Invent

Anthony

BouncyServers New Servers

Its that time again boys and girls, the time in which poor Anthony here is over run with work and things to do. Amongst the chaos of all the software upgrades and app building, I have now got a server to build, and me being me, the perfectionist that i am, its sure to be a problem free transfer (fingers crossed).

So, basically when we move to new servers its a really simple process, but can be very time consuming. The whole process is just like transferring all your files from one PC to another. First of all we have to build the server, then we have to get everything installed, things like apache, PHP, MySQL, cPanel and then after that, we have to get all the security put in place.

Once all this has been done, we then start the transfer, generally this is an automated process done between the 2 servers. The new server connects to the old server, and then it sucks everything off the old servers hard drive and places it on the new server. The fun doesn’t stop there though.

Once everything is moved across we have to validate that every single file has been transferred successfully, now, I’m sure your aware how many files are stored on your home PC, well, its a lot, and the amount of files on the server can be double that at times. If your a customer and you want to help speed up the process, you could delete any unnecessary files from you hosting account which would help increase transfer times, but you don’t really have to do this.

During this time we will also be investigating suspended accounts and terminating them as necessary, reducing the amount of data we have to transfer, so if your hosting account has been suspended for the last 5 days, your have 3 days to have it resolved.

If your a BouncyServers customer there will be a lot of information in an email the support department sent out regarding the transfers, but if you have any questions about the move, you may ask here and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Stick around for more updates as i progress, it can take up to 24 hours for the server to be built so i guess we all have 24 hours at least before any transfer takes place.

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O2-UK Messing Up My Bill Once Again!

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So, were coming up to the end of the month, and for many people this means there phone bills amongst lots of other things are due to be paid. For me, it marks the start of another long and boring phone call with o2 about my phone bill.

Now, i have been with o2 for years, prices are fair and never used to have any problems, that however has been a thing of the past for the last year. Something to look back on and think “ahh, remember the good old days when you used to just pay your bill without any hassle”.

Now, for the problem. Every month I’m forced to phone o2 because they cut off my phone for no reasons, mess up my bolt ons, or start charging me for things they shouldn’t be. Well, I’m sad to say, this month they messed up BIG time.

Mobile phone tariffs can be quite expensive, for me, i choose a £45 a month tariff on the iPhone, seemed to be the best deal for me for what i use. Now, £45 doesn’t sound like much, and its defiantly something that is achievable each month for me without any problems, and this is why i choose the tariff i am on.

So this morning, 7:25am i get out of bed, check my phone and notice i have a new email. It’s from o2 and its my phone bill. I wasn’t to worried about my bill this month as I’d hardly been using my phone, but upon reading the email i found myself being smacked in the face with what can only be described as an imaginary wet fish. Let me show you the email i got.

Dear mr Anthony Kinson

You can now take a look at your O2 bill for 18/05/09 online. Your total bill for this month is £655.28. Please arrange to pay this by the date detailed on your bill. Cheques being cheques, they do take a few days to clear so if you could write your mobile phone number or O2 account number on the back of the cheque and send it in time to allow for this, that would be great. Alternatively, why not pay with your debit or credit card by using the ‘make a payment’ option from your online bill, or call customer service and select the ‘billing and payments’ option.

Now at first I’m thinking what the hell is going on here, maybe the email is just wrong, or maybe my phone was connected to the internet and downloaded some stuff while i was asleep, or maybe i accidentally dialled a number. At this point i decided to logon to my o2 account on my laptop. Here’s what i found. (click to enlarge)

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As you can see, that is pretty messed up, first problem is my tariff has been listed 4 times. one is a deduction, then I’ve been charged £555 for my tariff, and then i have been charged again twice with 2 lesser amounts. Now i don’t know what the hell is going on with o2, but all they seem to do is mess up my bill, more so this month than ever before, and this isn’t just the first problem, before they updated there site, i had loads of problems logging into my account. Apparently it was my browser, or should i say, the browser on my phone, my PC, my laptop, my mums pc, my friends laptop, apparently my account was fine, and the problem was with all of these computers, despite the fact my mum could login to her o2 account on all of them. Problem is down to there poor coding in there websites, its pretty much as simple as that and anyone who has been into an o2 store will know that there computers are always down.

So, the next step for me is to now phone them, have them fix it, which will probably result in my phone being cut off like last time, they told me not to pay the bill so it could be regenerated and to pay double the following month, 2 days later, my phones cut off for not paying the bill. Crazy, the whole o2 system is a mess and i seriously think they should re-think about there system layout.

If anyone else is on o2 and has had similar problems, or recurring problems with o2, comment on this article and share your story. Would be interesting to read what other problems people are having.

