alphaxion.com
Tech, Gaming and Bile!
vertical slice… the data question.
Oct 6th
It has been roughly 36 episodes of the show now, and a fresh problem that was brewing has come to a head.
Storage.
Initially, when using my old webcam, it wasn’t so much of a problem… but then April came along and I switched to 1080p source and my storage pressures began to mount with every new episode.
You see, depending on how much I fluff my lines and amount of dialogue I spew out, an episode can devour between 10 and 30GB when you add the sources for each item. Despite my network capacity sitting at about 5TB, much of that is devoted to my rather large library of DVD rips and game ISO’s/maps/mods (all of which I own a paid for copy) – you see, I’m too lazy to compress them, and I now rue my penchant for “special editions” 
Thankfully, I was forced to replace the 750GB HDD in my main rig due to bad sectors earlier this year and still had the buggered HDD to replace on warranty. So I raise the RMA and ship it off. Luckily, the store I purchased it from (since it was an OEM HDD) no longer stocked that model and was able to upgrade the 750GB into a 1TB for no extra cost – I really do love the pace of technology at times!
After a little pondering as to where this new drive was going to call home, I settled on plumbing it into my main windows rig – well, it can’t physically fit into my server (already sporting 2.75TB) and my NAS box is out of the question since it requires a pair of drives.
Drive in, formatted, shared and filled with the current archives with little trouble… until the 700GB is swallowed up at some point. Though, with any luck, I’ll have the cash to spend on a better and more long term solution. Think I need to start a Drobo fund >.<
The days nemesis has been vanquished!
Aug 18th
This might seem a bit lame to those who actually know what they’re doing, but I have been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out how to grab and display more than one post in a category using the archive.php file.
I’m using the archive.php file instead of creating a specific category file because I want to keep the layout the same with the least amount of editing whenever I do need to make a change. Copy pasta maybe easy, but it soon gets tiresome and is needless extra hassle.
After some frantic “help!” posts on twitter (thank you @wpbeginner for responding!) and friendfeed plus a little searching of my own, all roads seemed to lead to this page in the wordpress codex.
Specifically, this solution:
<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat; // assign the variable as current category
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’; //concatenate the query
query_posts($query); //run the query
?>
Now, dumping this just before the while (have_posts()) : the_post(); line, ensuring you swap out ($query) with (’showposts=10&cat=’.$cat) will give you what you want – upto 10 posts of the category selected by the user.
Sadly, this will break the displaying of your tags, which simply won’t do! Off to the drawing board again!
My starter for ten was to try creating my own bunch of if statements to alter the query based on whether it was a category or a tag just before my while statement. No good, broke the whole page instead of just a specific functionality. Then a lightbulb flickered inside.
There’s already an if statement determining what to do based on the users actions right at the top… why don’t I just sneak them into there? I’m cutting down on additional if statements and making the code cleaner. So, I bodged together the code and got the following:
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<div class=”item entry”>
<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>
<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
<h2 class=”pagetitle”><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat;
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’;
?>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=10&cat=’.$cat); ?>
<?php /* If this is a tag archive */ } elseif( function_exists(‘is_tag’) ) { if(is_tag()){ ?>
<h2 class=”pagetitle”>Episodes mentioning <?php single_tag_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
$tagvariable=$tag;
$query= ‘tag=’ . $tagvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’;
?>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=10&tag=’.$tag); ?>
Hit refresh and began testing…. it works! No breaking, no spooling out the wrong info!
Check it yourself at http://dev.verticalslice.tv by clicking on “News” on the left and playing around.
Not bad for someone who only knows basic HTML and lacks any knowledge of how wordpress functions internally. Tho, as I said, it’s still prolly lame to those who actually know what they’re doing – but I’m not them, and this was my victory
If you know of a better way of doing this or if this opens the site up to a vulnerability, please let me know in the comments.
The goggles, they do nothing!
Aug 17th
Well, as the dust settles on moving from Leeds to Sheffield, my attention returns to working on Vertical Slice.
