eBlah! has had a long history on eBroadcast.com.au with lots of great friends meeting and conversations had along the way.
However like a lot of things in life, it is time for eBlah to move on.
We've listened to a lot of feedback from site users and drawn inspiration from the way many successful discussion boards are now operating in Web 2.0 land. The result is a new platform that will be making an appearance soon.
Over the coming weeks, eBroadcast will be launching a beta discussion site linked directly to the Australian TV and Movie Guides on eBroadcast.com.au, with a specific focus on TV and entertainment related matters.
We will not be shutting down the eBlah! forums immediately, but over time they will be phased out. We do not have an official end date as yet, but it will happen.
Many of you will be disappointed that eBlah! will not be here forever. However, we hope that once the new boards are launched, we hope to have a more lively and busy site that will take advantage of new technology since the eBlah software was written.
Of course, you'll be the first to know when this happens - we'll email each and every one of you.
We hope you understand this need for change. Please feel free to provide your feedback - happy, angry, indifferent or otherwise!
...Over the coming weeks, eBroadcast will be launching a beta discussion site linked directly to the Australian TV and Movie Guides on eBroadcast.com.au, with a specific focus on TV and entertainment related matters...
Have you listened to us, it doesn't seem like it. I need to go through all my 1000's of PMs for ones I want to keep, and any EVSC stuff I want to keep.
eBlah! has had a long history on eBroadcast.com.au with lots of great friends meeting and conversations had along the way.
However like a lot of things in life, it is time for eBlah to move on.
We've listened to a lot of feedback from site users and drawn inspiration from the way many successful discussion boards are now operating in Web 2.0 land. The result is a new platform that will be making an appearance soon.
Over the coming weeks, eBroadcast will be launching a beta discussion site linked directly to the Australian TV and Movie Guides on eBroadcast.com.au, with a specific focus on TV and entertainment related matters.
We will not be shutting down the eBlah! forums immediately, but over time they will be phased out. We do not have an official end date as yet, but it will happen.
Many of you will be disappointed that eBlah! will not be here forever. However, we hope that once the new boards are launched, we hope to have a more lively and busy site that will take advantage of new technology since the eBlah software was written.
Of course, you'll be the first to know when this happens - we'll email each and every one of you.
We hope you understand this need for change. Please feel free to provide your feedback - happy, angry, indifferent or otherwise!
Great news Glen, I look forward to seeing what you come up with...............
This was a serious question by the way. It would be a great app if it had an additional interface with an easier to visulize view of what is on various channels over a period of a few hours, like the current interface but with just the channel names and program names with a grid for each channel and timeslots. 6 hours of timeslots could be covered in 2 or 3 swipeable screens and all the channels in 3 or 4 going the opposite direction, then clicking on one could bring up the current one program per page view for the particular show clicked on. It would only have to be an additional and optional interface selected for example how you switch between the radar and forecast in the OzWeather app. As it is right now, the OzTV app is completely useless in comparison to just using Safari to look at the TV guide but it has potential to be a really good product. To be frank, I can't recommend it in its current form and its no wonder that it went up in rank when ebroadcast was tweeting it and everyone bought it to check it out, but has fallen back down to #26 yesterday (so quickly). OzWeather has been around for I think at least a year and its still in the top 100. Excellent idea, but just a little incomplete. The only project page I can find for it is the ebroadcast one so I don't know where else to add a feature request.
For those wanting to save the EVSC threads, I wonder if opening the whole damn thread in one page and saving them as pdf files would suffice? I'm not sure it would make clickable links or not for the videos or if the browser would crash from all the flash video or if Chrome or Safari might only open one instance of flash for the entire thing. I think I'll try out of curiosity... but then just to be mean I'm not going to come back and say how it went: If my browser crashes or my system comes to a near freeze then so should everyone elses lol
Last time the eblah forum was taken down, Dara, it was just locked but still browsable for quite a long time. Maybe Glen can lock down the threads and signups but still allow logins and make everything else read only if you ask him but even if it was possible (eblah runs on windows I think, could be wrong, so SOOO many things are a huge pain) and he didn't mind then it would just give you extra time to do the work. I have to admit I sort of laughed at the thought of wanting to save messages. I doubt you'll want them down the road the way you think you will, except maybe some of my messages because they're pretty damn awesome each and every time I type. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that you had a folder in your message center called "Dean" or maybe an alias for Dean like "Awesome" or "Lovely". I see this need to keep stuff though, like how my wife saves every card she ever gets... what's she going to do with them? Pull them out in 20 years and be frustrated that she only remembers 1/50th of them? I wonder if she has cards from when she was a kid....
