CBC Radio Two: now in streaming MP3

Those of you who have been following the CBC Radio Two revitalization have noticed that, buried amid all the controversy about juggling classical music so that it only appears between 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., CBC launched four web-only streams on Monday: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Songwriters, and Canadian Classical. These are available twenty-four hours a day, just like any other Internet radio station. Continue reading →

ground rules for success in a dynamic, new media environment

In the previous entry, I made the statement that many of us working in new media don’t have a clue about what’s going to be successful and what’s not. I wanted to expand on this topic with a few key points. At first glance, you could interpret these as being pet peeves. My intention, however, is to set some basic ground rules for success even in a space where tools, technologies and strategies change at the drop of a hat. Continue reading →

resolving the conflict between new media broadcasters and corporate IT

I returned late last week from attending Akamai Technologies’ first Global Customer Conference in Boston. Intended to bring together Akamai’s major customers, in order to share knowledge and information about current and future Akamai products, I think I derived more insight out of my conversations with other media & entertainment customers than out of the program material. I’ll explain why. Continue reading →

Red Hat upgrade complete!

Those of you who have been following my journal closely know that I’ve been working on a project at work to migrate our main web and Java cluster from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Well, we did the cut-over tonight and I’m pleased to note that everything pretty much went according to plan. Netcraft will now tell you that CBC.ca is running Apache 2.2.8 on Red Hat. Continue reading →

adventures in configuration management with Puppet

I’ve started investigating higher-order system configuration management tools, in particular, Puppet, in order to help manage CBC‘s web infrastructure. About two years ago, the only player in this space was cfengine, which at the time struck me as quite functional, but also quite arcane. Puppet seems to be much easier to learn. But I’ve come up against a fundamental problem that I’m hoping more experienced Puppet users can help me with. How does one force synchronous updates to Puppet clients? In this entry, I’ll explain my use case, and hopefully get some answers as to whether Puppet is the right tool for the job. Continue reading →

Quicktime caching of Windows Media payloads

A while ago I wrote a post about how the Windows Media video experience is sub-optimal on non-Windows computers — in particular, Macintoshes — and why I think this will trigger a run towards Flash on-demand and eventually Flash live. Here’s a concrete example: over the last six months to a year, and perhaps longer, we’ve been dealing with a steady stream of user complaints that the nightly newscast of CBC’s The National (insert promotional tagline about “Canada’s most trusted news source, hosted by newly-announced Order of Canada member Peter Mansbridge”) is frequently “out of date”. While I haven’t totally nailed down why this might be the case, I do note that most complainants seem to be using Quicktime to play back the stream, with Flip4Mac (ugh) as the translation layer. I believe that with so many moving parts, something is inevitably going to go wrong. Continue reading →

another one bites the dust

Today I sent another SATA hard drive back to Seagate because it failed. You might recall that I have had a bad track record with SATA drives: since purchasing this PC about two years ago, I’d gone through about three Western Digital SATA drives (all replaced under warranty due to failure) until I finally got fed up about six months ago and bought a pair of Seagate Barracuda 250 GB drives. One of them failed after three months, and the other died just this past weekend. Fortunately, my PC is RAID-1 protected (and I have all the data backed up on DLT) – but seriously, why are SATA drives so prone to failure? Continue reading →

fedora 9 upgrade

In previous entries here I have described my unhappiness with the Highpoint series of RAID controllers. In particular I owned the 1740 4-port SATA RAID controller, but dis-satisfaction with the frequency of driver updates finally caused me to dump the 1740 for another controller. (Note that even though Fedora 9 is the current release, Highpoint has still not updated their drivers beyond Fedora 7, which is almost EOL.) Continue reading →

off to Streaming Media East next week

I’m taking a long-awaited vacation next week, in part to attend my friend Kristin’s wedding down in New Jersey, but also for the Streaming Media East conference in Manhattan. My work these days requires a great deal of knowledge about video (and audio) delivery workflows for online media, and I can see many aspects of our operation ramping up in near term. Flash-based players like the Maven Networks front-end are already in use, and I can see live Flash being only six months off. It seems like Flash is suddenly on everyone’s tongue, and at least at CBC, Windows Media, while still our standard, is no longer the market darling that it once was. Continue reading →