May is Beatless month

It had been my plan to be at an in-theater screening tonight of the Beatles concert from February 11, 1964 at the Washington Coliseum. Unfortunately, “last minute issues” came up, and the shows were postponed.

MAY 2012 LIMITED ENGAGEMENT OF “THE BEATLES: THE LOST CONCERT” POSTPONED

New York, N.Y., May 8, 2012 — Screenvision announces the postponement of the May 17 and 22 limited engagement of “The Beatles: The Lost Concert.”

The new 92-minute documentary charts the birth and impact of Beatlemania and includes, in its entirety, their first U.S. concert from February 1964 at D.C’s Washington Coliseum.

According to sources at Screenvision, the film’s distributor in the U.S., the postponement is the result of last-minute issues which are being resolved by the documentary’s producers. The distributor hopes the issues will be resolved in short order so the attraction can be rescheduled for an even longer theatrical run in late Summer 2012.

“It’s regrettable that these issues have caused the cancellation of our planned limited engagement” adds Darryl Schaffer, EVP of Exhibitor Relations, Screenvision. “We are looking forward to their resolution so we can bring ‘The Beatles: The Lost Concert’ to even more Beatles fans and theaters in the U.S.”

Anyone who purchased advance tickets can obtain a refund through Fandango, MovieTickets.com or their local exhibitor.

For updated information on the film and future screenings, please visit www.lostbeatlesconcert.com

Beatroute on the router

Here’s a super-duper instrumental I heard today on BBC Radio 2 that I meant to post when Paul O’Grady played it weeks ago. It’s Jools Holland’s Beatroute. He really captures the 60’s theme song sound.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/05/Beatroute.mp3|titles=Jools Holland – Beatroute]

Holland was in the British band Squeeze, later becoming a big band leader like his contemporary Brian Setzer did after the Stray Cats.

While I was away

These are a couple of NPR reports that caught my ear while I wasn’t blogging. Paul Krugman is always worth hearing, which is more than I can say for a lot of economists.

[audio:http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2012/04/20120427_atc_15.mp3|titles=NPR: Paul Krugman]

Operation Tiger was a practice run for D-Day, with a disastrous outcome.

[audio:http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2012/04/20120428_atc_05.mp3|titles=NPR: Operation Tiger]

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.