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Damn you readers :) Upgrades again

Written By: - Date published: 7:47 pm, February 10th, 2015 - 31 comments

Well ok, after the election I figured that I could shift the site to some slower storage with a whole lot of redundancy in a RAID6 array of slower drives. We’d have a lot fewer readers than our peak for 6 months after post election, right? Nope – wrong. You are making me work…

Poor (and rather pathetic) Bomber

Written By: - Date published: 9:52 pm, December 8th, 2014 - 109 comments

Martyn Bradbury is still ‘leading’ the left from the behind. My focus on this site is how to reduce all the costs. One of those costs over the last year has been complaints about us from inside the NZLP. That is why I decided last month to drop my membership. Bomber snarkily whining up his ego looks like another wasteful cost.

The Standard on Facebook

Written By: - Date published: 5:30 pm, December 1st, 2014 - 25 comments

A number of changes are being considered by the authors of the Standard and the first is a dedicated Facebook page.

Interwebbing

Written By: - Date published: 11:04 pm, November 20th, 2014 - 8 comments

I was just having a look through the connections between this site and others (and contemplating how to increase it). I thought others might also be interested.

On machines and sleepless nights

Written By: - Date published: 3:46 pm, November 16th, 2014 - 5 comments

With Lyn away doing good works, I spent some late nights with beeping and screaming machines (those damn fans on hot machines) in the wee hours of the morning. My apologies for the outages mainly for our overseas readers. But I’m almost through the changes caused by an abrupt shift of the systems just before an election and during my starting a new job back in August.

Outage last night

Written By: - Date published: 8:19 am, November 8th, 2014 - 17 comments

The site had a strange problem with a database solid state drive last night while restarting after doing operating system upgrades. This morning it was completely offline and causing problems with the other drives in the array. Restored to an hourly backup.

Q&A with Andrew Little 3pm Sunday

Written By: - Date published: 8:38 pm, October 10th, 2014 - 39 comments

At 3pm on Sunday, Andrew Little will be on The Standard for discussion with questions from our audience of ardent left-wingers, greens, those who are just interested, and the odd troll with a fenestration obsession.

The Standard’s last two months

Written By: - Date published: 8:46 pm, October 1st, 2014 - 19 comments

I’ve just been digging through the statistics for the last couple of months here at The Standard on Google analytics looking back over the last 7 years. We did pretty well for a crew who are all volunteers doing this in our spare time, a server budget now less than $300 per month and where all of us have a pile of other work to do.

800,000 Comments

Written By: - Date published: 10:45 pm, September 10th, 2014 - 24 comments

Well that time rolled around again today some time. We are now past 800,000 comments. It seems like only yesterday that we were at 700,000. But it turns out that was just over 6 months ago.

Meet The Standard

Written By: - Date published: 4:39 pm, September 7th, 2014 - 30 comments

Some of you will be wondering what the announcement at the top of the screen about an outage tonight is about. I have to power down the system to put in uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to handle possible power outages. After 5 years on server farms, The Standard has moved home

David Cunliffe two-way on Sunday at 4pm

Written By: - Date published: 10:24 am, June 28th, 2014 - 61 comments

David Cunliffe will be putting up a post on Sunday earlier on Sunday. He will be around for some two way interaction at about 4pm-5pm. It will be similar to the previous session last month. However he has put more time in his schedule.

Being media again

Written By: - Date published: 12:15 pm, June 25th, 2014 - 47 comments

I’ll be in Wellington from the 4th to the 7th for the Labour party congress on the 5-6th. I’ll be on a media pass again which will relieve me of the duties that I have usually had to undergo as a delegate, like having to think too much. This will be the first congress I have attended as media. I’m expecting to have a lazy time watching others work. If you’re around Wellington, come and see David Cunliffe’s speech on Sunday. He is promising a big speech about what he and Labour will be taking to the voters this year.

Time to do the authorisation notice

Written By: - Date published: 7:18 pm, June 17th, 2014 - 8 comments

This site frequently has opinions from authors and comments promoting promoting political positions and telling people who they should vote for or not vote for, and why.  I’ve been making the site conformant to the rules about 3rd party promoters. You have a few days to comment on that before I start treating nuisance complaints as being a reason to get banned from commenting. Speak now or hold your peace until after the election.

😈

The Human Cost of Inequality

Written By: - Date published: 2:10 pm, May 18th, 2014 - 131 comments

The Sir Douglas Robb Lectures for 2014 start tomorrow evening in Auckland. These three free lectures are being given by the authors of “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better”, a book much hated by those amongst us who would prefer that societies either didn’t exist or were more unequal and tilted in their favour. Based on many of the trolls here on this topic, it’d appear that most Act supporters and many National supporters appear fall into this category.

Cunliffe interacts on Tuesday evening (rescheduled)

Written By: - Date published: 4:24 pm, May 12th, 2014 - 45 comments

Update: Rescheduled for Tuesday 5:30.
David Cunliffe will taking some time to write a post and engage on comments about it tomorrow evening. The topic will be about David’s “vision for New Zealand and how we get there”. The post may be up earlier, but the earliest that David will be able to respond will be about 5:30pm and then only for a limited period of time. The post’s comments will be fully moderated, so read the rules in this post about what is acceptable.

14,000 posts

Written By: - Date published: 12:46 pm, April 25th, 2014 - 32 comments

We hit 14 thousand posts since the site started this morning. As is usual I’ve been digging through the stats on the site to look for things we need to change. So there are a few graphs looking at what has been going on numerically. It isn’t too bad. We do need some more people posting is about the only thing. They’d needed to replace the usual pre-election year issue of those who looked at the upcoming election year and  said that they really don’t have the time….

