Category: Internet

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“Gone Faded” from Soft is out now

RadioZoom has played music from Soft a few times, and I keep thinking about how I should toss them into regular rotation on my personal playlists every time I hear them. What can I say? I get lazy with adding new music some times.

“Gone Faded” dropped on October 23rd, and I was able to get some of the new music via their mailing list. I’ll be cranking that into an RZ episode soon (I promise), but check out this promo vid they posted on YouTube. If you want another preview of some Soft goodness, go to this link because that’s the track that will be finding its way onto RadioZoom soon, Rebecca approved.

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Troubled Hubble – 14,000 things to be happy about

Rebecca has been singing parts of this song all day, so I figured that I would post it because it’s just that good of a song.

We’re island bound tomorrow morning. If that isn’t enough to be happy about, then the fact that we’ll be flying to Iowa in a week kinda is. Will be the first time in just over two years that I’ll set foot in my home state. I wonder if it will smell the same…

And if you are curious to find out more about Troubled Hubble[wiki], please do so. You won’t be disappointed.

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BitTorrenting in some Finnish league hockey

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The beautiful thing about BitTorrent[wiki] is that it allows us to pretend that we have a DVR. Well, in Vancouver, they are known as PVR, but it’s that digital video box that is so much sweeter than what a VCR ever was or can be.

Anyhow, on one of the many sites that I watch for the latest torrents that I want to grab, something popped up that caught my eye. It said “Finland” and “hockey” somewhere in the title, and there was also a “vs” in it as well. I’ve heard a lot about the Swedish, Finnish, and Swiss leagues that NHL players jump ship to play in, so I thought I would download it to see what it was.

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Sure enough, it was a Finnish league hockey game, and the broadcast was entirely in the native language. HD, widescreen format with sound that had some killer, stereo quality sound. Who ever did this rip, did it with passion, and the broadcast wasn’t half that bad either.

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I didn’t get a chance to watch the whole game because I was going through the collection of stuff that has been accumulating for us to watch prior to recording the latest episode of The Crazy Canucks last night. I actually needed to help free up space on my hard drive, so I parsed through it rather quick. That’s not to say that I wasn’t able to make a few observations, if not get a feel for how the game went.

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First and foremost, the amount of logos on the jerseys of the players should make any NHL fan rejoice that we don’t have to endure such blatant advertising. The arena wasn’t the biggest, but the home team made quite the noise when the home team scored. I think they were the ones in the blue and orange uniforms, but I don’t really know if they were SaiPa[wiki] or Tappara[wiki].

Checking into those Wikis, there are a couple of players on these respective teams from B.C. and Minnesota. Some good ol’ North American hockey kids, dontcha’ know, eh?

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Both of these teams, finding this information out while writing this post, are in the SM-liiga[wiki] in Finland. Interestingly enough, this league is regarded in Europe the same way that the NHL is thought of in North America. Playing at this level is nothing to scoff at, and watching some of the action is evidence of that. International rules or not, these guys can play.

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So Tappara won, and I think I’m pretty confident that they are the guys in those blue and orange uniforms, but now I’m second guessing myself and saying that the home rink was that of the guys in yellow and black. Or was it yellow and blue?

I don’t understand a lick of Finnish, so there is no way I can say for certain as to who was who, but 4-2 was the final score, Tappara was the winner. The guys in orange and blue. At least our numerics cross language boundaries.

Thank you, mysterious Finnish league hockey fan, for taking the time to put this out there for me to discover. Like I said, I’ve only heard about these leagues but never have had the chance to really get any exposure to it. On top of that, the announcers are fun to listen to, even if you can’t understand the language. Granted that it’s no Mexican league futbol match in terms of the quality and entertaining play-by-play, but these folks get just as excited.

I mentioned it in the recent episode of The Crazy Canucks, but the NHL should really do more with the technology of bittorrent. I’m not the first one to promote or come up with the idea, but it just might help grow exposure to the league if you make games available like this as soon as they are complete. Posting games to Google Video three days after they happen is… well… hmm, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, they’re easy to forget about.

Finland, you’ve got some good stuff over there. You make me want to come visit the home of Sami Salo[wiki] and stay for the hockey.

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Ben Folds – landed

Every so often, I head down the YouTube maze of fun and discover things that I never knew existed. This is actually one of two videos for this same song. The other one is cool, but I like this version better.

I’ve been a Ben Folds fan for a long time. The first album from Ben Folds Five is still around in my rotation, but all of them are good in their own right, at least to me. Ben Folds solo stuff is just as good, but I do miss the days of Robert Sledge[wiki] and the fuzz bass. Oh how I love me some fuzz bass.

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Giving a presentation at the Vancouver Drupal Meetup

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Photo credit: uncleweed on Flickr

Last night, I was invited to the monthly Drupal Meetup for October in Gastown. Boris and I have had numerous conversations about various projects that I’ve been working on, and the one that stuck out to him was the site I generated for knox-church.org. I wrote about this project some time ago, and you can read that post here.

The point of having me talk about the site was to talk about the development process of how the site was originally created in WordPress and then ported over into Drupal. As Boris was saying in the meetup, it’s not often that you hear of a site having this done because using Drupal was seen to be easier than WordPress.

