Julian C. Dunn

If you follow Slashdot, Digg, etc. you might already have heard of this, but CBC is going to distribute the final episode of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister via BitTorrent immediately following the prime time broadcast of the show this evening. That’s right, a complete, DRM-free XVID AVI file, along with an H.264 version you can download to your iPod.

As a favour to them, I’ll be helping a couple of the folks from TV A&E seed the torrent file this evening. Hopefully the bandwidth demand won’t be too onerous.

For more info, check out the CNGPM blog entry on this topic.

I’ve been on training the past 2 days at an internal CBC course called “CBC Radio 101″ – it’s intended for those people who need to support CBC Radio staff in their daily jobs, so that we can get a better idea of their day-to-day workflow and process. It was a really interesting course and I really would love it if other IT folks were able to attend – seeing in-person how shows are put together gives a new meaning to the words “deadline” or “urgent”. Continue reading…

As most North Americans know, Daylight Saving Time came earlier this year due to the changes introduced by the US Energy Policy Act of 2005. My colleague Gabriel and I have probably cumulatively spent 80-100 hours on patching CBC.ca systems to handle this change, and so far (keep your fingers crossed!) nobody’s noticed a thing.

My personal view of DST, however, is that the whole thing is folly; and furthermore, attempts to justify the DST change as an energy conservation measure are ludicrous. In fact, you can listen to an interview right on CBC Radio’s The Current with Prof. Ryan Kellogg of the University of California at Berkeley, who’s done a study stating exactly that.

Continue reading…

There’s a lot going on at work these days, much of it centred around a cleanup of our legacy infrastructure and fixing some longstanding problems, but I thought I’d take some time to introduce my Interwoven Product Naming Matrix! Simply pick a word from Column A, add another word from Column B, and optionally choose a suffix from Column C, and presto — you have Yet Another Interwoven Product ™. Enjoy!

It’s been a rough 48 hours for those of us at CBC.ca Operations. As you can see from the posted notice, a failure of the primary storage device hosting most of the site’s content has knocked out most of the website. Tod Maffin has posted a reasonably complete explanation on Inside The CBC, and I’m thankful for that. At the time of writing, the main volume containing the site content is still offline and fscking with no known ETA.

Originally I wasn’t going to say anything more about the outage, because Tod’s given an adequate update in his entry, and any speculation about the root cause of the outage (whether technical or managerial), and how soon it might be before we can restore service is just that — speculation. But some of the comments that have been posted on the above entry are just astounding and prompted me to write. While I am happy that many technical geeks are amongst our most enthusiastic audience members, I find the glib attitude of many of them with respect to operating the site to be very disturbing and upsetting. Continue reading…

As a follow-up to my last post, Simon Ditner is going to be giving a talk about speech-to-text integration in Asterisk using Sphinx2 and Sphinx4 at this month’s TAUG meeting. All the meeting details can be found here. You’ll also get to hear a demonstration of Simon’s own use of this engine, which is a hilarious Zork-over-IP implementation in Asterisk.

By the way, you may have noticed that some of my previous posts allude to me returning VoIP equipment to Devlin. That’s because I’ve returned to the Platform Administration team at CBC.ca. This time around, I’ll be working on a number of exciting capital projects (I know, it doesn’t sound exciting when you call them capital projects) that are mostly aimed at fixing the basics with CBC.ca’s infrastructure. I’m not sure I can disclose many details at the moment beyond that, but rest assured that I will be discussing the relevant technical challenges and their solutions at an appropriate time. I hope to be able to informally follow in the footsteps of my colleague Blake’s contributions to the Inside The CBC weblog in his Under The Hood column, but going into far greater technical detail than Blake is able to, for reasons of audience accessibility.

Today I’m going to write about why project managers are almost universally loathed by technical staff. Let me begin with a Dilbert cartoon which illustrates the sentiment:

Sadly, my experience in the technology sector has only reinforced my negative perception of project management. In this essay, I’m going to describe those negative experiences, explain what I think are the pre-requisites for project management to not suck, and then conclude on a bit of a downer by explaining why I don’t think those pre-requisites are likely to be fulfilled any time soon.

Continue reading…

I’m a system administrator again; on 6 December I moved to CBC.ca’s Platform Administration team. Yay!

Now where is my honourary fire extinguisher?

I have a new job; I’ve had it for almost a month now, actually, but since I lost my Internet access with my old job, I haven’t been able to write about it until now.

I’m now an Internetworking Security Specialist with FSC Internet Corp. of Toronto. So far, I’m having a great time. It’s nice to be working for a company where the technical people are valued.

The web designer just purchased a curtain to put over the entrance to the server room.