How this site’s webservers now work

Written By: - Date published: 4:52 pm, April 18th, 2014 - 8 comments

This site gets rather a lot of comments. Every time a comment is made the page it is on has to be regenerated, which limits the amount of static caching that can be done. So on a dynamic site like this one we require rather a lot of raw processing power to generate dynamically pages that keep changing all of the day. These days we do it in the cloud, buying hours on servers as we require then. It saves us money and allows us to handle the story breaking peaks. Looks like we’re ready for election year.

Union communicators and RSS – please join the 21st century

Written By: - Date published: 2:23 pm, March 11th, 2014 - 27 comments

Just at present I’m particularly interested in adding union sites with RSS feeds to our feeds. But it is somewhat irritating. Many of the sites don’t have a RSS feed. They should have one. Unions are an inherent part of the labour movement that we like to think that we’re helping and a part of.  It’d be nice if they did their bit to help us help them.

 

StopPress and comments

Written By: - Date published: 5:13 pm, February 25th, 2014 - 12 comments

I did a email interview with Damien Venuto of  StopPress (an online advertising industry mag) a few weeks back. It has now been put up online if anyone outside of that industry is interested. I’m in my usual pleasant, widely expansive and egotistical best with my beautific face beaming out at you

13,000 (and a bit) posts

Written By: - Date published: 3:22 pm, October 1st, 2013 - 14 comments

I’ve managed to miss a milestone on this site (again). As you can see, we’ve passed 13,000  published posts over the weekend. That really isn’t bad for a voluntary coop over a 6 year period with no particular publishing schedule beyond “put something up if and when you feel like it”. Looking back, I see […]

Stop the TICS Bill – Meeting

Written By: - Date published: 12:59 pm, September 20th, 2013 - 6 comments

Can Wellington outdo Auckland for the revival of town hall meetings? Come to an urgent Stop the TICS Bill meeting on Monday 23 September, 7pm at Old St Paul’s, Mulgrave St.

The Gosman (hypocrisy) ruling and other policy changes

Written By: - Date published: 9:09 am, September 17th, 2013 - 134 comments

This may be shades of getting over-Apple’d as they mercilessly flay people on iTunes with their gargantuan pile of boilerplate each time they change a line.

However there are a couple of policy changes on this site that people should be aware of.

Inequality lecture series

Written By: - Date published: 5:06 pm, September 12th, 2013 - 10 comments

Napier (tonight), Gisborne, Rotorua, Hamilton, Whanganui, New Plymouth, Nelson – even one in Auckland!

600,000 Comments

Written By: - Date published: 7:28 am, August 7th, 2013 - 77 comments

600,000 comments is getting pretty large. Even more disturbingly we are almost exactly on Eddie’s predictions of getting to a million comments by the August 2015 – in a exponential growth curve. While the numbers of posts per month aren’t changing that much, the numbers of comments per post have risen to average 75 per post.  I have some charts and a bit of personal philosophy on what it all means…

Robert Wade

Written By: - Date published: 9:43 am, July 8th, 2013 - 4 comments

As promoted by the Fabians, Professor Robert Wade is speaking across the country on Inequality and the ills it causes. Tonight in Auckland, Thursday Dunedin, Friday Christchurch and next Tuesday Wellington.

Outage and an irritating lack of support

Written By: - Date published: 9:07 am, April 9th, 2013 - 15 comments

As I’m sure that many of you are aware, we had an outage commencing at about 2205 NZST last night and finally getting fixed at about 0825 this morning. I got notified about 10 minutes into the outage by my various ping systems that the system was down. The main server with the database was just […]

Iain M Banks: Bugger!

Written By: - Date published: 6:34 pm, April 4th, 2013 - 38 comments

Iain Banks has cancer and is expected to only have a few months.  Damn this is bad news.  He is one of only three authors whose books managed to survive my move into ePubs last year and the donation of large quantities of my science fiction paperbacks.

Lecture: Why Aristotle would own a surfboard

Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, March 27th, 2013 - 4 comments

Professor Christoph Schumacher will look at the question “Should we be aiming for continual economic growth within a finite environment?”

Date: Wednesday March 27, 2013
Time: 6.00-7.30pm (Lecture commences at 6.30pm)
Venue: Sir Neil Waters Lecture Theatres, Albany campus, Massey University

Project complete (at least for the moment)

Written By: - Date published: 2:25 pm, February 28th, 2013 - 37 comments

Project code is complete and getting stamped on the hardware.

I have some time for maintenance and writing at last…. So put in your wish lists.

Oh and this is a warning to trolls. I have time to measure you and comment on your obvious lacks and deficiencies again 😈

Tickets to the Laneway Festival

Written By: - Date published: 10:48 am, January 24th, 2013 - 4 comments

I have 3 tickets in my hot hand to give away to the Laneway Festival (the one that we have been advertising for months). It is all day at Silo Park down at the waterfront in Auckland on the Monday the 28th of January.

I’ll hand out tickets for those who request them (e-mail to me) in the usual order – authors, commentators, and readers and then on order of request.

Upcoming talk on Canadian student uprising

Written By: - Date published: 3:44 pm, January 11th, 2013 - 6 comments

This Sunday hip hop artist and political activist Darius Mirshahi will be speaking in Auckland about the political situation in Canada and how the left are organising to resist Neo-Liberalism. Later he will be performing material which has lead to attention from Glen Beck and the Canadian police.