Aljo-Log

Archive for August, 2007

It has been months since Pulver Radio closed its streams because it could not pay for the dramatic raise of copy right fees. I am missing Pulver Radio. Pulver Radio gave me hours of listening pleasure on Friday and Sunday Evenings which I won’t get anywhere else. Especially David Marsden with ‘the Spirit of Radio’ was breathtaking to listen to. Also Shadoe Stevens’ ‘Rock the World’ with its new global music was an experience not to be missed. But as it is, these shows are both history and now I feel like I am missing out on something. I tried listening to a Dutch radio web station called ‘KXRadio.nl’ but that even though they play songs which no commercial Dutch station will play, these people don’t want me to listen to them! If radio shows were like oil paintings then ‘the Spirit of Radio’ would be a Rembrandt and ‘Rock the World’ a Van Gogh. Grandeur which KXRadio lacks! The difference is that David Marsden can keep your undivided attention for hours at a time, where KXRadio.nl also plays songs which you really don’t want to hear. Today I listened for the first time to ‘BigL.co.uk’. My first impression was ‘I like this music’, but then they played a new Bon Jovi song, and I really don’t like Bon Jovi. To me Bon Jovi stands for all the missed or denied opportunities in my life. To me Bon Jovi is a fake, even though they have their own sound. I think there must be radio stations on the Internet which play the music I would want to hear, but that finding such web stations is a problem. Commercial radio is changing so much as it is. Hits from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are no longer being played except for a few worn out classics. While there are a lot of very good songs from these decades, but that if a radio station would play oldies they wouldn’t be able to play current hits which make the profits. This is a bad situation, even though it can be explained. Someone please tell me where to listen for Oldies… ‘BigL’ maybe?

Aljo_

Because I no longer appreciated Dutch radio I started to look for alternatives for Dutch radio stations. I found PulverRadio.com – located in New York City (Manhattan’s Lower East Side to be precise) – but they quit. I found Australian radio stations I liked, but that I feel that these Australians don’t want many foreigners to listen to them. Today I was teased away by two Australian radio stations – during their night programming – by either playing songs I didn’t like or talking about issues I didn’t want to think about. I normally love the easy going music and programming on Australian radio. In America large and popular radio stations cut their streams for people outside the USA! I can no longer listen to KIISFM.com or Z100.com if I wanted to. I am sure this is all political, I mean, how would Dutch radio stations feel if many potential listeners abandoned them for foreign stations? While these Dutch radio stations paid a lot of money for their broadcast licences. I think this is the reason why American radio stations are making sure that their streams can no longer be listened to abroad. Of course there is a reason for people like me, who are desperately looking for an alternative for Dutch radio. I don’t like the Dutch presentation, because it is too explicit all the time and I don’t like the music Dutch radio plays because it lacks quality and inspiration. Australian music is so much better than Dutch music, even though Dutch artists are trying and improving, still the Australian music scene is larger because these Australian artists make more enjoyable music.

Aljo_

Last month I moved and here is a picture of my new view.

Aljo_

Well, I didn’t expect this at all, but someone told me to type in the command: REPAIR TABLE phpbb_search_wordlist USE_FRM; in phpmyadmin and guess what my forum is fine again! I can delete messages and add new messages without a problem! Gosh this feels so good!

Aljo_

Okay I investigated some more about how to fix my forum. I established that the reasons for my problems are the indexes of the database. So I checked all 25 database tables with the command CHECK TABLE and fixed the broken tables of the database with the REPAIR TABLE command. Unfortunately the largest table had been broken beyond repair. So I could no longer get the phpbb_search_wordlist table back in working order. Because of this I now can no longer add or delete messages anymore. You can still read my messages. I guess I have two options now: 1) I have to start from scratch after installing phpBB anew or 2) I reinstall the forum and reload the database which I backed up and then manually go about checking all tables again. The reason this broke was because my web hosting provider upgraded from MySQL 4.1 to MySQL 5.0 and that my forum used a datatype which is no longer supported in version 5.0 of MySQL. If I had known this in advance I could have prevented my problem from happening by just issuing a simple one line command before the upgrade. But that is hindsight. This sure gets me frustrated, even though today I did more with SQL than I ever did before. Unfortunately because I had deleted messages from a corrupted database I can now no longer fix it. This is my lesson for today. My forum gets a lot of hits so I am a bit reluctant to remove it from my website. Luckily all messages are still there to be read.

Aljo_

Yesterday my Web Hosting Provider upgraded their MySQL version from 4.1 to 5.0. After that my forum no longer could edit or delete messages. So people can still read my messages but I can no longer do anything to moderate my forum, because the database which stores my messages has a problem with it. While the application I use for this forum is the newest version and according to their site phpBB.com my version should work perfectly with MySQL 5.0. Unfortunately it doesn’t. I checked the phpBB.com site but couldn’t find any references to my problem. I am now writing this posting to be put on my weblog to test it, to find out if my wordpress.org weblog still works okay. I sure hope so. Since about a week I no longer allow visitors of my forum to submit postings, so nobody needs to notice that I can not moderate it anymore at this time. Still this is really inconvenient and annoying! Will keep you informed.

Aljo_

I found this photo on a website of an Australian radio station. The woman in this photo is called Naomi Watts; she is an Australian actress who currently lives in the USA. She is married to another celebrity. Her career consists of some three major movies. The reason I put this particular photo on my weblog is because the girl I am in love with looks similar to this actress. I hope to be with my love soon, it has been a while. Pictures like this one make me feel good.

Aljo_

My webhosting provider featured ASP.NET 2.0 so I figured I could install DotNetNuke  (the Content Management System) with them. Then I learned that DNN needs MS SQL instead of MySQL. Unfortunately my webhosting provider doesn’t support MS SQL. If you want to rent space with a webhosting provider which supports MS SQL it is about three to four times more expensive to rent! So I dropped DNN for the time being and now I am going to read a book about the Joomla CMS, because Joomla uses PHP5 and MySQL which are supported by even the cheapest webhosting providers! Joomla is probably more widely used than DotNetNuke, but that I liked DNN so far as I can tell. Will keep you informed.

Aljo_

01 August 2007

Tasmanian Hospital Announcement

Hello there,

Recently there have been suggestions that Federal Government intervention in traditional areas of state responsibility is a power grab by Canberra.

Let me make it clear, my government only intervenes in those areas where state or territory governments have not fulfilled their obligations and local communities feel let down, or where a co-operative approach having been patiently tried has clearly failed.

We intervened in the Northern Territory to help indigenous people because the Northern Territory Government had not met its responsibilities. This intervention will clearly benefit the Aboriginal community.

The historic $10 billion plan to save the Murray-Darling Basin was conceived because the cooperative approach between the Commonwealth and the Murray-Darling Basin states had failed. The states had repeatedly ignored the water-use caps voluntarily imposed under that co-operative arrangement.

We had tried the co-operative approach for years but it simply hadn’t worked.

The Australian people are not especially concerned about theories of governance when it comes to the delivery of basic services such as health and education.

They want good outcomes and are not particularly fussed about which level of government delivers those outcomes.

Overwhelmingly they want more rather than less Commonwealth involvement especially where a state government has not delivered an adequate service.

In this spirit I will visit Devonport in northern Tasmania today to announce Federal Government funding to keep open a public hospital which services a community of some 70,000 people. This is not something the Commonwealth has normally done in past, but action was needed.

The Tasmanian government has announced plans to downgrade the existing hospital which has left the local community deeply unhappy.

The Commonwealth’s true role in this case is one of direct intervention to help the local community.

Thanks a lot for listening.