Not only did I finally crank out a new episode
But I’ve also been tweaking the new website over at dev.verticalslice.tv, not to mention filling it with all of the episodes produced so far. The plan is to migrate dev into being the new www and sliding the old tumblr based one into being a blog for the podcast.
Of course this means setting up a host for it, which I’ll get round to later on.
I’ve also split off the videos into its own account on youtube, this way I’ll be able to keep vertical slice content on its own and let me continue to upload utter trash without getting in the way.
Then there is the facebook presence.
So far, it had only been a group… A poorly visited group.
So, instead I have set up a fan page and hope to keep that updated and running instead of the languishing group. Of course, I could always do with extra fans – especially when you can secure a decent URL once you hit 100 fans.
So lets see how things are… there’s the website, eventually a blog, facebook fan page, twitter account, itunes listing, youtube account, miro feed.
Anything I’ve missed?
many a movings going on
Jul 15th
Many apologies for no episode of Vertical Slice last week, this was due to my constantly being on a train to Sheffield and chasing round and meeting people in order to secure a new flat there.
That, and the “studio” (read: living room) also looks like this right now:
I do have a spotlight episode that I have been editing on and off as well as plans to record a quick episode outside, provided it stops bloody well raining long enough…. that, and if I can find somewhere that won’t have me drowned out by the traffic!
Date of moving into the new place is the 20th, which means I’m gonna be without the net for a week or so (will… not… cope!!!).
However, once I’m back up and running in the new place (which has better acoustics than my current locations, so it’ll mean better sound!) I should be getting right back to schedule once again.
There have, also, been a few developments behind the scene that I can’t talk about right now… but it will mean a boost to the show if I manage to pull it off.
And finally, I do have plans to move away from using tumblr as the grunt behind verticalslice.tv but development of the new site is very slow as there is only me pratting around with it right now and I have *no idea* what I’m doing in PHP!
If you want to see how things are shaping up just clicky clicky, if you feel that you can help just drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to work with you. You’d also get a copy of the eventual template to use as you wish, as long as you’re not selling it to others.
Hmmm…
Jun 9th
Well, last night I suffered the C:\ on my main rig corrupting, guess that explains why the system had gone a little wobbly before I tried to reboot it.
This means I’m spending the day on my macbook while I have the HDD connected to my server for a little data recovery using Arax Disk Doctor, which has saved my arse a few times now (at a reasonable price too! No, I don’t work for them nor do I get any kickbacks!).
So, everything I was working on needed to migrate to there which means I discovered something… the text editor that comes with OSX sucks balls. Seriously, it totally screwed up the html/php I was working on causing the development site for Vertical Slice that I was playing with to break and not load. So, off I went hunting for a real editor.
I finally discovered a free one (since there are so many simple apps that people are trying to charge $70 and upwards for on OSX, definitely a better ecosystem on windows and linux). The editor I eventually decided upon is called Smultron. Well worth grabbing a copy if you want to edit html/php on your mac without paying stupid prices.
Oh, yeah… I kinda let slip about the next bit of news. I’m working on my own site for Vertical Slice rather than using tumblr to power it. This way I’ll be able to control how things look. Sadly, I don’t have any skills with PHP and SQL so I went on the lookout for an opensource CMS that lends itself to vlogging and came up with nothing.
There’s plenty of them for creating video sharing sites, but nothing specifically for a vlog. So, having had some experience with wordpress and being unimpressed with podpress, I thought I’d get down and dirty with a basic wordpress site.
The result is a totally stripped down interface crying for some tarting up sitting over at dev.verticalslice.tv. I’m trying to learn how to pick out parts of a post and arrange them into the site in the order I want – which is proving to be a difficult task when you lack a brain capable of writing code.
At the end of this endevour, I plan to release the theme for free so that there is a theme out there for a simple vlog site without having to pay a fortune.
