MNN RSS Feed

MNN Commemorates World AIDS Day on December 1st with Special Programming

webadmin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:18:45 -0500

World AIDS Day is recognized around the globe on December 1 and is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007 and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV as of 2007 making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed an estimated 2 million lives in 2007 of which about 270,000 were children.

Hemispheric Collaboration: Internet Bill of Rights

forestmars — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:11:08 -0400

I'm downtown at what's being called an historic event: a real time, intercontinental collaborative construction of an Internet Bill of Rights which is taking place in New York and simultaneously in South America. This collaborative effort to create a consensus of agreement on a set of essential rights for the Internet was done using custom software that allowed the participants, working in small groups, to make suggestions for inclusion in an Internet Bill of Rights, edit each other suggestions, and then 'endorse' any groups contributions by adding their group's icon to any of the suggestions. The collaboration was also faciliated by simultaneous machine translation between English and Spanish.

The Internet is Serious Business

forestmars — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:54:29 -0400

This isn't the first time an alien has visited earth on a fact-finding mission. They've been coming here for hundreds of years, studying our planetary communications systems. The alien is grey with elongated fingers and toes, has an insatiable curiosity, and is the star of the CUP produced film "The Internet is Serious Business" which had it's premiere at Anthology Film Achives tonight.

High Def Expo is Def

forestmars — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:35:35 -0400

I'm at the HD Expo today. It's the first time it's been held in New York (it will also be repeated in LA next month<>) and is happening at the Waterfront, which you seasoned NYers may remember from it's halcyon days as The Tunnel, and scene of more than a few filmings. Whenever a TV show (or film) needed to have a scene in a club, they invariable filmed it in The Tunnel.

Large Hadron Collider is Superduper Fly

forestmars — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:01:49 -0400

The first test beam was shot through the CERN Large Hadron Collider this weekend (and the universe apparently wasn't destroyed, haha.) The accelerator goes live in 30 days, and thanks to robot I'll probably spend most of them dancing to the Large Hadron Collider rap:

FiOS Goes Live Today

forestmars — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:22:52 -0400

Today Verizon officially rolls out FiOS TV here in New York City. They're having a schmancy ceremony at Grand Central which will be webcast (not on MNN.) As you may known, NYC granted Verizon a television franchise in the city back in May which was just confirmed on July 16th by the New York Public Service Commission. As part of the deal, Verizon will pay franchise fees for use of city infrastructure, a portion of which goes to fund MNN, which provides universal access and programming to all Manhattan residents (other burroughs each have their own networks.)

Verizon has also indicated they will quickly be moving into web video: Web video over FiOS

Pleased to Meetcha, Hope You Cached My Name.

forestmars — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:27:05 -0400

At this evening's Unigroup meeting 'll be giving a quick summary of name-space and dns news including ICANN's Paris announcement on gTLDs, the recent hijacking of ICANN's own domain (and what insight this gives us into IANA operations) and of course the current flapdoodle over the critical DNS vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky. Immediately following will be the main presentation on Deploying and Scaling Rails.

Hurrah! It's Network Mapping Day!

forestmars — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:19:14 -0400

Using Intermapper to visualise all the nodes of the network here produces a pretty picture, though logically it doesn't have a *lot* of resemblance to the actual network topology. It's really just mapping nodes. (Though I was surprised to notice it recognises devices by protocol, well, printers anyway.)

The crescent on the upper right are the existing streaming servers in the DMZ, although Intermapper is oddly assigning them staff network IPs as well. Hmm, I should probably look into that. And I will just as soon as Intermapper finishes... mapping our entire class B network. Of which we are using fewer than a dozen addresses. (Picture after the jump…)

Broadband Advisory Committee meeting next Wednesday.

forestmars — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Next Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00am there will be a briefing
from the Mayor's Office and Diamond Consultants for the Broadband
Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration's plans for
bridging the digital divide in New York City.

The Broadband Advisory Committee was established in 2005 with the
passage of Introduction 625-A creating a joint public broadband
commission to advise the Mayor and the City Council of New York on how
the resources of City government can be used to stimulate the private
market so that residents and businesses of New York City have more
options in terms of high-speed Internet access. The goal of the
committee is to educate the general public about broadband and the

Rule 23: Delete anything you don't understand.

forestmars — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:16:19 -0400

First thing this morning our new and most xlnt SA tells me he found the biggest offender on the staff file share-- meaning a single directory that's using up 10% of the available space (which is pathetically small to begin with, but that's another story.) It's a folder in our own department. "Oh that's just some stuff from Jacob" says our support dude, and before I can even take a looksee SA's blown it out.