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Bouncy Radio Center 9 – LiveStream Update

Just a quick message really. There is going to be a major overhaul on the livestream player, Basically it is going to be put into its own module / class and there’s now 28 selectable themes for it, including the themes you are already familiar with.

This should allow for better calls to the livestream player in hooks and modules that people may create. Thinking ahead ;)

Anyway, i will post another article soon with a sneaky peak at the skins that will be available.

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Listen Info Update – Bouncy Radio Center 9

Right then, well I’ve been a busy bunny since my last article with updating the listener info detection for media players, and, well, there’s now 7 which are recognised successfully (see below image).

  • Winamp
  • iTunes
  • VLC Media Player
  • Real Player
  • Bouncy Radio Center LIVE Stream
  • SHOUTcast App for iPhone / iPod Touch
  • Windows Media Player

If you know of any other popular media players that are used to tune into your radio just let me know the name of the media player, and the user agent information, and I’ll add it to the standard list.

Also to answer questions i often get asked about VLC player. The reason its not added as an option to tune in with is because VLC uses all sorts of file types and supports lots of methods, as such, you can use VLC to tune in using the winamp link or the iTunes link, and so on. Any entry for VLC would be nothing more than a duplicate of another link so not really needed, but it IS supported.

If you want to send me a recommendation for a media player just comment on this article and I’ll respond. If you have Bouncy Radio Center v8 installed you can tune into your radio with the media player you want to submit and grab the User Agent data from the listener info there.

linfolist

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Bouncy Radio Center 9 – Listener Info

Information is something you can never have to much of (except in Beth’s case where she likes to describe in detail her trip to the toilet). Well the new Radio Center 9 is no different and at this point, I’d like to introduce you to the new listener info pop up box.

linfo

As you can see it has a few new additions since its v8 counterpart such as player icons and under runs. So, first of all the player icons, nothing more than a visual representation of the player that listener is using. In v8 you would have to look at the User Agent box and determine from that. Well with a lot of patients and some regular expressions you can now see a cool little icons for each listener. If however the player is not recognised, an unknown icon will be displayed and you can check out the user agent field for more information.

Now onto under runs. A lot of radio owners are often faced with members of their forums or radio listeners saying that the radio keeps stuttering or buffering, and as a radio owner its hard to determine whether just this 1 listener is having the problem, or if all listeners are having a problem. On a DJ point of view this usual results in the do having to disconnect and reconnect, just to be safe. well no there is no need. You can check to see if all listeners are experiencing under runs or buffering.

For example, listener ID 482 in the above image, lets imagine he has 12 under runs, and the other listeners have 0. We can safely assume that the problem is with that listeners internet connection and act accordingly, asking the listeners to ensure they are not using all their bandwidth downloading or if there using a 3G connection as they are tuned in with an iPhone/iPod Touch, so from these 2 new bits of information (player and under runs) we can assume maybe this listeners signal has dropped or there speed has reduced causing under runs / buffering.

If all listeners are having under run problems then you can assume that the DJ is having bandwidth problems with his upload speed and ask him to reduce the bit rate accordingly, alternatively, if your radio is not hosted with BouncyServers (probably the best host in the world) it could very well be a server lag problem.

As you can see, these new features don’t give you a definitive answer, but they help MUCH more in determining the cause of any lag issues.

And this boys and girls, is just one more reason why the Bouncy Radio Center is the best all round SHOUTcast management solution around.

Let me know what you think, and stick around for more updates very soon!

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work, Work, WORK!

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Everybody works in one way or another, we all have jobs to do, and for the last few days, I’ve been dreading getting out of bed for a few reasons. First of all, because I’ve not been eating properly or getting much sleep at all over the last few weeks which is leaving me a bit short in the old energy department, and secondly, because i know I’m going to have to stare at a screen full of code for hours, and that being the reason for the first.. erm.. reason..

Seriously though, I have just spent around 8 hours finishing off the new Radio Center Sidebar Hook, and why, because it’s a long process meeting standards.

Hooks for example come bundled in 1 xml file, this file has to contain language strings, template bits, settings, PHP code, help files, database queries and so on.

Now the radio sidebar hook only contains 1 template bit, 12 settings, 24 language strings, 1 PHP file and 1 help file and its taken me all this time to complete it.

Saying that, the sidebar module uses the RAJAX module and has some JavaScript coding in it also, so I’ve had to add some stuff to the RAJAX module to auto update certain elements of the sidebar. Still, most people will look at the sidebar and think nothing of it, its small, it doesn’t look too complicated, and in reality, its taken hours and hours to complete.

The fun doesn’t end there though, oh no. I’ve still got loads of other bits to complete, the main board panel hook for starters, its almost done, i just cant decide if i like the look of it or not, mainly because of the padding with the default IPB table class, however i did write a class called “RadPad” specifically for the radio, but i haven’t decided if i want to use it or not yet.

