Intermittent errors with blogspot.. might be time to change

For the last couple weeks I've been having some weird problems with blogspot. At first I thought it was because I was uploading images too large, but I've had different problems on things other than images. Mostly formatting, and comments disappearing/reappearing.

I turned on moderating the comments because of spam. At first it worked well, but now it seems to be messing with them (as Kristen noticed too).

I've setup other blogs I've written using wordpress, and have been considering the "move". I have my own hosting for my personal sites, but I'm not sure I'd be able to post so many large images to it. Along with the hiatus, which means I will be posting less stuff about Stargate, and more stuff about *snore* programming! Perhaps I'll wait until the Summer to move the blog.

Working on an exciting side project which has pushed my other side projects to the.. side.. It's not my idea to share (wish I could think up neato stuff like this), but I'll post a link to the beta once it's ready. I am imagining that this will take loads of my free time over the coming weeks, but am looking forward to seeing something working, since Stargate is so quiet!

I've been enjoying reading lots of fan fic, as I imagine it (along with Little McKay's YouTube offerings) will be keeping me sane until Stargate comes back. Current favorite (and awaiting the next chapter!) is called "The Enemy You Know" by Padawan Aneiki. Cool stuff!

Some Comments:
Thanks to everyone to clarify the ownership of the guitar. I was too lazy to go back and look through JM's blog, although I was sure I'd seen it there before. You guys have great memories!
Little McKay: Sadly no free DVD's.. actually I've never gotten any free, but we do get a deep discount a couple months later when we buy them from a special list from Fox. Loui is too impatient, so I think I'll be stopping by the shops on the way home to pick it up for him. Yay on your new script ;) I'll look forward to watching.

Eris: Sadly I have no pics except what's on stargate.mgm.com from BAMSR. I do have some photo's of Torri from the first two episodes, but nothing behind the scenes sadly!

lysambre: Welcome! I just realised that you're right! Martin Gero says it on the video for the super fan contest right?

BFN

The Ark of Truth is out today!

The image I wanted to show in it's complete form.. without my dreadful edit.

Tomorrow is The Ark of Truth day!

My BF Loui asked me over the weekend if I will be able to get a copy of "the Ark of Truth" from work tomorrow. He informed me that if I wasn't able to supply it, he would be force to go and purchase it!

I am pretty sure I won't be able to get one from work tomorrow, so I'll have to give my money to Fox, and buy it retail. If Loui could wait just a couple weeks, I could get it.. oh well! I shouldn't really hassle him, since I've had the opportunity to watch it already.

Other SciFi will have to tide me over the next couple months. I'm not sure how long is left of Torchwood this year? I was thinking it was the end of the season, because people kept dying.
Dr Who is supposed to start up again soon right? I feel like it's been a while since I saw any new episodes.

Sadly I've still found no confirmation here or elsewhere when Season 5 will air. People keep hinting Summer, but I can't get anyone to officially admit it. The ads during "The Last Man" said July right? I wonder why there is no word from SciFi channel on it.

On the guitar and chairs picture from last week, honestly I don't know who's guitar it is. I just assumed it was JF's since it was on his chair. Although Elyse you are probably right, that looks like Jason's aumakua (sp?).

archimedes: I'm so sorry to hear about your accident? I hope everyone is OK!

Little McKay: I have no specific requests.. you already seem to have it down, so I'll watch everything you can offer up. The rap sounds very cool! I doubt you'd get in trouble, since your stuff doesn't use copyrighted materials, and it's so darn original. It's very sad that you aren't able to enter the super fan contest, I think you'd give people who live in America a run for their money. It's mostly legal issues as to why the contests are only open to people here. Every country has different and sometimes complex laws regarding contests. Due to marketing budget limitations, they market only locally. Fox does some things specifically for the UK, not sure if they do anything for other countries through. They do the DVD distribution for MGM.
First thing I noticed about the picture with the chairs and guitar was how much smaller JF's chair is.. wonder why?

Ina: Welcome to my little blog, nice to meet you! I wanted so badly to post that image of JF on Friday, but it was before "The Last Man" so I had to edit out the rest of the photo.