Because it's not like we really *need anything* from the guy who who designed the whole network infrastructure and current development plan, right?

Thank ye gods for Restropect.

ACM 2008

forestmars — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Just got back from a week in Washington at the Alliance for Community Media conference. Well I got back on Saturday but I pretty much took all of yesterday to recuperate.

The best sessions at the conference were, of course, the Drupal one, and also the last session on Social Media 2.0. (It was nice that social media wasn't looked on as the red headed step child of the conference this year.)

It would have been great however if the conference had had working WiFi so participants could have tweeted the session highlights in real time. That obviously works better than trying to 'summize' after the fact. (btw Twitter just bought summize today, which you probably heard.)

NTS: Please Don't Update Servers 1st Thing Monday Morning

forestmars — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:30:25 -0400

Note to Self: Please don't do server updates first thing Monday morning.

After updating the Domain Controllers to the latest OS X, I noticed web pages were loading painfully slow(ly) most likely due to a dns issue, obv. For some reason the master dns server was turned off during the upgrade from 10.4.10 to 10.4.11 and everything was bouncing over to the slave server. Kind of a strange anomaly, but still not the kind of problem you want competing with your first cup of coffee on Monday morning. BTW if you have servers still running 10.4.10, you may want to upgrade since there are security issues.

Somewhere a phone rings...

forest — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:55:41 -0400

Setting up some new stuff on the site today, and won't bore you with the bloggy details, but poke around, see what you find and send in any inquiries using the contact section.

And keep watching!

~Forest

netmask 000000ff doesn't make sense with host route

forestmars — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:45:24 -0500

Well for all my concerns about fixing it from Boston, reconfiguring the network went surprisingly well, at least it was just a matter of entering the correct values and restarting networking on the various machines. tested everything in time for lunch after which I heard from Jacob, up pretty early apparently, who offered he had 30 free minutes to chat about the changeover, though I'd already taken care of it by then. Still glad I didn't go ahead and fix it remotely from Boston, things always go wrong when you least expect it, yanno.

No Updates This Week.

forestmars — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It's just what every network wants to hear on their first day of a week long conference away. "Um, I kinda bumped the power supply to the firewall." Not really such a bit deal, right, it'll just come back up. Unless you're like me and left last week without saving all my (your) rules in a start up script. (So much for the phone route.) But enough about that. I'll be at Drupalcon all week and likely won't be updating anything here. :-P
tgd: mnn, drupalcon.

Apple’s well kept Xsan secret.

forestmars — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Pretty funny coincidence that not even a week after we decided not to go with an Apple Xsan storage solution --for reasons that are best left unsaid-- Apple made the annoucement they would no longer be making their own raid hardware but would be outsourcing the chassis to Promise. Or rather buying Promise. Or something.

Anyway, best left unsaid doesn't have to mean unsaid, and so the truth was that we caught a different rumour that Google video was using Rourke hw on the backend of their XSan MDC's, because it just out-performed the Apple stuff. Hard to bleeve isn’t it.

Um, are you sure you don’t mean geek?

forestmars — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

"You really are a nerd." he said.

I looked at him quizzically.

"No, I mean you know your stuff." he quickly corrected, catching the look in my eye.

"In a nerdy way?" I asked.

"Yes, right. Exactly."

"Um, are you sure you don’t mean geek?"

It's such an obvious distinction. So it never fails to amaze me when people completely miss it.

test video

jenniferwager — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:29:06 -0500

Pothedz Couch

webadmin — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:38:58 -0400

I have worked at MNN for almost two years and in those two short years I have come across a lot of really great content. Everyone on staff has a set of their own personal favorites shows and I have never really had the time to create my own personal list. Sitting on a Saturday night I flipped on Channel 57 and came across "Pothedz Couch". Actually the schedule shows it as "Wayne's World" with a different producer but since the two are special I'm sure there was a tape problem or a scheduling conflict.

New Webserver...

forestmars — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:40:49 -0400

e326Our former webserver was performing rather sluggishly so we replaced it with this bad boy. An IBM e326 powerhouse!

Dual AMD Opteron 2ghz (dual proc. capable single installed)
2 GB Ram
15K 320UW SCSI Discs... oh yaa fully hot swappable
Dual gigabit Nics

This machine is just kicking butt and ready for all of the upgrades we have coming down the line.

Previously we were running our three websites on a 5 year old server that was...