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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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….
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.
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.
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
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 […]
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.
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.
Napier (tonight), Gisborne, Rotorua, Hamilton, Whanganui, New Plymouth, Nelson – even one in Auckland!
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…
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.
As I’m sure that many of you are aware, we had an outage commencing at about 2205 NZST last night and finally getting […]
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.
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 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 😈
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.
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.
Looks like people are heading back to work. I’m always surprised at how predictable the end of year pattern is on this site. In fact I can (and do) bet server maintenance on it. This year we moved fully into the cloud but did it offshore. That way we don’t pay excessive variable costs to the Southern Cross cable monopoly to pay for searchbots.
I’m about to start doing some substantial site changes. So don’t get worried if the site disappears for a few minutes at a […]
TPP Out of the Shadows – What they won’t tell us and why we should be worried about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Lori Wallach and Jane Kelsey will deliver presentations and take questions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) at 6.30pm at the Old Government House Lecture Theatre, University of Auckland.
Great to see Drinking Liberally starting up again in New Zealand. And in a new city, Hamilton. There’s nothing to stop people getting Drinking Liberally started up in other cities again. It’s pretty much just a matter of finding a venue, maybe organising a speaker, setting up a Facebook page, and asking your friendly Leftwing hub blog to tell everyone about it.
Next Monday evening in Auckland, Professor Peter Davis will present a seminar asking what does social democracy have to offer in addressing our current discontents (loss of sovereignty, emigration of some of our best and brightest, commodity-dependent standard of living, structural deficit, inability to retain our key assets, solidifying underclass)?
Public Lecture on Sunday 30 September, 1pm-3pm, Auckland University Fisher & Paykel Auditorium, Owen G Glenn Building, University of Auckland Business School.
Our authors do have to live outside of blogging, and because we’re pretty skilled in our various professions we don’t actually have that much time to blog. Which is why this site runs as a coop with limited recognition of the personalities that are so essential to our operation. But it is nice to point out when others recognize our authors in their professions – and I can have a stir at the same time….
When: Tuesday 15 May, 7 – 9pm
Where: Freemans Bay Community Centre, 52 Hepburn St, Freemans Bay, Auckland
Come along to this public meeting to show your support for TVNZ7!
By one standard we have now passed 400 thousand comments. But I’m not a bullshitter with numbers like Bill English or Whaleoil. By my standards, we haven’t quite hit it yet. We will in a couple of weeks. I’m starting to get a bit worried about how we’re going to handle the rapidly increasing rate that people are arguing with each other here…
