Not sure how much of a difference it will make to visitors until we get the upgraded Internet connection, but the new servers are now up and running smoothly. And man, are they ever fast (at least for the backend stuff)! It’s almost ridiculous how much faster they are!

Thanks for your patience with the upgrades 🙂

Hope you enjoy your day (first birthday in Edmonton in a long time), and I hope the exam goes well. See you for dinner!

Okay, this is just insane. We have been trying for three days now to upgrade our servers and Internet connection, and we have come up against problem after problem. It just never ends!

Our first problem, was that moving a hard drive to a different chipset renders it unable to boot. So we finally got the data off the drive, and copied it to another drive that had been freshly installed. Right after we did that, the drive failed. We don’t know why exactly, we have been being very careful with static and the like. So we got that drive replaced, and set it up again. Then we proceeded to setup the second server, and you’ll never believe it, that drive failed too. It was a slow death, as it would sort of work, then it would stop working, until eventually, it stopped outright. At that point, we decided we’d get new hard drives and set them up properly.

We currently have both servers running on a single machine right now, but things are not working correctly still (except my blog basically). Tomorrow morning we are going to pick up a the new hard drives, reinstall everything, copy the data, and pending another disaster, everything will be working.

We’re really sorry for the delay. Hopefully we won’t ever have this problem again (our old servers were on old, hard-to-upgrade hardware). After tomorrow, the only downtime I anticipate is a couple hours for DNS settings to propogate when we move to the new fibre optic connection.

Thanks for your understanding.

Kimmi is talking about Paris Hilton and how she is going to be in Playboy, and Andrew is talking about Paris breaking up with Adam Levine. Well, how about reading her notes, her address book, and looking at her personal photos?

That’s right, her Sidekick has been hacked and posted online. (Warning: Nudity after the click.)

Read: Engadget

At long last I have the shows from Northern Voice posted on BlogosphereRadio.com. You can see the full listing of shows here. Unfortunately, we did not get to record four of the six panels – it just wasn’t possible for us. One thing I learned is that we should have had two machines working, one for recording and one for processing/uploading. That would have allowed us to start posting shows much earlier. Next time, we’ll do better 🙂

The episodes are all a little bit tinny (with the exception of the interviews episode), but it was the best audio we could get from the house feed. Megan says that it gives the “auditorium” feel anyway! If you encounter any problems listening to, downloading, or subscribing to any of the episodes, please let me know. We’re still working on the servers, so if things are a little slow, bear with us.

Lastly, enjoy!

Just got back home, and man, I wish I could go back. I’d take the grass and warm weather over this snow crap any day! Transferring shows…

I have tried a few different Internet connections now, even a wired one at Kinko’s, and I just can’t seem to get any decent speeds. And I have about 500 MB of stuff to upload, so 15 k/s isn’t going to cut it. I am back in Edmonton tonight around 11 PM MST, so I will just copy the files across the network then. That means, no BlogosphereRadio shows will be up until then. Sorry if you’re eagerly awaiting them, but that’s the best I can do.

We’ve also realized that the limitations of our servers and Internet have been stretched, and just can’t do what we need any more. Thus, new server equipment has been purchased this weekend (and partially setup) and new Internet will be coming this week. So by next Sunday, everything should be peachy!

I have all of the recording from yesterday’s Northern Voice conference ready for you to hear, the problem I am having is that the upload from the hotel here is terribly slow. It’s like watching paint dry when I look at the progress bar. Anyway, Tim Bray’s and Robert Scoble’s sessions are up in MP3, the download link for the ZIP file will come a little later.

Megan and I are going to the NV dim sum at 10 AM PST, so I think I’ll try and find an Internet cafe or somewhere that I can plugin for high speed to upload the rest of the stuff. Sorry for the delay – so much for my “almost live” tagline for these shows!

The conference is now over, and what a conference it was! I spent a lot of my day recording, but I also got a chance to talk to some really interesting people. The panel I was on, “Working with Multimedia Content”, went quite well. I didn’t really say much, but that’s okay. Most of the panel focused on Marc Canter and his new project for working with metadata. In any case, I really disagreed with some of the things he was saying, and quite frankly, I thought he was very rude to the audience.

I am currently encoding the files for BlogosphereRadio.com, so unfortunately I don’t think all the shows will be up by 6:30 PST which is what I had been telling people. On the flip side, we spent some more time recording, so we have some good interviews and sound clips from conference attendees in addition to the sessions.

As soon as the shows are up, I’ll post here, and if you subscribe to the BR feeds you’ll of course get the shows right away. Next up for us is the after party at 7:30 PST. More later!

Here you can see our podcasting setup in the main theatre at Northern Voice. Basically we’ve patched into the house feed so we are picking up the microphone from the podium, and they also have a lapel mic that is a bit quieter.

It seems like a regular thing for me to be stealing power! It’s been talked about at the conference here, and it’s kind of funny, people don’t sit at the front of the room unless there is no space left by the power outlets. Definitely a technology conference!

We decided that we’d podcast the Community Blogging session instead of the Introduction to Video Blogging, simply because it was taking place in the main theatre. I am still planning to podcast my panel session at 3:15 PST.