Olympic Television on the Internet
Readers of this blog know that I do not have cable television, and here in this fjord (Howe Sound, near Vancouver) I have limited opportunity for over-the-air TV broadcasts. Nor am I interested. Nevertheless, the local and current celebration is Olympic 2010 Mania. I have found that the best coverage of the games is not the local authorized television station, but the official website of the Olympic Consortium of broadcasters.
The site where this is available is different for various countries. Here in Canada it is: http://www.ctvolympics.ca/
In the USA it is: http://www.nbcolympics.com/
What is so special about these sites? I find that I am able to watch the television feeds over the Internet, on my computer, in almost-high definition, and in almost real-time. I don’t understand how this possible.
The local authorized broadcaster of the Olympics is the Canadian Television network: CTV. I can watch that broadcast feed complete with the commentary and features. What is better is that I can see the schedule of each event and choose to watch that instead. Those events do not have any colour commentary (or commentary of any kind) but the page is constantly updated with the current stats about the next contestant and the current times and scores. In other words, I see the same data as any commentator would have. I also hear all of the audio captured at the site; so I hear the PA announcements, the sounds of the audience, and often closeup sounds and voices of the competitors.
These streams, or Internet broadcasts, are available for all of today, as well as everything for the previous day.
I said almost real-time because I’ve found that this data falls behind real-time during an event. If there is an Internet gap, there is a freeze, and then the program picks up without missing anything. I can always go back and watch something again.
I said almost HD because the resolution seems variable. When I first begin to watch it is low resolution, but within about 30 seconds it becomes sharper. The technology seems to involve a Microsoft product called, Silverlight. I understand that Silverlight is supported only on Windows PCs and Intel powered Mac computers. Linux users are advised to install Moonlight 3 preview.
No it is not perfect, but it is pretty good. It shows what we may expect from broadcasters and the Internet. In the days when I watched broadcast TV I was accustomed to commercials. The commercial are all here. The difference is that on the Internet they are such a shock that I found the sponsors and their often-repeated messages highly objectionable. I don’t have a warm glow of gratitude for the official Olympic sponsors… on the contrary. I think they’d be more effective being more clever and subtle. Interruption marketing belongs to print and cable, but it may not be as effective in this new medium.
Changes at UsingIweb | WestHost | WordPress | Twitter
Both Deepak and Robert have other projects that have removed our focus from UsingIweb. We decided to keep the this blog and perhaps, from time to time, add to it. The year has been busy. Technologies have changed, and so has our relationship with the Internet and its web.
In earlier posts I (Robert) was enthusiastic about Dreamhost. As time passed I found it sometimes very slow and occasionally not reliable. Help is available, but not as fast as I might like it. It is not expensive and I maintain it as a place for some experimental domains.
My preferred web host is now WestHost. Usually they have a special for about $10 that includes 50 GB of space and unlimited web sites and emails. In our tests we found that Westhost served content faster than the competition. This was especially true for CMS programs. It seems that all of our sites are using databases now. What really sold us on WestHost was the outstanding service. I’ve never had to wait long for a representative and these people all seem to really know how to recognize and solve problems.
WestHost claimed to offer virtual private servers (VPS) accounts. It is moving to shared hosting, so the VPS feature is no longer promoted. I was concerned that one of the reasons for speed was having a VPS, but the staff assure me that the speed will not suffer with the change. We’ll see. Apparently, if a client wants a real VPS, they offer that service through a partner, VPS.net (VPS.net is interesting and innovative, so it is worth visiting the site).
Speaking of partners, WestHost was purchased by http://www.uk2group.com/ which owns many hosting sites. At first that transfer of ownership was a big concern of mine. Over the years I’ve found great web hosts, only to find that host was bought by a big faceless giant that provided crummy service. The last episode was when Neureal.com was acquired by EMC. Actually, I’ve not found that service at WestHost has suffered. I follow the CEO of UK2 Group on Twitter, and I’m under the impression that these folks are really interested in providing good hosting services.
One piece of advice that I learned from Deepak was to separate my domain registrations from my web hosts. My rule for my registrar is that the registrar must have an office at a real address that is in the same country as me, and within a day’s driving of my home. Also, I’d like to be able to talk to the people who work there. Since I live on Bowen Island, near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, I’ve chosen BareMetal as my registrar. Why do this? Should I have a problem with a web host, I can easily upload my whole web site to a new host and then at BareMetal change the pointers to the new site. My domain, and therefore my business, cannot be held for ransom by a web host where the relationship has gone sour.