Allow me to explain that a little better because WordPress is something I am familiar with and use it for this blog on a regular basis. I’d even say that I love WP. I’ve built five sites using WordPress, so it is a CMS that I am comfortable with. It was that reason that, and this would make it six WP sites that I’ve built, I originally chose to have knox-church.org based in WordPress. On top of that, the plan was to build something that would enable church members the ability to interact with the site, adding and removing content as needed.

The site was based primarily on categories and a few, key plugins. The categories made particular posts appear in certain locations in the site, and not choosing these correctly would cause the post to not show up when and where it was intended. The plugins were subtle manipulations of posts, listing certain posts in an event list as well as an automatic deletion plugin to remove the posts once they expired. Both are very cool tools, but those are two extra fields in the post editor that the submitter had to parse through.

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Photo credit: roland on Flickr

Being contacted about the site after a time of decreased to little activity by church members, they wanted to be retrained on how to add posts to the site. Over time, they forgot the process and were confused by the site after logging into it after an extended period of time away from interacting with it.

It was at this point that I decided, based on things I knew about Drupal, to port the site into the new CMS. There wasn’t a lot of content to contend with, so manual transfer was the path I took. However, I knew that the CCK and Views modules could solve the multi-step process that came from WordPress and, in turn, having to teach that process to users with novice to intermediate understanding of how to interact with a web based CMS.

With the revamped look to the site in Drupal, the Calendar module brought a new level of listing events to the site that wasn’t there previously, but requested. When a user logs into the site now, they are directed to the area of choosing which type of content they wish to create(using the Login Destination module). The only fields they have to worry about are the ones they are presented with, making it a streamlined, simplified process of making sure everything they need is there before they hit the submit button.

Vancouver Drupal Meetup - October 2007 Additionally, step-by-step instructions are at the top of the page to guide them through the process, something much more difficult to do inside of WordPress, and these can be adjusted as need be to better reflect the needs of the users over time. This helps when someone goes for extended periods of time between logging into the site, forgetting how to interact with the editor that is presented in WordPress versus the custom page they are presented with in Drupal. Listing events on the front page, displaying news items, and listing sermons are all things that are coordinated on the back end through the Views module.

When it comes down to it, Drupal was a better route to go for what the church wants and needs. They want to be able to interact with the site and need to have something that can work for them without being overly difficult to use when it comes to their level of understanding. It’s also not as much as the ability for a church to have a website for its current members as it is to have a way of expanding their community and allowing others to find the site to get information about becoming apart of their organization.

I had a lot of fun speaking to everyone about the project and did my best to answer their questions. Not being the Drupal ninja compared to some other folks I know out there, I never felt out of place, and that is a very welcomed feeling. However, I did spike a massive fever when I got home and am still recovering from it today, so let’s hope that isn’t Drupal related.

If you would like to find out more about Drupal user related events going on in Vancouver, check out their page at groups.drupal.org/vancouver or visit groups.drupal.org to find a Drupal community near you.

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Pilot To Gunner – barrio superstarrio

Pilot To Gunner[myspace] has been on the scene since 1998, but they don’t have the numbers in terms of releases to really make that believable. Doesn’t make me like them any less. This is a really good track to run to. They make their way into my running mixes here and there.

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MySpace still sucks

Dear MySpace,

MySpace still sucks. It sucked from when it first started and it continues to suck. Sure, it’s a great social media platform where bands can preview some of their tracks, people can send messages back and forth, and strippers can have direct, albeit virtual, contact with their fans.

MySpace sucks You started in 2003, so why do you still act like it? There is no rhyme or reason to the site. Where ever there is a space to put something, it gets filled. It all falls under a category of some type, but the design concept is… well, what design concept? It’s near gibberish.

You’re not Digg, and no you’re not Facebook, and there is a good chance that you never will be. Those folks still understood what the meaning of design overhaul meant for the sake of their site. It was for the better good of those who interact with the function of the website, and the effort makes those people want to come back for the simple fact that it makes sense.

RadioZoom has a page on your site, and I hate having to interact with it. Yes, it is an amazing way for artists to contact the podcast, but I deplore having to login and do anything with your site. The fact that users make it even more difficult by blinging out their MySpace pages, bands hardly excluded, makes it that much more worse. I know that’s not your fault, but if you did something about that, I would be quite over joyed.

Here’s an idea that I would like to see. As someone who throws music into their podcast, why not make it an easy way for bands to actually share music with those who are deemed good enough to download it, such as podcasters? Right now, it’s all or none for bands to select which songs their would like to have people download. If a band had the option of authorizing podcasts to grab their uploaded selections for play in a podcast episode, imagine the possibilities that could have.

You probably don’t care that I don’t like your site, and there are plenty of people out there that are just fine with it. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you. I’ll still pop in once in a while to check in on things and do my best to figure out who has contacted for what reason because of the sad fact that there is some usefulness out of your service. It doesn’t make using MySpace enjoyable though.