I should mention, and only because its of zero relevance, that for the past hour and a half I keep thinking "OH! I need to make my wife a sandwich for when she wakes up and goes to work tomorrow, but I keep getting distracted and writing this made me forget again... I'd just remembered. Since I am awake, don't feel like watching a movie, TV sucks at this hour, and I don't feel like learning anything new, like for example I'd like to have my Linux box open the TV tuner and transcode video on the fly and send it to my iphone, but I haven't looked into this. It isn't as easy on the iphone as it is on any other normal device, so while I want this because I had it on windows via an app that did it, I wanted to try this as a project but as it turns out Apple is loosening up and will allow Flash for one thing, which I actually agreed with the power management issues of in the previous decision so I don't care, but more importantly they've allowed a port of VLC on the iPad and an iPhone port is expected and I learned this literally the day after I replaced XP with Linux on the said computer, so by the time I worked this out I'm sure VLC will have the iPhone port in the app store (for free) and I'll just use that along with an ssh client. I never really use TV on my iPhone, but since I had it and now I dont, I need to have it again. This is the real deal VLC too, not the jailbroken version that someone managed to compile and get running just okay considering there was no other alternative other than the Mplayer port also in the jailbroken store. Right... so what was I saying? .... good Lord I have no idea even after reading the paragraph... oh yeah I remember now. I was going to say that since there's really nothing to do at 4 in the morning unless you feel like learning something, which as I was giving a recent example of, I don't, then there's really nothing else to do, so as a result of that really long posts that aren't entirely related to the topic sometimes become .... what's the word.... well it passes the time without boredom. As I said though, I need to make a sandwich before I forget. Oh yeah, and try to print out a 600 page long pdf file with possibly 300 instances of flash running. First the sandwich, after that the experiment in how well Mac handles things that might be too much for it and to be honest I'm actually a little excited about trying to freeze the computer and enough so that I actually wish I had less RAM for it.
Despite being reluctant to share my experience with attempting the pdf file, assuming the server can load everything as its slow sometimes, I will be coming back and letting everyone know how the sandwich went. There's various types of sandwiches I can make and a variety of things to put on it additionally. Also, my wife is really picky and needs more variety in her food than anyone I've ever met. Yesterday's sandwich wasn't that much of a success apparently so I'm hoping to do better today.
I think the sandwich is going to go pretty well. It turned out that I didn't have all the lunch meats I thought I did and I went with tuna. She hasn't had tuna in probably 3 weeks and it was a good quality and spongy bread that she also hasn't had in a while. I'm optimistic. Also, I've bought more sandwich meats to use at later dates. Good to know for those reading and I'm, to be honest, really relieved that I got it off my chest. It makes me wonder how much I'll be getting away with this sort of post quality when the community moves into ... whatever other community we'll presumably have, for example if I write 1500 words on how I think Cote de Pablo is hot as an Israeli, not hot as a Latin American, how I like her character on the show but presume that she could be up herself with fame (oh and don't get me started on Oprah recently and not the Oz trip either but something else), and how I like that she hasn't run out and gotten breast implants but dislike that I even noticed only because the marketing is to put her in t-shirts that really draw them out sometimes... and then went on to compare that to the rise of "deviant" behavior as a norm in the Roman empire shortly before its ... how would you describe the fall of the Roman empire? Did it fall or did it just sort of sizzle off a bit first? How am I supposed to know? I'm American and although I went to private school for part of my education I wasn't paying attention because I hate history. Anyway, it isn't mandatory for me to know that and graduate. I feel the HSC is cruel. In the US anyone at any age can, and for example, drop out of high school, go back as an adult or pass an equivalency test, go to Junior College and get credits that will be recognized if you transfer to a Uni and if you really kick arse in Junior College you're still going to qualify for academic scholarships as much as the next kid. It makes sense... if I was running a school my money would be on the adult that went back and did really well because they wanted to more than it would be on the kid that may or may not be getting pushed into something that they don't have any desire or drive for. As near as I can tell though, the HSC is there more to stress people out than to help them. Maybe it keeps parents from pushing their kids into career choices they aren't suited for academically, but I don't think that should be a school's problem. In any case, I wonder how that will go over on a new community. I historically don't care anyway :p
On the other matter, I did very nearly freeze my computer. I've never had this one freeze and I've thrown some incredible stuff at it, though I've also never run out of memory. I'm pretty sure I created a swap file today if I didn't have one already though. What ended up happening when I tried to open the entire EVSC archive thread hitting "all" pages, instead of the system freezing, was that either my browser couldn't handle it or the OS decided my browser had crashed. It didn't close it out, I go the "Oh snap!" message in Google Chrome after a prompt that it wasn't responding. I tried, because I'm pretty pathetic and I'm still trying to impress Dara despite coming off as a wanker... but more out of boredom as stated, a program that downloads content for offline viewing. It's here if anyone's interested but if the Windows port is anything like the Linux one then its not that user friendly. I have it on the Mac but its command line only and the help option sucked. I don't have the manpath setup so I couldn't read the manual. Anyhow, after getting optimal setting to get all content except embedded flash itself, which you just need to be online for and it works though, I set it to save the thread locally and since it only goes to like.. something like 47 pages then does .... and says "All" after that, it only cached up to page 47 and that ended up being 102 MB because of all the images it downloaded so I figured that with the huge number of pages it still had to do that it really wasn't worth continuing and that Dara isn't going to take her clothes off for me anyway, and if she did I live like pretty far away so it would be pretty useless. I can't reach that far...
