Category: Tech

Boston RadioBDC

Once again, the landscape of Boston radio is changing and, like the return of Barnes Newberry, it’s found on the Internet. The Boston Globe is going back to what some major city newspapers did way back in the 1920’s, by starting its own station. It’s called RadioBDC, which I’m taking to mean “Radio Boston Dot Com.” The station is online only, and it’s essentially picking up where alternative Rock station WFNX left off, when it was sold to Clear Channel earlier this year.

I’m not the target audience for RadioBDC, but I’m hoping it succeeds. It doesn’t have a TuneIn listing yet, and I don’t have a direct URL for it, so for now I can’t play it on my Logitech Media Server network and the only way I can hear RadioBDC is with the station’s Flash player on a computer, which means I won’t be listening to it a lot. But I’ve already heard something I like a lot — Champagne Supernova, by Oasis. I was never one looking to get high, which apparently was a priority for these guys, but drug references in song lyrics have never phased me. For somebody who had bell bottom pants and a paisley shirt in the seventh grade, this is good stuff.

http://youtu.be/g3C7DECI0jU

Computers are the craziest people

All of you Cisco Unified Computing System fans are going to like this. I have an 8-blade chassis in the lab with two 6120XP fabric interconnects. I was able to access both of them with UCS Manager, then I took a Java update to 1.7 and my troubles began. I launched UCS Manager and got this message:

At first I thought it meant that Java 1.7 wasn’t considered to be a higher revision than 1.6.x, but then I realized it means that only 1.6 will work. So I uninstalled 1.7 and went back to 1.6. There was no Java error message, but the UCS Manager wouldn’t launch. So I tried going to the other 6120XP and it worked. From there I could see both units, but the first one still refused a direct connection. Which raised the question of what had broken? I updated to 1.7 again, tried getting into UCS Manager on the 6120XP that had worked minutes before, and it failed. Downdating to 1.6 left me with no access to UCS Manager.

What was the fix? Deleting the Java cache. Apparently, it can remember error events and replay them. After clearing the Java cache, this was how the Java console looked when the UCS Manager successfully launched on both 6120XP units.

This is one of my painful, and fortunately infrequent, examples of why I don’t blog about work.

Hit me!

According to Quantcast, more people stop by here than go to K.D. Lang’s official site. I suppose I can accept that. I’m also ahead of Wheaton College’s site? Yeah, sure. But rating higher than hotbareteens.com? Uh, no. I don’t see that as being very likely.

Bluehost drops support of Gzip compression

Last week, Bluehost sent this notification:

SERVER PERFORMANCE UPGRADE

Dear DOUGLAS,

We’re pleased to inform you that the server hosting your dograt.com website will be undergoing a major software upgrade, from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6, within the next 48 hours.

This upgrade includes newer software packages (including Python, Perl and gcc), as well as all the security and performance benefits that come along with CentOS 6. In addition to this, the server will be redeployed with a different file system type simultaneously, further increasing performance.

Although a bulk of the upgrades to your server are being done with it online and functional, in order to safely finalize these changes our Administrators will need to temporarily take your server offline in the early morning hours. Barring any extenuating circumstances this outage should only last about 2 hours.

Please note that while we do not anticipate your software having problems post-update, it may be required to re-compile any module(s) you are using to take advantage of the newer included libraries. We suggest reviewing your site afterward to verify that it is functioning as it should.

The case can be made that the upgrade actually reduced performance, because after the update was run I saw that Gzip compression wasn’t working. In the cPanel manager for my Bluehost Pro account the Optimize Website option is gone, and that means something called “mod_deflate” in the Apache Web server is no longer supported. So I wrote to Bluehost and here is their reply:

I’m sorry to inform you but we did away with that icon as it caused problems with other things in the hosting account, this was done fairly recently and wont be coming back in the near future or ever that I am aware of.

First they were pleased to inform me, then they were sorry to inform me. From this I am inferring the real issue is that CPU power is more expensive than Internet bandwidth. The loss of Gzip means that every character of text in this post and the page it’s on is being sent, rather than going across the Internet in a compressed format that uses about one quarter the amount of data, before being unpacked by a browser. If I want Gzip compression, I’ll have to force it in PHP, then see if Bluehost’s dreaded CPU throttling returns for the first time since upgrading to their Pro plan.

Stimulating the economy

Behold! My venerable and beloved Sony 32XBR100 has left the porch and is now being used by my son for his “classic” video game setup. In its place is a Samsung LN40D630, and this one came without a vertical line of red pixels. The LN40D630 has received uniformly positive reviews, with the most comprehensive of them being at this link. The stand came from Target.