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Launched a new Drupal site: knox-church.org

knox-church.org I’ve built a Drupal site for a church that contacted me some time ago about building them a website. The goal, originally, was to make something that would help Knox Church to not only publicize events at the church and provide information about it, but staff wanted a way to easily interact with the site. This meant updating it and getting some sort of events calendar on the site.

The initial creation of the site was in WordPress. I did a lot to separate the site into categories that would manipulate how the page was displayed to those who surfed into the site. The only problem was the training that took place to bring the staff up to speed on how the site operates. WordPress is intuitive, but the average, intermediate to beginner user might have a difficult time grasping the technology. The various plugins I found and used for listing events were effective, but there was a lot more to be desired from what was available at that time.

Since building the first site, I’ve been doing more and more development with Drupal, and the potential has really hit me in the past few months. I have to give a lot of credit to some conversations that I’ve had with Boris Mann about a couple of projects, including this one, that I’ve been working on. Being a guy on the forefront of Drupal development on a global scale, he has really helped to give me ideas on the possible things I can do. Getting from point A to about point G or P takes a little work some times, but when you reach Z, it’s like a lightning bolt hitting you in the face. In other words, yes, Drupal has elements in it that makes changing the world quite possible.

Well, in this case, it’s going to make it easier for Knox Church staff to interact with the site, not to mention an actual events calendar, which is incredibly cool. There is even iCal integration and a slew of other things that I can do that I don’t know about or how to do, but it’s all possible. It’s just a matter of having the time to sort it out.

What I do know is starting to not only make a lot of sense, but it’s going to streamline interaction for those on the site. As events come up, they can be added from any computer from anywhere and at anytime. As information changes, it can be edited and kept up to date on the website. That goes a long way when you make a typo on the church bulletin that forces everyone to show up at the wrong place and/or the wrong time, not to mention an easy way to post cancellations of events.

There is still a learning process to undertake with the staff. You can build all you want and have lots of cool things, but it’s the content that’s key. This is the next step, and the excitement is starting from those who know about the impending transition to a new content management system.

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Replacing the home network with the Linksys WRT150N

I’ve been making comments here and there about our home network for the past few weeks, and it all came to a head about a week ago. At first, I was quick to blame Shaw about their service and lack thereof. I know for a fact that there was one day where it was their fault that we had no access for nearly a day, but the problems continued after a quick phone call about the problem.

Out with the old, in with the new

For the past few years, I’ve been using an Asante FriendlyNET FR3004 router (circa 2002) and an Apple Airport Express to create a wired and wireless LAN. Not even a year after buying that Asante of an eye sore, it was discontinued, and the firmware updates stopped not long after. The UI for setting up the thing was never my favorite, but it worked. Well, it worked until about a week or so ago, and the Apple Airport Express has always worked well, now a very handy, travel-sizable WiFi device.

During a recent recording of The Crazy Canucks that ended up being a hodge-podge selection of material due to technical problems, our network went into meltdown. Skype wasn’t working, and the entire bandwidth ground to a halt after that. This was prefaced with slow performance in the days leading up. It wasn’t until that I bypassed the router and went straight into the iMac that the Asante was medically discharged from service.

After some research, Rebecca and I settled on getting a new router. Like my father raised me, I didn’t want to get something that would work as much as it would be a suitable replacement for at least the next three years. Looking at the specs for the WRT150N, it had a few key things that I wanted; four 100/1000 Base-T ports on the back, WPA wireless encryption, and 802.11n capabilities that would support Rebecca’s MacBook.

There were some folks recommending other versions of Linksys routers, namely Duane and Gregg, and those were very much appreciated. For the price and the performance that I’m getting now compared to what I had is very noticeable and quite loved though, and it makes me very happy. I used to think that my PowerBook’s performance over wireless was poor due to it’s age, but it was obviously the poor operation of the old router translating traffic to the Apple Airport Express. It’s nearly a new world, and Rebecca has noticed it as well.

So far, I’m really impressed with the Linksys WRT150N. I spent some time setting it up to allow better functionality with certain programs like iChat or Skype, and the wired connection for the iMac has an increase in performance when loading websites or downloading podcasts. Here’s hoping for the long term, but knowing the interesting things I could do with other Linksys models makes me wonder what other, geeky things I could do with it. I’d just have to brave to try.

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WP-Cache plugin to help boost page loading time

I’ve installed the WP-Cache NoSymLink plugin to my site for a little experimentation. The goal of this is to cut down on the amount of time it takes to load the various pages and posts within my site, and this plugin is a tweaked version of the original WP-Cache plugin.

If you have a WordPress site that attracts a lot of traffic, this will help speed up page loading by a few seconds. What it does is takes some of the load off your server in terms of generating pages on the fly. With every, single post that you read on any WordPress site, the server it sits on pulls information from a handful of data sources to present you a web page on your browser.

Instead of dragging down server performance and making you wait for all this information to load from a database, the cache stores this data on a temporary basis to get the page to show up on your browser faster. This is really helpful if you have a site with a lot of traffic or host your WordPress blog on a server with a slow connection to the outside world.

Can’t say that I have the worst server or the number of readers that heeds the need for such a plugin, but I’ve noticed a little bit more speed to the load time on my site.