something that is more mysterious than the hole that John Key is digging for his political future. Why in the hell is “milk bottle” one of the most frequent search terms for this site? Looking at the search queries that have resulted in a click through …
Written By: - Date published: 3:30 pm, January 29th, 2010 - 43 comments
Ok, I promised a review of the comments in 2009. Here are the usual suspects with both the number of comments and the number of bytes in the comments so you can see who talks a lot and how much. This was a little tricky because I used the e-mails to select the top e-mails, …
Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, January 29th, 2010 - Comments Off
On Friday at 7 p.m the server is getting kernel upgrades and other maintenance upgrades. They reckon that it will take 10-15 minutes. In the past this has taken from 5 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the disk state. Be warned and don’t get alarmed – the server hasn’t gone down.
Written By: - Date published: 10:26 pm, January 21st, 2010 - 23 comments
I was pulling out the stats for 2009 so I could update Tumeke blog rankings about who authors on this site so Tim could update the names under our site name. Rather than just send it to him, I thought I’d post it here and send him a link Because I wanted to understand the …
Written By: - Date published: 10:18 pm, December 30th, 2009 - 7 comments
Haven’t had as much time as I’d like for updates so far – there are some who have been insisting that I be social over the break! There is also a vast oversupply of wine in cupboard, beer in the fridge, and diet forthcoming in the new year where beer is forbidden (red wine is …
Written By: - Date published: 1:53 pm, December 5th, 2009 - 3 comments
I did some small interface changes on Friday morning. The main effect was to widen the page from 950 pixels to 1024 pixels to allow for a wider sidebars and central content. I also cleaned up the header graphic a bit. Consequently I’ve just increased the depth of thread discussions from six deep to seven …
Written By: - Date published: 6:03 pm, November 25th, 2009 - Comments Off
The New Zealand Political Studies Association is holding its Annual Conference from Nov 30 – 1 Dec in Auckland, hosted by the University of Auckland Political Studies Department. The conference will run five simultaneous streams presenting papers in the fields of: Political Theory, New Zealand and Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Communications and Media, Public …
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 pm, November 18th, 2009 - 8 comments
Well I missed it. We rolled past the 4000th post at the end of October. A bit unexpected, it was too early by my reckoning and I wasn’t looking for it. We’re now at post 4154 so well on the way for the next milestone. Number 3000 was in early June, so it took a …
Written By: - Date published: 4:40 pm, November 13th, 2009 - 7 comments
At about 7pm on Saturday 14th there will be an outage while the server gets another upgrade to a new OS kernel. Your server should be down for 5-10 minutes, we will restart it at the conclusion of the maintenance window. Yeah right – last time it was a couple of hours because the server …
Written By: - Date published: 11:56 pm, November 2nd, 2009 - 13 comments
Sorry to anyone who thought that The Standard hadn’t published anything today. The site had in fact been pretty active for a Monday. You got caught by a wee mistake by me* I moved the site to a more accessible location on the server in preparation for updates in the free time between now and …
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 am, October 30th, 2009 - 15 comments
The Campaign for a Living Wage will be taking to the streets of Auckland’s CBD tonight to demand a minimum wage of 15 dollars an hour and an end to poverty wages. The theme is Halloween trick or treat. If you want, you can dress up as: (a) a Zombie worker who has awoken from …
Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, October 23rd, 2009 - 7 comments
Scientists say that 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere is the safe limit for humanity. We’re above that limit and we’re climbing fast. 350 Aotearoa is the New Zealand arm of 350.org, an international campaign dedicated to creating an equitable global climate treaty that lowers carbon dioxide below 350 parts per million. Tomorrow, Saturday, …
Written By: - Date published: 12:33 pm, October 18th, 2009 - Comments Off
[Pulling the following comment from Toad in Open Mike up to the front page.] If you are in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or Dunedin tomorrow, please try to find the time to support the protests against ACC’s proposed cuts to sexual abuse cover and therapy. There are protests organised for this Monday 19th October: AUCKLAND: Meet …
Written By: - Date published: 11:54 am, October 7th, 2009 - Comments Off
There’s a solidarity picket tomorrow outside Infratil’s HQ in Wellington to support the locked out Auckland bus drivers. If you’ve got a moment in your lunch break head on over and support these workers against this latest example of New Zealand’s growing employer militancy. What: Auckland bus drivers solidarity picket. When: Thursday, October 8 (tomorrow) …
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 pm, September 21st, 2009 - 6 comments
The outage earlier this evening was due to the hosting company taking the server down.. We will be rebooting the host machine to update its kernel and apply some other fixes. The reboot will occur at approx 2200 PT (10pm Pacific time) on Sunday September 20th. Your server should be down for 5-10 minutes, we …
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, September 10th, 2009 - 18 comments
Socialist Aotearoa have organised a Telecom solidarity fundraiser on Friday night. Not for $7m man Paul Reynolds, but for the lines engineers his contractors are busy laying off with no redundancy and trying to force into sham dependent contracts. If you’re in Auckland head along and show your support. The engineers are sure going to …
Written By: - Date published: 9:29 am, August 8th, 2009 - 3 comments
If you’re interested in the software that runs this site and many others, there is a wordcamp in Wellington this weekend about the open-source wonder WordPress. WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core …
Written By: - Date published: 3:41 pm, July 29th, 2009 - 25 comments
This has been added to the policy because as Lew points out there appear to be morons in government, blogs, and in journalism who appear to think that by speaking out on a blog about politics implies that you lose all expectation of protections on privacy. I’d suggest that all blogs insert this or something …
Written By: - Date published: 5:43 pm, July 7th, 2009 - 20 comments
After a remark by all-your-base the other day, I’m testing how good Akismet (the WordPress anti-spambot) is. I’ve removed the need for entering a captcha for registered and logged-in users. That is a reasonable compromise for a test as the registration is protected with a captcha. If anything manages to get through it is (based …
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, July 7th, 2009 - Comments Off
Just received this from Drinking Liberally Wellington: We hope you’ve enjoyed our unannounced winter break. We’re back this Thursday, at 5:30 at the Southern Cross on Abel Smith Street. This week our special guest speaker is Mark Eden, from the Wellington Animal Rights Network. He will be speaking on “Sow crates, battery hens and not …
Written By: - Date published: 5:20 pm, July 2nd, 2009 - 31 comments
Our first comment was on our second day, August 17th 2007 “Where will it lead? ” by trythisone on our third post… who never showed up again. Number 100 was on September 15th, 31 days in, John laughing at Jacqui Dean for wanting to ban dihydrogen monoxide – also known as water. Our thousandth came …
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, June 30th, 2009 - Comments Off
It’s pissing down with rain here in Wellington but the pay equity protest is going ahead. Grab your workmates and head down to Parliament at lunch to tell the government to reverse their cuts and start taking pay equity seriously. What: Pay equity protest Where: Parliament When: 12.30 today More info at www.union.org.nz/payequity
Written By: - Date published: 4:59 am, June 30th, 2009 - 33 comments
Ok. The new server is up and running after a few painful days with the system being suspended, and then after moving it to a backup and having a partition run out of space (yesterdays problem). The ostensible reason that Bluehost were suspending my account was because the processing usage on their CPU’s was exceeding …
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