A screen cap from Siri

I’m interested to see if the new Siri voice command stuff on the iPhone 4S goes anywhere. I don’t think that it will, but it’s not because Android was there first or because I don’t think it works. It’s because I don’t think people will use it.

Yes, Android had voice commands first, but Siri is very different. It was created by a dedicated company based on military artificial intelligence research – not just a side project to take dictation. Siri was fully fleshed out before Apple bought it. Voice on Android works (if you speak slowly and clearly) but it isn’t “smart”. The breakthrough of Siri is that it works out what you want based on natural language and context, not keywords.

I don’t think people will use it for two reasons:

1. It won’t work in every environment. Too much background noise, other people talking, television/radio on, etc. If you have to make a conscious effort to change your environment to use it, then you simply won’t. It’s not so convenient if you have to step out of a room or switch something off and you can accomplish the same thing with a few taps.
2. People like their privacy. Artificial intelligence is compelling on television and in the movies because it is a trick to let the audience know what the characters are thinking. You are watching them problem solve.

In real life, people don’t want everyone else to know that they’re looking up restaurant reviews, creating an appointment to meet someone for dinner, or checking sports scores.

Voice interface and artificial intelligence are very powerful, but until you can subvocalize, I just don’t see it catching on.

This is the primary reason that I don’t think that computing in the living room on a TV work. People have an intimate relationship with their data and having the display across a room just feels too invasive. Sure, it works great to share Youtube videos with friends and do other consumption activities. But not research or creation.

Would you honestly feel comfortable writing an email across your living room where anybody could walk in and read it (or look in through a window).

Now how about on a train or in the office with everyone listening?

Edit: A counter argument from John Athayde on Google+

How about while you’re driving? How about if you’re in a private office?
I don’t think it will be ubiquitous, but I do think it will become more used, especially for certain circumstances.

My response

True. Baby steps. I just think for most people, if they don’t use a feature regularly, then they forget about it.
I’m very interested to see how it plays out and am envious that Apple bought it, when it was going to go multi-platform

Edit: The screen capture is from a series by Joshua Topolsky. The other queries he made are also excellent!

No, I’m not being cornered by friends and family to address any problems.. At least if I were, I don’t think they would publish the schedule for me

Intervention is a creator-focused Internet Culture Convention near Washington DC held September 16 – 18.

I am scheduled to speak on three panels this year:

Open Source Software for Everyday Use
When: Friday 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Where: Panels Room 2

Do you feel that your creativity is held back because you can’t afford programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, or Microsoft Office? Our panel of experts have freed themselves from the bonds of expensive closed software ecosystems and you can too. Whether you’re just fed up, want to try new things, or can’t afford to pick up the software you want, there is an open source alternative available to you. Find out what packages our panelist use, how to find software that fits your need, and how to join the amazing communities that spring up around open source software.

Chances are you probably use some OSS, and you don’t even know it. Our panel of open source evangelists discuss the facts and help you find the OSS packages that can free you from outrageously high costs, bizarre licensing practices, and poor interface design. Come and learn ways to save yourself money, improve your productivity, and secure your computer. You don’t have time or money to ignore OSS anymore. Set yourself free.

Keeping Your Stuff Safe
When: Saturday 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Where: Panels Room 2

Strategies for backing up and preserving your digital life

Audio Podcasting 101
When: Sunday 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Where: Panels Room 2

Everything you need to get up and running with a podcast with as little money as possible. Learn from these podcasters how to avoid those rookie mistakes that can turn an audience away

Update: I just upgraded my primary workstation to the full KXStudio as a test. Details at the end of the post

I have long been wanting to replace the Windows operating system on our studio machine with Linux, but haven’t for a number of reasons. Recently the machine has been having fits and garbled a very important interview, so it came time to wipe it and start over.

Our home server took a dump, so our regular studio box took its place. Reconstituted server hardware is now in the studio, however it is less than ideal. It was my primary desktop machine about 7 years ago sporting a 1.1 GHz AMD AthlonXP processor and 1 gig of memory (system bus is only like 200 Mhz), so it’s limited in what can be expected from it performance-wise. Someday the studio will get a proper hardware upgrade. It would help if we sold the friggin’ house though.

What works:
An Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) system with a very harmonious audio environment recording from my firewire mixer at 48kHz and 24bits. Currently using the KX “low latency” (but not realtime) kernel. More on why I went with Lucid below.

JACK is the full-time audio core and everything goes through it with bridges if apps aren’t JACK native. Ardour works, Linux VST plugins work, many Windows VST plugins work too. I didn’t play with any of that much since my primary goal is podcast production, preferably with Skype remote co-hosts, which works (yay!)

