Author: DOuG pRATt

Colbert Report suspended!

Last night, I was surprised to see that The Colbert Report was a repeat, even though The Daily Show was a new installment. They always come as a matched set, so something must be wrong. The Huffington Post says, “Production has halted on “The Colbert Report” for Wednesday and Thursday, according to fans who had tickets for the rest of the week’s tapings.”

Does Colbert have a personal emergency? Has Viacom pulled the plug on the show because of the SuperPAC?

Follow-up: The Wall Street Journal says it’s “because of an emergency in Mr. Colbert’s family, according to people familiar with the show.”

Further follow-up: Colbert’s mother is over 90 years old. Just saying.

While we’re waiting for Stephen’s return, let’s watch the latest battle in the Colbert-Fallon Ice Cream Wars. I just eat this stuff up.

Stephen sends a valentine to Jimmy…

… and delivery is made.

TV at its best

After getting all serious from watching Z, on the Roku I’m enjoying a totally weird episode of Thriller — Boris Karloff, not Michael Jackson — from 1960. Mort Sahl has kidnapped Sue “Miss Landers” Randall (from Leave it to Beaver), to protect her from Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, who wants to kidnap her!

Z lives in my memory

I’m watching Z, from 1969, on TCM.

When I was in the 9th grade I saw Z on a school field trip. We took a yellow bus all the way into downtown Boston, which was a big deal in itself. I remember being completely wrapped up in the film, start to finish. Everything seemed to be so real, and not fake like a Hollywood movie. I wasn’t even aware that I was reading subtitles for over two hours, as I struggled to keep up with the story of political intrigue. The ending left me feeling upset and outraged. Z helped to develop my awareness of the adult world, and political corruption, which was further tested a couple of years later, with the news of the Watergate Hotel break-in by Nixon operatives.

P.S. The movie is over, and it occurs to me that it’s similar to Dragnet, in the way it goes through the investigative process.

Dragnet on the Net

A TV show I enjoyed a lot as a kid in the 60’s was Dragnet. When I was older I learned that Dragnet had not only been on TV in the 50’s, it had first been a radio show. The revived Dragnet returned with its old formula, and supporting cast members, intact. In the intervening years Sgt. Joe Friday had apparently been overlooked for promotion, despite his unbroken string of cracked cases and successful arrests.

In the Fifties, Dragnet dealt with some hard facts of life, such as drug addiction and sex crimes. When Jack Webb returned as Joe Friday ten years later, he used the show to crusade against the growing influence of the youth culture. There was an anti-Summer of Love attitude, and Hippies were depicted at best as misguided and confused kids, or as drug addicts hiding behind the trappings of Eastern religion. Parents were concerned about the rapid pace of change in Sixties, and many were struggling with rebellious teenage children. In 1968 the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and Webb offered a clear, unwavering view of right and wrong. It’s my opinion that the popularity of Dragnet helped to get Richard “Law and Order” Nixon elected in 1968.

Even the growing ranks of comic book collectors, empowered by the Batman TV show, weren’t spared Webb’s critical gaze, as seen in the infamous “Superfan” episode. I saw this when it first aired, and it starts off nicely enough, with a brief history of Hollywood, but towards the end it’s painful for an old fanboy to watch, because I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in what Stanley says.

Getting back to Dragnet in the Fifties, the link at the end of this sentence searches eBay for Dragnet OTR. “OTR” stands for “Old-Time Radio,” and as you can see there are plenty of sellers offering Dragnet radio shows. Anybody who buys one of these collections is wasting their money, because they’re available for free on Archive.org, from a wonderful organization of enthusiasts called the OTRR — the Old Time Radio Reseachers Group.

If you don’t feel like downloading and unzipping the files, you can listen to Dragnet on Tunein.com. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing that for the past few weeks. It’s interesting to compare the radio and TV versions of Dragnet. For example, here’s an episode from 1955 called The Big Deal.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/01/The+Big+Deal.mp3|titles=Dragnet “The Big Deal” 4/19/55]

Zip-a-dee Doo-Dah

This will be a boring post about a technical aspect of blogging, called HTML output compression. I’m going to tag it so that anybody else who is wondering about the same thing I was a few days ago might find it.

There’s a site called Is My Blog Working?. A little while ago I plugged in the Dograt URL and saw this.

A couple of minutes later I refreshed the information and saw this.

The difference between these two views is the loss of Gzip compression. Newer Web browsers support compressed HTML pages. This can greatly reduce the amount of data that’s sent over the Net for a Web page. There’s no point in trying to compress something that’s already compressed, like JPEG images, but anybody who’s ever turned a text file into a ZIP file knows it’s like Wonder® bread — it squeezes down to a fifth or less of its original size.

WordPress is written in a scripting language called PHP. It’s possible to have compression done within PHP, and some WordPress sites do this, but it increases the processor load for the site. Bluehost, which this site runs on, temporarily throttles back individual sites that are using a lot of processor time. Dograt.com currently shares a Web server with nearly 3,000 other sites(!), and enabling compression in PHP would invite a big spike in my site’s throttling, that is otherwise lessened by the use of a WordPress plug-in called Quick Cache, which holds onto pages that have already been viewed, so they don’t have to be created again the next time somebody asks for them.

Other WordPress caching plug-ins can enable compression in PHP, but I don’t use them because the best place for compression to be done is below PHP, in the Web server program. For many blogs, including mine, that Web server is an open-source program called Apache. Enabling PHP compression when Web server compression is already working, and attempting to compress data that’s already been compressed, slows things down and accomplishes nothing, which is why WordPress doesn’t offer PHP compression as a standard feature.

Enabling compression in Apache for a site requires an entry in the site’s Hypertext Access File, .htaccess. This can be done manually, by editing the file, or through the control panel software. In cPanel the compression feature is found under Optimize Website.

So this begs the question, why is compression not always — in fact, it’s rarely — enabled for this site? It’s because Bluehost turns off Apache’s compression feature when the CPU gets too busy, as explained by Bluehost’s founder, Matt Heaton.

http://www.mattheaton.com/?p=228

We then wrote a patch to the Apache web server (This is what serves your websites to your browser) that interfaces with our CPU protection system. This patch checks our CPU usage twice a second and if CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold then we temporarily suspend mod_deflate. When there are unused CPU cycles then it reenables mod_deflate. By implementing it this way we get all the benefits of mod_deflate with none of the detriments of excessive cpu usage causing slowdowns.

Bluehost is vastly faster, more stable, and reliable than iPower, the hosting service I was using until two years ago. Oh, there are occasional blips, like cPanel wasn’t working briefly a couple of weeks ago, and every so often the site has been offline, but for the money I’m paying I’m pleased with Bluehost.