My first blog was cranked up in the summer of 2006. Now I’ve helped several people with theirs. WordPress has emerged as the best of the blogging platforms, and the software is sufficiently rich in features that it can now provide the foundation for an excellent web site (that just happens to include a blog).
My final note here is that I am amazed at the extent to which Twitter impacts my day. It has been over a decade since my family has had the cable and therefore broadcast television. We do receive a newspaper — but I never read it. I find that now most of my news arrives as a result of my RSS aggregator plus from the posting of the people I’ve chosen to follow on Twitter. I usually know about breaking stories hours and even days before the people who rely on the traditional media.
update Mysql table from another table.
I recently changed video servers and needed to update several hundred video reference codes that were held in a MySql database. I have two tables, one of which contains the video title and the old embed code, and another table with the video title and the new reference codes. The title of the videos is exactly the same in both tables, so I am able to use the video tile field to link the two tables.
Avoiding Spam & Greylisting
The main email address at one of my web sites receives about 3,000 pieces of spam per day. This has quadrupled in the past year, and most of it in 2008. Managing this, and finding the real email is wasting lots of my time. I am looking for solutions.
This week I am researching an email anti-spam technique that is certainly geeky, and is not for everyone, but may be the solution I am seeking: it is called greylisting. It was tested in 2003 and described in a white paper entitiled, The Next Step in the Spam Control War: Greylisting, by Evan Harris.
I am grateful to Gary Jones of BlueFur.com Web Hosting for suggesting this solution in this thread at the TAZZU Vancouver Business & Technology Community forum.
Technorati Tags: BlueFur.com, spam, greylisting
2008 Internet New Year Resolution - Changing Web Host
Here are some of my Internet plans for 2008. I expect to consolidate my various web sites with a single host - probably Dreamhost. This means moving web sites and domain names as well as a phpBB forum and at least one database. [More in the next pane... ]
Technorati Tags: Axion, emcwebhosting.com, NeoOffice, Neureal, OpenOffice, phpbb, Uniserve
Linux Trials 1 - Ubuntu 7.1
After a very busy couple of weeks I am finally able to start testing various Linux systems. I found a great source for small hard drives so that I could install each system on a different hard drive - Free Geeks Vancouver. This group, part of a chain of volunteer organizations in many different cities, helps to recycle unwanted computers. I’ll blog about them another time. When I explained what I was doing, the manager, Dave, rooted around in a box and gave me a bunch of used hard drives for $5.
The better corporate site - Dreamhost - for example
There are a lot of corporate web sites. Most are designed to be ugly brochures, and most seem to work hard to convince me that I don’t want to do business with that organization. I’ll tell you why — and what I prefer to see — in the next pane…
Technorati Tags: dreamhost, Seth godin, Trojan Room, web site design
NeoOffice - OpenOffice.org for the Macintosh is available.
OpenOffice for the Mac has been available if the user is willing to install X11. It works, but it certainly does not feel Mac-like. In October, NeoOffice was released for the Macintosh, and it included all of the new OpenOffice features.
The folks who have worked on this point out that the program is offered for free, but, “the cost and time spent on NeoOffice are trivial for a large corporation, but they are very large for the two people that operate the NeoOffice project so donations are used to help pay for NeoOffice cash expenses like bandwidth, machines, and webhosting fees that we would have to pay for ourselves.” If you plan to use this, please consider a donation.
In addition to the trinity of office programs: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a draw program, there is a database and a presentation program. The database looks very similar to the one in OpenOffice. and that one looked at least as robust as MS Access. We’ll see.
Technorati Tags: Macintosh, NeoOffice
KDE vs Gnome
The first Linux distribution I was about to download was OpenSUSE, a free Linux distribution offered by the American networking giant Novell, who offer two different versions of Linux - a KDE version or a Gnome version. So today’s effort went into discovering the difference between the two before downloading.
My plan is to download five or six different versions of Linux as I discussed in this post to try out how each works. Once I’ve chosen one, I’ll use it for a month to see if it can become my main computer. Along the way I’ll post my findings for anyone who is interested.
It is not nice to try too fool mother Google
If you have a site that ranks well with Google, perhaps you can use your high ranking and provide links to other sites to increase their ratings.
That’s okay, especially if you think that visitors to your site would appreciate the link. That is more than okay, it helps build the web.
But if that link is so valuable to other webmasters and their wretched sites, perhaps they would pay you to have that link.
That would make mother Google really angry.
Actually, mother Google is really Matt Cutts, and he has spoken… Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank.
Technorati Tags: Google, Matt Gutts