NBC Has Decided To Stop Making Great Shows Like ‘Community’

By , 2012-07-29 20:30

The four biggest sitcoms of the last 30 years were all NBC shows, and they were all somewhat broad: Seinfeld, Cheers, The Cosby Show, and Friends. But they were also original for their time: A show about nothing; an after-workplace comedy that dealt with social issues and recurring themes; the first family sitcom to center on an upper class black family; and, of course, Friends, which doesn’t seem novel now because every show is Friends, but a collection of attractive people who did mostly nothing was novel at the time.

via NBC Has Decided To Stop Making Great Shows Like ‘Community’.

Well that’s just wonderful. Let me think of my favourite (currently airing, US-based) comedies right now:

Community, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, How I Met Your Mother.

See a pattern? Excluding HIMYM they’re all “witty”, “sophisticated”, “critically-acclaimed” shows on NBC. Which also happen to have poor Nielsen ratings.

Witty, sophisticated and critically acclaimed.

I was going to ramble on about why Nielsen ratings are dated, but you can just read about that anywhere on the Web.

Hopefully NBC execs will come to their senses and our “sophisticated” comedies will live on. Or perhaps it’s time for a new way to fund and distribute quality entertainment?

Syncing config files to a subversion repository automatically

By , 2012-07-18 11:05

Here’s a script I cooked up for syncing my Web server’s config to a subversion repository.

Before running the script, initialize an svn repo at /root/subversion/serveurs-web.

#!/bin/bash
# Path to the previously created SVN repo
svnpath=/root/subversion/serveurs-web
 
# use rsync to copy config files from /etc to svnpath. Allow delete, but don't touch the .svn folder
rsync -auz --delete --exclude=.svn /etc/lighttpd $svnpath/web1/etc/
rsync -auz --delete --exclude=.svn /etc/php5 $svnpath/web1/etc/
 
#svn status $svnpath
 
# svn auto delete, add and commit script stolen from http://blog.sosedoff.com/2009/01/16/svn-auto-add-and-delete/
echo "processing files to add..."
svn status $svnpath | grep "^?" | sed -r 's/^\?[ ]+//' | xargs -r svn add
echo "processing files to delete..."
svn status $svnpath | grep "^!" | sed -r 's/^\![ ]+//' | xargs -r svn delete
echo "processing commit..."
svn commit $svnpath -m "automatic commit from $HOSTNAME"
 
# done!

Summertiiiime … At work.

By , 2012-07-17 15:43

OK so time to revive my poor neglected blog.

It’s officially summer! Old news, I know, but I have to establish setting for my writing.

Summer means slow days at work, with a parking lot that has considerably more vacancies than usual. It also means we can use the school’s gym at lunch – I played basketball today for the first time since my collar injury and it went pretty well. Good times. From a sysadmin standpoint, slow days are great because there are less people around to complain about things being broken, so we take more liberties and break more stuff. (Usually making sure to fix it fairly quickly anyway though. Usually. )

This week I’m working on archiving e-mails with Symantec Enteprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange. It’s a pretty cool but pretty complex application, and it generally works pretty well. All the same, dealing with Exchange and Outlook and PST files (and a few PICNIC cases…) makes me wish we could use more cloud services. Like Google Apps for education: FREE managed e-mail with oodles of storage. Not to mention the rest of the Apps suite. Or even Microsoft Office 365. Anything but on-prem. This is one reason why I both love and hate working in tech for education.

On the slightly more fun (and not coincidentally, more FOSS) side of things, I just successfully updated our Web server environment to Proxmox 2/Debian 6. Which took a whopping… 2 hours. For 50+ independent sites with MySQL DBs. Do I ever love virtualization and shell scripts. (Sidenote: Firefox’s spell check doesn’t recognize “virtualization” as a word. It’s 2012 guys!)

Anyway, the PST migrator just dinged. Better go check on it.

More summertime stories with less work to come at some point.

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