“demon”, SPRACI’s trusty home for more than a decade, is going into retirement soon.
Despite sometimes struggling with heavy load in recent years, it was hardly ever down and hardly ever even needed a reboot - full cred to the stability of good old FreeBSD 4.1!
.. but its time to move on… and the new server will mean a lot of new possibilities!
… expect to see some big changes on spraci soon!
.. starting with a new more flexible back-end and yes probably a new look too…
(open to suggestions - if there is something you want to see implemented on spraci, NOW is the time to let me know!)
given up on php4 - streaming from files it slow whatever I do in that - now finally joining the “php4 is dead” chorus! ,,,,,, spraci moving servers soon anyway… … until then its going to be perl and c! …
…and it looks like sqlite’s FTS (fulltext search) features might be tha bomb! (yes you do need to edit a file to enable it when you compile it .. but in c that isn’t a problem and the perl DBD::SQLite has it enabled anyway (at least to FTS3 level - and from testing so far it seems to be nice and fast!)…
In reponse to this post
It starts with the simple things… better tools suitable for smaller sites and organisitions.
…(without the install hassles or hefty hosting requirements), and also good authoring tools that are designed for use by the general public to make it really easy to add some of that extra metadata….
… and of course education .for the general public and non-technical manager types…. and teaching the general public some basics like how to make their data a little more machine readable and the advantages of doing so - even right down to simple things like avoiding ambiguous date formats … eg why in the 21st century are most media publicists STILL sending emails with attached pdfs out to websites as press releases?
(or worse - flyer images for events without any text! - I get hundreds of them in my mailbox every day)… surely by now you would think any “professional” publicist would a least have started to make a move towards setting up a data feed, adding some microformats or rdfa to their website, etc-or use some kind of simple machine-readable metadata format in those emails they send out.
regarding the ipad .. “not as easy to program as it is to use” .. tell me about it! ..needing to buy a new mac just to be able to use their sdk and then pay appstore fees just to publish an app is not every developers’ cup of tea! ..
yes corporate culture has got to come out of that 90’s-ish ‘walled garden” way of doing things. (its a pretty sad state of affairs if I have to jailbreak an iphone just to be able to do basic things like back up my contacts easily without the pain of those crippled sync apps, install an open-source app or use a handy script I wrote myself)
“studying to be a mechanical engineer & he’s never seen a spark plug” … lol ..
kind of like a programmer who has never heard of XOR or KISS. 
regarding “rows of toggle switches for input and light bulbs for output”, touchh-screen devices and comparisons with parrots… well under the hood that 21st century ipad is not really that different to that 1950s machine with the toggles and bulbs … it still works on the same basic principles when you look at the electronics just A LOT faster and more compact.
spraci is being moved from mysql to a new faster database system.
A few different alternatives are being tested.
I haven’t made a final decision yet, but it looks likely that it will be a hybrid of a traditional (non-shared) rdms such as sqlite for easy management and a fast compressed k-v-hash file-based system better suited to fast no-hassle use from the current php front-end (fast enough to also eliminate much of the caching that is currently needed).
Some new code will be written in c (some people think I’m crazy but seeing a page load almost instantly is addictive!)
There may be a few temporary outages in some sections while this is happening.
some thoughts to discuss..Events Sites which have listings of public events.A lot of sites people think of as “social media” these days are culturally closer to the model of an email discussion list (as in free-form discussion between people who have “joined a list”) than somewhere people would go to look up “whats on this weekend” and play more of a role for discussion about an event and the sharing of stories, photos, etc during and after the event than they do in letting people know about a future event.To find events outside their known social connections people would go to sites that have listings of public events - events sites, gig guides, etc (some of which have also been based on a user-generated content model for more than a decade)**** “user-generated content” is not new. ****For a historical perspective look at the use of usenet, bulletin boards ans email discussion lists in the 80s and early 90’s - predating the “web” and setting the cultur
this looks like lots of fun .. I remember a few years ago finding some modules on cpan for midi ..
http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/08/31/livecode.html
about time!
Microformats Blog: Facebook Adds hCalendar and hCard Microformats to Millions of Events
I was planning to go out last night but within an hour of leaving the air conditioned office the extreme heat & humidity flattened me and I just ended up in bed with a wet towel and a fan…
might go out..hopefully a cool change will make it ok..and if a thunderstorm comes with it I’d rather be outside to watch the lightshow!
decided to pull out the soldering iron today and have a go at that discman that has been lying around here for ages… It now has pitch control. Higher clock frequency (16.93MHz) than the discmans I had years ago, but the mod still works.
Dorkbot tomorrow (2011-01-13) - http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net/
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Itch-E & Scratch-E. Finally, the comedown with 5000 Fingers of Dr T, back home in the early hours.
Disc B is an all-new selection of remixes produced from the new generation of Clan Analogue’s artists, all of whom remixed their favourite tracks from the collective’s back
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Hear the first vibrations of Clan Analogue’s next era
The set includes a companion DVD. As well as classic filmclips by Deepchild,
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disc includes the new documentary Clan Analogue: Plug In & Switch On and the influential 1995 VHS release Clan Analogue Live at the Goethe Institut.
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Tips for event promoters with websites:
If you are going to publish public events on your own website
make your markup meaningful! … make it clear to both machines and humans what is what… - use this:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
anywhere you publish your events.
… or post your events somewhere that does it for you.
Event listings on spraci.com are marked up in hCalendar (they have been for years), and spraci’s feed aggregator can read hCalendar
For spraci listings you should also specity what city it is in - use "geo" and "hCard" under "location".
where was everyone yesterday? … Sydney was like a ghost town!
I must remember one saturday to go and check this place out!
http://robotsanddinosaurs.org/