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Wordcamp

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 […]

Change to policy – Privacy Consent

Written By: - Date published: 3:41 pm, July 29th, 2009 - 26 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 […]

A little test

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 […]

Drinking Liberally Wgtn

Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, July 7th, 2009 - 1 comment

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 […]

100,000th comment

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 […]

Pay equity protest TODAY

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, June 30th, 2009 - Comments Off on Pay equity protest TODAY

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

Bluehost have been a pain, but it is all over now.

Written By: - Date published: 4:59 am, June 30th, 2009 - 34 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 […]

Roger Award nominations open

Written By: - Date published: 4:30 pm, June 25th, 2009 - 27 comments

Nominations are now open for the 2009 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which is organised the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa and GATT Watchdog. You can download the nomination form (in either Word or PDF) here. The criteria for judging are by assessing the transnational (a corporation which […]

Server move

Written By: - Date published: 9:23 am, June 24th, 2009 - 19 comments

The hosting company has moved the site to a new server last night at about 10pm. That is nice, however they didn’t bother to inform us that it was happening. Of course it was 0400 their time. I noticed it because I was working on a few bugs like the archive page at the time. […]

Pigs, kiwis… and a king!

Written By: - Date published: 12:23 am, June 22nd, 2009 - 6 comments

From SAFE: Join Mike King, one of New Zealand’s leading comedians and pig campaigners, launch an exciting new pig-friendly initiative to help end pig suffering in New Zealand. Mike King has become the country’s most notable ambassador against pig crates. Hear how he went from the ‘King of Pork’ to a champion for pigs. Hosted […]

Server Glitch

Written By: - Date published: 12:40 pm, June 19th, 2009 - 22 comments

I’m unsure exactly what the server glitch was earlier today. The hosting company had a problem with our database going ballistic, so they shut it down and suspended the account until fixed. By the look of it, I was told about 5 minutes later and a few minutes after that received an e-mail from the […]

3000th Post

Written By: - Date published: 5:41 pm, June 8th, 2009 - 17 comments

Well it is that time again. We just rolled over the 3000th post on the site. Number 2000 was in November last year, so it took 7 months – not bad considering that it took 6 months coming up to an election last time. The comments are sitting at 95,000. So we have done about […]

Join the Super City hikoi

Written By: - Date published: 12:55 pm, May 20th, 2009 - 13 comments

IHI Aotearoa has put out the call for Aucklanders to join their hikoi against the Government’s undemocratic Super City proposal on Monday, May 25th: “We want the Crown to honour its exisiting agreements with Tangata Whenua. To create better and more diverse representation in local government. To protect mana whenua rights. To protect the land, […]

Outage

Written By: - Date published: 5:09 pm, May 16th, 2009 - 2 comments

There was an annoying outage in the site earlier for a few hours. The hosting site was investigating a performance issue on the server unrelated to The Standard, and took the Apache server offline for script generated HTML. Thanks to all those who txt’ed, e-mailed, and skype’d to let me know of the problem. I […]

Clean Start rally – Thursday

Written By: - Date published: 3:53 pm, May 11th, 2009 - 8 comments

If you’re in Auckland on Thursday pop along to this in your lunch hour and help support low-paid cleaners: Hat tip: The Hand Mirror.

International Workers’ Day

Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, May 1st, 2009 - Comments Off on International Workers’ Day

If you’re in Auckland tonight get along for the annual May Day march up Queen Street. Poster below. More events, including for other centres, are listed here.

Meeting tonight on Super City

Written By: - Date published: 12:27 pm, April 28th, 2009 - Comments Off on Meeting tonight on Super City

From Just Left: Tonight – Freemans Bay Community Centre – the Western Bays Community Board is holding a meeting from 6.30pm to discuss the Govt’s super-city proposal. Come along. It is nice to see that some parts of the Council do want to hear what residents think, rather than other parts who are buying into […]

Reminder: Drinking Liberally Wgtn

Written By: - Date published: 2:02 pm, April 22nd, 2009 - Comments Off on Reminder: Drinking Liberally Wgtn

Drinking Liberally with Sue Bradford Where: Southern Cross Bar, Abel Smtih St, Wellington When: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 from 5:30pm. That’s tomorrow. Green MP Sue Bradford will be at Drinking Liberally – 6pm tomorrow – Southern Cross Bar – leading a discussion on “the state of the left and our prospective response to the current […]

The server has moved (finally).