Then there’s the global radio bar hook, which i haven’t even started yet.. HA! fun times!

As far as the actual radio center goes lets see, the History page is completed, done, dusted, the schedule page is done on the public side, but I’m not happy with the way scheduled entries are laid out, so that’s probably going to have an overhaul. DJ List, not started, Downloads, not started, Linking, Not done but that’s an easy one, Stats, done, but not finished.

Mentioning the stats, i forgot to post on my blog about them, so i will write an article shortly about the new stats features.

Despite all the work i have done so far, completion still seems a long way away. I’ve literally been getting up, working on the radio center, going to bed, getting up, working on the radio center, going to bed.

Time off today i think, but saying that, I’m to anxious to get it finished i end up going back to it, telling myself I’ll just do a little edit here an there and before i know it am full on writing modules and crap.

Anyways, enough ranting from me, I’m gonna go eat.

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Bouncy Radio Center 9 Licensing Options

So while i have been working away for hours and hours every day over the last few weeks working on the new Radio Center, I’ve been thinking about how to give people the best value for money when using the Radio Center.

Now, personally, i would like to give the best deal to loyal BouncyServers customers, and this comes in the form of giving them the new Radio Center absolutely free. On a business point of view this would be crazy and would be a stupid idea, so i was thinking, what’s the best way to give BouncyServers customers a free Radio Center whilst still being able to maintain the costs of the licensing server and keeping the production and updates of the software active.

At this point 2 things came to mind, the first one is building a separate copy of the radio center which has adverts bundled into it, we get some advertising, and the client gets the free software. However, nobody likes adverts, and adverts wont pay the bills. This is when i had the second idea, i could lock the radio center to only function with radios provided by BouncyServers, and there we have it.

Now, this is a great idea, but it has its flaws, first of all clients with standard cheap radios would not cut the running costs for both the radio and the radio center, so we would have to set in some conditions.

These conditions… well, i will be setting up a minimum spend amount on the radio, for example, if you spend £** on a bouncyservers radio, we will give you a free license for the brand spanking new Bouncy Radio Center.

This benefits both us and the clients, we get additional custom as people would start using our radio servers instead of other radio servers, and the clients will get the radio center absolutely free with no additional cost, all they would have to do is get there radio from us.

Of course this is just going to be one of the available options, we will still have the usually options for people who run there own radio servers or do not wish to move allowing them to purchase a radio license the old fashioned way. Were happy, there happy, everybody’s happy!

 

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on this please comment and let me know, even throw across your own licensing ideas if you think there is a better option.

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Bouncy Radio Center 9 & iPhone / iPod Touch Listeners

2 announcments here, first of all, the new v9 radio center will now list all listeners tuned in on the iPhone or iPod Touch and display a cool little icon next to them in the listener info list and secondly all BouncyServers SHOUTcast customers radio streams are listed with SHOUTcast’s stream directory by default, meaning that they now have the potential to attract more listeners, even if they are not visitors to there websites.

This option can be switched off for people who wish to remain private of course and the same applys for our V-Cast customers with video streams.

That’s about it, just a quick update really but there will be more news coming soon on the new progress of the new radio center.

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New Motherboard, CPU & RAM

Well not so long ago i decided my trusty old PC could do with an update. I bought this PC around 4 years ago. Compaq Presario SR1609UK, and it cost me about £400 for just the tower. Back then it was pretty good, Sempron 3000+ processor, 1GIG DDR Ram ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and the motherboard and I/O was the most appealing. It had 8 in 4 card reader on the front as well as 3 USB, Mic, Headphones, Line In Sockets and a 1349 Firewire port. The back was just as appealing, 4 USB, 1 Firewire and all the usually stuff. The motherboard itself had PCI-E x16 which was good, 4 PCI slots, and 4 RAM Sockets.

Now, if all that meant nothing to you, it basically meant that i could upgrade to future technologies easily, for example, if i wanted more ram, plenty of space, if i wanted better graphics, no problem.

Anyway, over the last 4 years it had some MAJOR upgrades, for starters 3GIG ram was slapped inside, a Sapphire Radeon x1650 Pro 256mb graphics card, and Avermedia Hybrid TV+FM HD TV Card and a Creative Sound Blaster LIVE! 24-bit sound card.. nice, was great for ages, even upgraded to vista, loved it.

Then the problem struck, applications were getting more complex and more demanding, games were getting super heavy on the processor, an there was the problem, the processor. The version of motherboard i had didn’t use the AM2 socket for processors, it meant that getting a upgraded processor would bring little improvement and then it was hard to find a processor to fit my socket.