I hope its not offensive to say so, but I'm really glad to be ditching the eblah software. It was neat back in 2002 and 2003 but I've grown to dislike it. Maybe its just this site's skin but its not my favourite thing out there.
Yes, I agree, I feel a tad sad, but not about the forum today but what it used to be like, it was fun in the old days.
I really can understand why Glen wants to change things, running and maintaining a forum costs money. I belong to one in the UK that I am a founder member and a Mod, about 3 years ago they were about to close it down due to lack of funds so we all donated so much to keep it going. It worked well as it is thriving today.
Its not closing though, its being replaced and the intended focus is changing. Apart from that a community is inevitably the people that make it up. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's been asking myself if I really want to bother with /eblah over the recent months. Its been pretty boring here for a while so it can't really be all bad for those that do stick around if membership increases. The worst that will happen is that it won't work, which is already the case here, and if not then certainly the road things are on to, as people are both disinterested to begin with and to top it off, the social dynamic has become dysfunctional. All that's left is to type mundane crap about making sandwich and so on. There's no humour left, there's no enthusiasm left, etc etc and its not without enough of us trying to resurrect things to a degree either so what's left?....
Yeah it is sad though... the above I guess is, in a way, me saying so.
Because everyone is in fights with people that's why And heaps of good people left. And no one talks about TV. People used to talk about the Biggest Loser but this year, no one. So I didn't either.
lol, I wonder what the pm was about... I sort of don't want to know because it probably involved me being a big baby about a forum disagreement. Did you look at the software I linked to? It would take a lot of tinkering to get the settings right to save private messages and you'de have to both be logged in, so it would have to support that feature which I think it does but haven't tried it, and run it multiple times such that if it only sees "pages 1, 2, 3, 4 ... 400" then it would only look at pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 400 because those would be the only links available. It means having to tinker with obscure settings to get it to cache as much as possible of the 4 pages, page 400, then having to click on to "5, 6, 7, 8, ... 400" and do it again. That's a rough example. If you want to give it a try then you can. If it logs you in and gives you access to your message center then the things to keep in mind are to tinker with the recursion level or you'lle end up linking off to various places in the site. You'de set it to 2 or 3 depending on the URL you give it for your private message thing. You want to save save javascripts... I can't remember everything now, but you want links to point locally otherwise they'lle point back to the site here rather than the local filesystem you're creating. You want to make sure you're fetching external image files and give it access to crawl outside of the site "entire web" was the setting I think, so it can cache those. Embedded youtube won't cache but when you connect to the internet the html tags are normal youtube embed tags so that will still work. To test it, use a browser that has a cleared cache and is logged out from your account and then additionally disconnect from your network interfaces so the computer isn't online. The only thing that shouldn't come up offline is embedded youtube since it needs to be fetched. I think youde quickly find it wasn't worth the trouble especially the message centre. The most annoying thing when I tried it out on the EVSC thread was that it gave me a master html page, and then I could click on any page from there, but once on a page I had to go back to the initial html page, to click on any other page number of the thread otherwise it would give me the actual internet link rather than the local filesystem link.
Once again, that might have been too much info.
As for the EVSC stuff, its 551 pages and I only did the first 41. Oh crap... you know I might have actually downloaded all the files since it did hit the all "All" link which does all pages. I was thinking at the time that 41 pages ended up giving me 102 megs of external image files but I think I grabbed all the images via that link and the rest just needed to check that the files were there and create the html files... I'll see how well it works. It may create a new folder and want to redownload for each new address I give it and that will be the same problem I already assumed I had.
And yes, I do realise that my posts are sometimes painful for some of you to see given their length and lack of content. I can't help it. Its a compulsive thing
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