Written By: - Date published: 3:16 am, April 3rd, 2009 - 20 comments

The Standard has moved the server to an off-shore site. There are many reasons for this. I can get equivalent or better service offshore for about a tenth of the local price. To be precise, I paid for a year of hosting on a better system, it cost slightly more than I was paying for […]

Have your say

Written By: - Date published: 1:15 pm, March 31st, 2009 - 4 comments

Professor Paul Callaghan from Victoria University introduces the ‘Think Tech’ site via video. Panelists will look at what sorts of new technologies, in ICTs, nano-technologies, or bio-technologies, are likely to emerge in the future, and the effects these could have on our society and on our education systems. Are we prepared for this future? Are […]

Democracy and the BOFH, Jonkey, and S92A preparations

Written By: - Date published: 5:59 pm, March 4th, 2009 - 53 comments

Reply is a feature that accidentally got turned on last week when I had a adware/malware outbreak through a security hole (those buggers are smart and fast). I did complete reinstall with updated software. Somewhere during the upgrade, the reply feature was turned on. Now I’ve been occupied by moving house for the first time […]

Maintenance and upgrades

Written By: - Date published: 4:06 pm, February 17th, 2009 - 25 comments

The latest load of bill-paying work has finished (and the site is paid up until June). I’m at a relatively loose end for a few weeks. There are a number of postponed tasks that I’ll catch up on, but there should be a lot of time for the site. Tonight there will be some work […]

Israel – a failed democracy

Written By: - Date published: 8:30 am, January 9th, 2009 - 86 comments

The following quoted text is a e-mail response by Mike Treen from Global Peace and Justice Auckland to someone who was complaining about the campaign to boycott an Israeli tennis player. Hopefully Mike won’t get too upset with me for giving this a wider airing. It appeared in the GPJA NEWSLETTER #269, January 8, 2009 […]

Caching Fixes

Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, December 10th, 2008 - 15 comments

There has been a on-going issue with some readers not getting updates through in a timely fashion in the sidebars when posts and comments are updated. A similar issue has shown with people using the same proxy server winding up sharing their cookies. I’ve checked the back end caching throughly so I’m confident that it […]

Playing with rankings

Written By: - Date published: 2:32 am, December 8th, 2008 - 10 comments

Since the 16th of November, I’ve been running an experiment with the Alexa ranking system to look at the site sensitivity in rankings from what is hopefully a single new person using it. This is one of the factors used by Tumeke and Halfdone‘s rankings. So I was interested in how much it would affect […]

Another upgrade

Written By: - Date published: 1:15 am, November 27th, 2008 - 7 comments

Another upgrade complete. As per usual let me know if any problems (that I didn’t find in testing) show up. Please let me know here. If I don’t know about them then I can’t fix them. The next upgrade will happen on the weekend. This is a new module designed to make bans more effective […]

More optimization

Written By: - Date published: 1:47 pm, November 16th, 2008 - 14 comments

I’ve just put another round of optimizations into the system. In this case caching the p-code generated by php into shared memory This should usually result in faster page display where content is changing rapidly. Posts with fast growing comments should get the major benefit from this. This should allow the site to run on […]

Peak traffic

Written By: - Date published: 9:31 pm, November 10th, 2008 - 16 comments

Some comments on Sunday about this site performing well induced me to have a look at the traffic over the last week. I was extremely surprised at how much load the system can now take without stalling. From the WordPress blog stats, It turns out that the traffic for the week was 34.6% higher in […]

Maintenance

Written By: - Date published: 12:13 pm, October 16th, 2008 - 9 comments

There will be some scheduled maintenance at the hosting company tonight between 10pm and 6am. During that period the site may be offline for some short periods. So if you cannot get the site for a period, then just try again a little time later. Yet another record breaking day at The Standard yesterday. We […]

Upgrades – Grumpy post area

Written By: - Date published: 5:48 pm, October 11th, 2008 - 77 comments

I’ve brought the site up to date. All the various hacks that I put in this years have now been removed as the software and plugins have now been upgraded. The main area of difference is in the re-edit, which is no longer in-line. I’m still tweaking that in places for look and feel. I’ve […]

We’re popular – but with the wrong people

Written By: - Date published: 2:25 pm, October 5th, 2008 - 10 comments

After a lot of work both by a few e-mails from people here and by the good services of some people on nz.comp (google seems to be a little behind on the messages) I finally found the link to the malware site that was attached itself to the site footer. The material that it was […]