So now we have arrived at 2 weeks ago, my pc became stupidly slow with the programs i need to use, i mean it was taking me just over 2 hours to convert and burn a DVD (take note of this). Now i looked high and low for weeks, trying to find a suitable upgrade, and then i found it.

AMD Phenom x4 9650 True-Quadcore
High end MSI Motherboard
4GIG DDR2 800 RAM

i saved my money, i ordered, paid, and waited patiently every morning for the delivery man to arrive.

When it finally arrived, i installed a 64-bit copy of vista, and the first thing i done was run the windows rating test. here’s the result.

Capture This was a major improvement, especially considering my laptop which is only about 2 years old and cost £500 has a score of about 2.4. Now, as you can see from that score above, gaming graphics and the hard disk are letting me down, but this isn’t surprising considering I’m using the same graphics card i mentioned above which is now quite old, and I’m using a 4 year old IDE hard disk. Graphics I’m not to fussed about, new games still run on above normal settings fine, take The Last Remnant for example, this runs good with high textures and everything set on high providing shadows are off, shadows seems to cause a major drop in frame rate, but again, I’m not to fussed, i have an Xbox for playing games. So my next step really is to get a new SATA hard drive.

Now performance, OUTSTANDING is all i can really say, remember my old 2 hours+ DVD burning time, well i tested this a few days ago, the same DVD now only took me 18 minutes to convert and burn! My processor never seems to reach above 50% usage, in fact, the only time i ever got it to around 70% was when i was rendering an Adobe After Effects CS4 HD Project, and even then i think that was slowed down because my hard disk cant write data as fast as my processor can produce it.

So, if anyone is thinking about updating there PC’s Quad-Core is definitely the answer, absolutely awesome.

And with that, if anyone is interested, I’m selling my old motherboard, processor and 3GIG DDR Ram, runs great for normal day to day tasks, I’m a bit of a power user and most of the programs i use require high end CPU’s, anyway if your interested just let me know.

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Bouncy Radio Center 9 RAJAX Module

So I’ve been working a lot on a feature that has been requested for a LONG time, a feature which seen an early implementation in old versions for a brief period. That’s right, AJAX refreshing of radio data “in page”. Basically this is updating details such as the current song playing, DJ, listeners etc. without having to refresh the page.

This is where i would like to introduce to you the brand spanking new RAJAX module for Bouncy Radio Center v9. RAJAX is short for ‘Radio Asynchronous JavaScript and XML’ and comes bundled with the new Radio Center App.

CaptureRAJAX comes with 2 modes, Auto & Manual, quite simple really, Auto Mode will update the radio data every ‘x’ amount of seconds after the page has loaded, while Manual Mode provides buttons to the right of each block of data, which when clicked, will update the relative information, However, Auto Mode also includes the refresh buttons, allowing for you to check the current song for example as you wish.

In addition to this some protection has been put into place for those people who visit the page, fall asleep and forget all about it. This comes in the form of a Decay time. What this basically does is double the wait time if data has not been updated on a certain RAJAX element. Let me show you in detail, lets assume this check is for the name of the current song playing.

Check Time Since Load Starting Decay Did Data Change? Ending Decay Time To Wait Comments
1 00:00 1 N/A 1 30sec Data is deemed changed as there is no prior response to compare to
2 00:30 1 YES 1 30sec song name changed so decay is reset to default which was already 1
3 01:00 1 NO 2 60sec song name not changed, decay and wait time doubled
4 02:00 2 NO 4 120sec still no change, double again
5 04:00 4 NO 8 240sec no change again, double again
6 08:00 8 YES 1 30Sec ahh, data changed, reset the decay and wait times to default

 

So as you can see, if somebody sits on the page, and the radio goes offline for example, rather than there browser making a request every 30 seconds, it will double the wait and decay time if nothing has changed. This means idle users wont hog up resources making un-needed requests.

In regards to how this works if you have a song for example which is 6 minutes long playing on the radio, it should be caught and updated by check 6, if however you have a song which is say 9 minutes long, check 6 would detect no change and would have to wait an additional 8 minutes before the next check picks up the change, this is not a serious problem, as you could just click the refresh button to update that element and the decay and wait time is reset again.

So that’s most of the technical side sorted, well, at least all you need to know for now. Oh yes, RAJAX will also feed any custom radio hooks, apps, modules that users may create letting you take full advantage of it in your own custom modules whether its inside of the forum scripting or not, RAJAX is there to feed you, and your there to be fed.

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave me your thoughts and comments.

oh, and before i forget you can test RAJAX live over at our development forums http://dev.bouncyservers.co.uk

Until next time, keep it bouncy! (poor attempt at a sign of line)

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