Why bother with this when tumblr is doing a good enough job? Well, partly because I’d love to have the freedom to mod the site as I wish and partly because a friend of mine is offering to host it for me since they’re starting up their own business as a GSP (Gaming Service Provider). Basically they’ll have some servers in a datacentre, set them up with game servers and then rent them out. They’re looking to launch the service soon. I’ll post a link when I can remember what he said they were called >.<
While I have been stuck on my macbook today, I have done a couple of things. The first is to throw my hat into the ring for the Rocketboom Talent Search.
I think I’ve made a solid application and could certainly pick up where Joanne left off, though a little nagging voice in the back of my head is telling me “you don’t really stand a chance”. I guess we’ll see, I totally loved my time writing for them and feel I could add so much more than the other applicants, but then I would say that.. wouldn’t I?
The second thing was to finally get my interview with the code monkeys finalised and uploaded. This was my first ever interview and was the first time for Adrian, the guy I interviewed, so we both had nerves, lost our trains of thought and plenty of giggles at the camera (which I had placed in a very poor location).
The important thing for me, at least, is that I have finally conducted one and learned a hell of a lot from the experience. I hope you won’t be too savage when you do watch it – you will watch it, won’t you? 
So, aside from waiting to see how the talent search goes, I’m stuck with the horrors of reinstalling the OS onto my main system and setting it back to how I like it.
That’ll be 4 hours of my life I can’t get back again 
more vertical slice updatery
May 8th
Work on Vertical Slice continues. I have an interview with The CodeMonkeys that is in editing right now.
There is now a domain for the place, sitting on it’s own at www.verticalslice.tv. It’s still powered by tumblr until I can afford hosting of my own and figure out how to power it. In addition to the new domain, I’ve begun uploading non-coolshite branded episodes to a blip.tv account in order to take advantage of their itunes distribution, which now means the show is in the podcast directory – linkie.
This takes the strain off of my home net connection and makes it far simpler to publish the episodes, especially since the RSS feed generating app I was using has decided to randomly no longer output anything when I export to xml :S
In a little extra thing from today, Louis Gray posted something he does in response to people reposting and/or blogging about the items he posts to his sites. It’s a good idea and one that I have also decided to do as well. So, whenever someone blogs about or links to Vertical Slice I’ll pop a link to it in the bookmarks and tag it with “verticalslice”.
Of course, in setting this up it made me realise that one of the reasons why I’m not getting many viewers of the show is because no-one is telling anyone about it! Well, apart from one.. cheers Keith 
This isn’t for lack of asking either, I’ve mentioned it to so many sites I’ve lost count yet the result is always the same – I’m ignored. No-one wants to pay any attention, which makes me wonder why.
The one thought I keep returning to is that the show is crap and not worth anyones time, yet this is incongruous to the general reception it gets from those that see it (unless they’re lying to me in order to protect my feelings). Maybe it’s just I’m an odious person that no-one likes… a certain possibility.
Whatever the reason is, lemmie know. It’ll make things easier for me to either determine whether I should keep doing the show or just give up and do something else.
And if you do like the show – tell people about it! Spreading it to others is the only way I’ll be able to keep making them.
phorm can go phuck off!
Apr 29th
Just to let the visitors of any domain I own and operate know that I have submitted a request to BT that they hold no permission to intercept traffic to or from my sites and should remove my sites from their profiling system.
If you own any websites, I fully recommend you do the same by following this link – you’ll be joining many people including Amazon.com in standing up for our rights.
The message sent to them is included below.
Hi,
I wish to have the following domains and any subdomains within to be excluded from your illegal wiretapping service known as “webwise”.
alphaxion.com
verticalslice.tv
pissheadnerds.comPhorm DO NOT have any permission to intercept or disseminate the information contained on these sites, it is a gross abuse of privacy and of data neither you nor phorm own.
Regards,
Chris Johnson
Please join this stand as well as inform as many people as you can about the sleeze, collusion and abuse perpetrated by BT, Phorm and the UK Government when it comes to the logging of everything you do on the internet.
