Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Well, it’s over. America has a black president. A very white black president but a black president none the less. And rightfully so too, Obama is the man for the job.

We held somewhat of an election party to watch the results come in last night. With the projector hucked up to project accross our lounge wall and the sound system hucked into it too it was more than big enough to enjoy a life size picture of Christopher Hitchens when he appeared on the BBC’s panel.

Having work I went to grab some sleep not long before 4am and everyone else had dispersed by the time I got up but never the less it was a fun night. And I’m now loaded up with several litres of energy drinks at work so I should be able to make it through the day .

Following the initial meeting last Tuesday, the Pro Life Through Pro Choice campaign finally launched today. The campaign is to promote the idea that pro choice does not mean anti life (whereas those who traditionally describe themselves as pro life generally are anti choice) and that the abortion issue is a serious one which needs to be approached with an open mind.

Yesterday I uploaded my 100th video to YouTube.

This excludes the material uploaded as part of Worfolk Pictures so I don’t think that is too bad going. It is a right random collection though, there are series of videos from anything from tech to celebs all with atheist rants mixed in with them.

…the world ends tomorrow ;).

You’re probably reading this on Facebook or Netvibes.

Therefore it probably has slipped your attention that my homepage has a completely new look. Having managed to fix the site and looking for a new style to give the podcast mini site I decided that it would be better to just come up with a whole new look for everything and use that across the site.

And, for the first time, my blog has a seperate skin which matches the main site as well! Finally that integrated look which I know Kieran has been suggesting for so many years ;). So, give me your feedback, what do you think, does it work in your browser, have you found any problems?

You may notice once you start playing around that the image at the top keeps changing. At the moment there are only 6 that it “randomly” selects out of each time (I put randomly in quotes because most of us know how bad computers are at picking out random numbers, on saying that, humans are no better), two of them are photos - from graduation and Rationalist Week, two of them are collages of loads of different pictures of me and two are of composed of some of my favourite stock photography. As the months pass I’m hoping to add more and more until there is a sizeable library of them.

Having ordered my car on Friday and picking it up on Monday I really should get round to posting some pictures of it. It’s a 1.6 Astra, 2001, 50,000 miles so not the fastest thing in the world but never the less reasonably fancy. The air con actually works in it which is always a nice suprise with used cars.

I’ve messed around with the blog a little. The topic links now use /category/ again rather than /tags/ to differentiate them from the actual tags themselves which I am going to make an effort to use from now on. The tag listings are a little ugly at the moment but hopefully I’ll get round to sorting that out eventually.

I was uploading some videos to Revver today to find that they now review every video manually! Every single video is apparently now moderated by a Revver staff member to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright (among other reasons).

Meanwhile in YouTube’s fight against copyright they had now banned any videos longer than 10 minutes long, no matter what account you have (previous you could sign up for a director’s account which required a few extra contact details to get the limits increased).

An email recently arrived in the inbox of registered users of Pandora from the UK informing them that Pandora will be switching off to UK users on January 15th.

It’s a real shame as Pandora is a fantastic service. For those who haven’t discovered it yet (and I wouldn’t advice trying it now as you’re only going to get into it as they start blocking us), basically you put in your favourite song or artist and it goes away and finds new music that is similar so you can discover new cool stuff. It also takes your feedback on songs so it can improve what it picks out. It’s a customised radio station for you much like Launch Cast on Yahoo Music.

Unfortunately however, after blocking almost everyone else last year, Pandora have finally given up on trying to secure rights to play music in the UK having been unable to agree on a price with the music industry for licencing broadcast rights and so will only be available in the US after next week.

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.