Elyse: So um.. yeah I think I used your poll idea again this week.. Thanks!!

Results of last week's poll:
What do you think of Beckett's return to Atlantis?

• It's Great! - 65% - 11535
• Meh. - 16% - 2852
• Huh? I thought he was dead! - 19% - 3404

Very much in the positive. Thanks for the question idea Elyse!

Our traffic stats for the Stargate site are looking very positive. This last week was our highest traffic ever! The traffic will drop off now until Season 5 starts, but I think it's very good, and hopefully we've been doing the right stuff to attract fans and fans to be alike over the past (almost) year that my team has been working on it.

I read some posts on Gateworld about the Season 4 ratings, and have been much relieved. We held a small "pool" here to guess the rating for Season 4 premiere, and unfortunately I lost, my guess was a lot higher than it ended up. Looks like the back half of the season did much better in the ratings, I hope that bodes well for a possible Season 6.

No images today, blogspot is giving me grief (errors).

BFN

Season 4 finale tonight!

I can't believe season 4 is over already! I feel like it barely started a couple weeks ago. I remember reading in Joe Mallozzi's blog (what feels like recently) about the sand.. Whatever will I do over the hiatus? Go insane? Maybe I'll just have to watch more of Little McKay's video's on YouTube.

Today was spent finishing up the standard footer, not much exciting going on there after yesterday's frustrations. As we are moving CDN's, I've been trying to locate all the sites that link to the video's on the old CDN so we can either sunset them (if we don't have the source, or control of it) or update them with new links. Dealt with some DNS issues.. domains mysteriously switching name servers.

Many thanks to Morjana for once again finding a bug for me to squish. Luckily she noticed right after it went live, so I was able to fix it before too many people saw it. Nothing dramatic just a link missing. Attention to detail is everything! Morjana has it that's for sure.

Apologies for my ham fisted editing.. just wanted to make this image.. OK for today.





BFN

Source the file on the RIGHT server

I literally wasted about 3 hours this afternoon trying to get something to work. I say wasted, because if I'd just uploaded the file I was trying to remotely access to the live server, it would have worked! For some reason either the config on our dev server is different.. or something to do with the firewall.. file security or whatever. NOT fun! I had only a couple minutes left in the day before I needed to take my carpool mate home.. and I thought.. hmm.. what would happen if I put the file I'm trying to access someplace else. Voila. Of course at that point I realised that the 50 different ways I'd tried all afternoon would ALL have worked! Argh.. That's what I love about programming.

Drive to work today took almost two hours. If I'd not had my carpool mate in my car, it would have taken me even longer! One freeway has a carpool lane for part of the way, and I think this morning it saved us at least half an hour. SO ready to move.

Stargate was quiet today (no whooshing) but I realised I'd forgotten to post the results of last week's poll!
What do you think of the casting changes for Season 5?

• Yay! - 26% - 1594
• Boo! - 27% - 1667
• I'll Wait and See. - 47% - 2890

I'd say those results speak for themselves, thanks to Rose for that poll!
This week's poll was by Elyse! I'm not sure what we'll do for the poll during the hiatus, but after reading Joe Mallozzi's blog, I've got my fingers crossed that we won't have to wait until the fall. I don't have any "inside" information on it, as when the next season airs is all up to SciFi.

Some comments:
Kristen: Yes my project is pretty much just that.. a way to try out new technology. If I try and read a book about it, articles, or tutorials I get bored after 5 minutes and never finish it. When I make a "project" out of it, something I think is useful, I can motivate myself to actually complete it! I love NIN.. I was wondering how it was faring with their release, as I'd not been able to get to their site. What they probably had was just a regular server running their site, and no CDN (Content Delivery Network) to handle any spikes in bandwidth. We learned our lessons about bandwidth spikes when the movie Rocky Balboa came out. Luckily we did have a CDN, so it just cost us extra, as opposed to any downtime!

Alipeeps: Yep I love the BTS pics too! I was also wondering why the other's didn't even seem cold? I am not sure when that eps was filmed, but it must have been early on in the filming last year.