And for those who think “well, I’m not bothered about them seeing that I visit pets.com every month” you need to wake up, your privacy is one of the most important things in your possession. Just because you see no value in it, doesn’t mean there isn’t any.
It is a cornerstone, a pillar (and any other metaphor) of democracy. With it, a government cannot control its population. Without it, we are naked and open to abuse – just look at the use of employee blacklists for examples of how your privacy can be abused and the absence of it used to deny you access to essential things even when you have done nothing other than voice an opinion.
Just remember that Phorm used to be known as 121media, a known spyware/malware company, and that their technology matches up perfectly to the aims of the telecommunications bill that proposes all internet traffic be monitored.
Now do you understand why the UK Government has been turning a blind eye to the crimes committed by BT and Phorm? Do you realise why, when asked by the people they are supposed to work for (that’d be us), the UK government simply use excuses that do not stand up in a court of law (no bad intent, it’s too complicated to explain to you).
Please, spread the truth about Phorm and educate as many people as possible about why it’s wrong. And hit them in the pocket too by opting your websites out of their abusive system.
Links of interest.
More evolution of the show
Apr 24th
Well, I’ve been playing around with Garageband – side note: now I know where some of the music in my fav podcasts come from! Was flicking thru the sample loops and going “OMG, that’s blahblahblah show!” every so often >.<
Anyway, main reason for this is to solve the problem of there being very little music in my show. Though, I do have a friend of my GF making some 8bit music for me, I thought I’d fill the gap until then and give Garageband a try.
First, a little disclosure: I’m shit with music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m totally buggered when it comes to making it – not a damn clue. Which means whatever I make out of this app will likely be pure dross.
After about a couple of hours I finally end up with a 3min track that I will be using in the “Gadget Show Live” footage episode that I’ll be uploading a little bit later today.
If you want a little sneak peek or if you even want to use it in your own shows, just grab a copy here as you’re free to use this in whatever way you want, just as long as you slip a credit to me and/or a link to this site.
Preview [audio:http://www.alphaxion.com/podcasts/random_score_1.mp3]
some thoughts on Rupert Murdoch’s actions
Nov 18th
Posted by alphaxion in commentary
No comments
One of the biggest stories unfolding right now, concerning the net, is the various websites that comprise the online media empire of possibly the most odious man on Earth – Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Lies News Corps – being walled off amid cries of “if we don’t start charging for online content, news media will die”.
Now, as much as I despise the guy, he does have a point that advertising alone just won’t cut it. It’s an uncomfortable point I’ve tried to address more than a few times and, if we want all this cool stuff to hang around for any length of time, there needs to be a more direct route for making money off of editorial content/media on the net than relying on the mcguffin we know as advertising.
With video and audio media, I certainly see the cable subscription and pay-per-view systems being introduced for the likes of Hulu, with user generated content sites remaining ad driven or cheaper ways of proving show concepts/pilots and of harvesting talent, with the media firms paying some form of agent’s fee to the open video sites for their use. It’ll end up as “same as it ever was” for this industry, hell the video-on-demand service of Channel Five here in the UK is already going down this route. It’s just the way for indie content producers to get into the “big time” could be made easier – and the cost of making that content for the big media firms could have a little downward pressure on it for a change.
However, print media is a trickier thing entirely.
The ease of crafting/delivery compared to audio/video media means, for them to stand a chance of survival; they’ll have to become “bundled services” you get for free with other media subscriptions. Kinda like the way you get free wifi for a year when you sign up to a contract with your iphone on O2.
Though, I’d always leave it open for buying a “single day pass” to the site for content published that day and older info should drop into a “free access” status with ads slapped on them, that way you can still keep residual linked traffic as well as making a little money off of those who still want yesterdays news for as cheap as possible.
Effectively turning a newspapers site into a hybrid model – a walled garden for breaking news, with diminishing costs after that when you drop into the archives.
I figure they’d make more money that way than simply walling it all off until you pony up for the keys. But then, the net would prolly be a nicer place without general access to anything spouted by Mr Murdoch’s insipid mouthpieces.