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Enigma: Gravity of Love

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 pm, July 2nd, 2010 - 4 comments

Enigma have for a long time one of my favorite sounds to listen to while programming from the early 90’s onwards. There have been bug-hunting exercises where Enigma has literally been on my playlist all day. You can just queue all of their albums, knuckle down, and kill those tiresome and frustrating bugs. Since it is going to be a programming weekend, including some site tweaking….

Great Leftie Debate

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 pm, July 1st, 2010 - 15 comments

If you’re at a loose end in or near Palmerston North tomorrow. This looks interesting and will help raise campaigning money for next years election. See some of Labours finest go head to head in a war of words. Featuring Palmerston North’s own MP Iain Lees-Galloway, Jacinda Ardern (Future MP for Auckland Central), Lianne Dalziel […]

A quiet day

Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, June 4th, 2010 - 6 comments

The Internet is a modern wonder. However if you have to run servers on it, often the biggest wonder is that it works at all. There are so many things that can go wrong with the transport of data from one place to another.

One of those glitches happened to us yesterday.

Maintenance during the weekend

Written By: - Date published: 9:32 pm, May 27th, 2010 - 27 comments

During the weekend, amongst the other chores, the system will get an operating system upgrade. I’ll also be doing a general check for filesystem errors and look for stray files accumulating after its first 30 odd days of operation.

In theory, this should only result in a few minutes of outage. However…

Maintenance

Written By: - Date published: 10:08 pm, April 21st, 2010 - 6 comments

The new server seems to be doing the job.

However it will be going down for ten minutes at about midnight while it reboots to install upgrades including a new linux kernel.

Scheduled Maintenance

Written By: - Date published: 3:37 pm, April 16th, 2010 - 9 comments

There will be some scheduled maintenance tommorrow from about 10am for an hour or so. This is to move the site to a new server. I’ll be glad to get out of the 100% CPU that the current server is having.

5000th post

Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, March 26th, 2010 - 25 comments

We’ve now done 5000 posts. Number 4000 was at the end of October, so it took a bit less than 5 months (even with the dropoff during the summer break). The comments are sitting just less than 155k which is less than our long-term average. It is probably more a reflection of the kiwi’s disappearing […]

Search upgraded (yet again)

Written By: - Date published: 12:47 am, March 15th, 2010 - 4 comments

sysop

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.

NZ Fabian Society lectures

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.

Obey the moderator

Written By: - Date published: 4:09 pm, March 4th, 2010 - 6 comments

This is the shortened and lyrical version of the policy.

150k comments and rising…

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 […]

Tsunami warning

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…

Updating the blogroll

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 […]

Removing old site

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.

Maintenance

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 […]

Trivia: the milk bottle mystery

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 […]

Discussion: The usual suspects in 2009

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, […]

Maintenance time

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, January 29th, 2010 - Comments Off on Maintenance time

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.

Lots of good posts in 2009.

Written By: - Date published: 10:26 pm, January 21st, 2010 - 24 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 […]

Updates

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 […]

Minor tweaks

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 […]

New Zealand Political Studies Association Annual Conference

Written By: - Date published: 6:03 pm, November 25th, 2009 - 1 comment

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 […]

Damnit… I missed the 4000th post

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 […]

Planned outage

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 […]

Oops some people got cached…

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 […]

$15 min wage march tonight

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 […]

350 Day of Action – Saturday

Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, October 23rd, 2009 - 8 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, […]

Protests against cuts to sexual abuse cover

Written By: - Date published: 12:33 pm, October 18th, 2009 - Comments Off on Protests against cuts to sexual abuse cover

[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 […]

Bus drivers solidarity picket – Wgtn

Written By: - Date published: 11:54 am, October 7th, 2009 - Comments Off on Bus drivers solidarity picket – Wgtn

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) […]

Outage

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 […]

Telecom solidarity fundraiser

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 […]