Little McKay: Yay! I will be hitting you up for testing once I have something working ;) I forgot that he was barefoot in that scene, that must have hurt.

morjana: There were a bunch of pics similar to that with him setting up that shot. I thought it looked really interesting.

d-odyssey: I noticed that marks on the floor too. We have posters up around our office from famous MGM movies, and there is a picture from Annie Hall, where Diane Keaton is talking to Woody Allen and they are standing on chalk marks. I don't think I'd be able to move to the right spot without looking down!

omglawdork, Mary, Padawan Aneiki, Elyse: I definitely love the pics too! It's just so hard to choose which one to post.

BFN

Simply comparing dates, sftpDrive

It's really very easy, but I always have to look up how to do it. This time I'll write it here so I can come back and find it faster next time. Simply transform valid dates using strtotime, then compare. Voila.. easy huh? If only I had more room in my brain for such simple things!

$today=strtotime($TodaysDate);
$release=strtotime($ReleaseDate);
if ($release < $today) {
//preorder
$button="preorder";
} else {
//regular
$button="order";
}

I was introduced today to a wonderful little app that I've been waiting for someone to write a good version of. This one is called sftpDrive. Quite simply it creates a "map" on this window's machine to an FTP server. Since I am still using Homesite (still haven't found anything as convenient) I just open up the mapped drive of the server I've ftp'd to, make changes, save file. Test on server. No pesky "in between" ftp'ing the file up using a standalone app. I am at this point about 90% sure I'll get them to buy it for me here at work, but 99% sure I'll get it at home!
Such a simple piece of software, but such a time saver! Thanks Matt for linking me that.

Found an image amongst the many that are not approved to go on stargate.mgm.com that I think fans will like. I am hoping if we ask nicely that they will approve it, as it doesn't actually have any people in it! I guess the way the images are approved is that the marketing people choose a few from the many, and send them over to the show runners, who then yes or no them. After that I am pretty sure it goes through legal, to make sure we have rights and what not, then they get sent to us to post on the site. Seems like a big run around, but considering the hot water we could be in if someone didn't like what was posted.. seems worthwhile!

Starting a small project of my own today, (in my own time, not for work) to write some firefox extensions. They seem pretty simple.. will update on progress, and if anyone feels like being a guinea pig later? jk.. don't want to crash your machines! If anyone has written any before, I'd love any hints or tips you can offer!





BFN

Flingers are Fun!

Am sure most have seen now either through Team Stargate email yesterday, or through looking at the stargate.mgm.com site, but the Flinger Giveaway has started!
They were the "prizes" I was working hard to put into envelopes last week. All 100 of them!

Yesterday I wasn't in the office (out sick) but was able to point those that were here in the right direction for setting one of the pages for the promotions. I'm always so happy when things go alright without me (Thanks Steger!!).

Those in Team Stargate probably already know about the third contest that will be appearing on the site later this week. The premise is that the fans submit "super fan" video ads. I only wish I had enough talent to try such a thing. Working on the pages to accept the video's now, and hopefully will be in final testing in the coming days.

We're working on changing the video page, as it was originally added quickly, we didn't get the time to make it the way we liked. The thought is that it will be tabbed, so the first tab will have the most recent 12 video's, and the other tab(s) will either be archive, or all the other categories. I'm just worried that if the other tabs require more clicks, that less people will see them. Still I think it's better than having one massive page to scroll through. I didn't think we'd end up with so many video's! We had to beg and scrape to get content before we launched last year, but now it comes thick and fast during the season.

I finally got a server with PHP 5.1 on it! Yippeee! Now to get all the sites working on it.. and the new version of mgm.com.. Yikes.

Some comments:
Elyse: Right now I don't have a dog.. but my cat ate my flinger. Wonder how DH's fared with Mars?
Everyone: My commute is doing my head in.. not sure why it's affecting me so much right now, even though I've been driving it for over a year and a half. Just this morning I found myself challenging a car to "just go ahead and hit me" until I realised that that would be dreadful..

BFN

The dreadful 80 degree weather + smog.. ick.