I loaded up Skype, then Ardour. In Ardour I mapped the first two mics on my mixer to tracks 1 + 2 (since my wife and I co-host most of our shows together). I created a 3rd track and mapped the pulseaudio sync to it. This feeds all audio output from pulse applications (browser, media player, Skype) to that track. The outputs of my microphones were already mapped from Jack to Pulse, so I didn’t have to do anything there.

I called the sexy Skype Call Testing robot and voila — I could hear her, and she could hear me! Furthermore, Ardour recorded all of her audio on to track 3 which was completely discreet (neither of my mics were on the track) and my tracks 1 + 2 were completely discreet as well – exactly what I wanted, so mission accomplished!

This was mostly “out of the box” with very little tweaking. The tweaks wouldn’t even have been necessary if I had a USB, PCI, or fully supported firewire interface. KXStudio really does “just work”.

On Twitter today Thomas, Chris and I commented about the new Google+ a little and I think that their “Hangout” feature will be a boon to podcast recording. It allows ten person video conferencing for free. With this setup I could participate in a multi-person video conference and record its audio (or not), and still have clean tracks of my side of the conversation. If each person recorded their side of the conversation and we pull WAV files together, then we’d have pristine sound with the benefit of that facial and body language feedback to help the conversation go smoother.

Caveats:

1. My latency is pretty abysmal (24 – 46ms depending on how hard I want to push the cpu), but that’s not important for podcast recording. Nothing is noticeable on the Skype call. I will work on latency when I get back to doing some music composition, but I suspect I will need a new rig for that given the slow system bus and other limited resources of this machine. I was able to run at 2.5ms without affecting my Ardour tracks (I only tried three), but every other program was bogged as the CPU spikes. I suspect the Ardour recording works so well since JACK is running in realtime mode with a high priority so all other programs get very little cpu time.
2. You cannot play audio from a pulse source and route that to Skype. For instance, the other people on the call wouldn’t hear a YouTube video if you played it. This is a minor inconvenience. I suspect that you could route a VLC or Audacity instance to feed them audio (thinking about podcast feedback here), but I didn’t have a chance to try it. In a way it’s good because it means that your buddies won’t hear any desktop alerts or other system audio chimes if you forgot to turn them off.
   Another benefit of Google+ Hang Out is that you can do shared YouTube watching that syncs between all browsers. If anybody pauses, fast forwards or rewinds it automatically does so on everybody’s YouTube stream. Pretty nifty! If only Netflix or HBOGo would hook into this!
3. If you shut your mixer off, it will not come back up in JACK. You need to reboot your whole system before recording again. Also a minor inconvenience, but somewhat annoying since that was something that didn’t seem to bother Windows.
   Of course with the audio issues I’ve had lately with recording through Windows, I was profalactically rebooting before every session so it’s a wash. It is likely possible to modprobe the firewire kernel module again after turning the mixer back on and force-restarting JACK, but I didn’t try that.

How I Got There:
When looking at all of the media-centric Linux distributions I decided to go with KXStudio on top of Ubuntu. I found it interesting that they recommend Lucid (10.04) rather than the newest version. There were actually forum comments from FalkTX (the main guy behind KXStudio) essentially saying that 10.04 is still the best platform for audio on Linux due to changes in the newer versions.

I thought briefly of going ahead with 11.04 (KX does support it), but figured I would use what they recommend. The KXStudio team backports all of the kernels, tools and the latest versions of pretty much all audio software to 10.04 so there isn’t much to lose. Also, it is a Long Term Support release for Ubuntu, so it will have security and bug fixes half way through 2013. A recording studio is something that you don’t want to mess around with a lot once you have things dialed in.

I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 10.04, then followed the instructions to add the KX repositories and “upgrade” to KXStudio. It went very smoothly with a couple minor question prompts and some waiting for it to download a couple gigs of software.

One of the steps is picking your desktop environment (they support Gnome, KDE and Unity). I’m most familiar with Gnome so that’s what I went with. Years ago I was a KDE user and I briefly considered going back to it, but this project just isn’t the place to do that.

Another step is to pick a kernel. I was going to go with the realtime kernel (2.6.38-8), but that wouldn’t allow the proprietary nvidia graphics (built into my motherboard) drivers to work. For some reason, the system will not boot into X with the open source nvidia drivers (Nouveau), so I’m kind of stuck here. I went ahead with the “low latency” kernel which is a little older, but still 2.6 (2.6.33, I believe).

I also had to work through some monitor resolution issues. It was stuck at 640×480, then at 800×600. The highest I’ve been able to get it is 1024×768 which is annoying on the widescreen monitor, but acceptable. I’ll work it out later. X configuration has always been a bit of a black art to me so I need to do some more research.

First time bringing up the connection tool I didn’t see the Firewire mixer (an Alesis Firewire 8). My friend Thomas has the same mixer and went through an arduous journey getting his to work which I was hoping to avoid (though, thankful for his notes getting his to work!)

Working through FFADO’s troubleshooting FAQ I found that issue was simply Ubuntu not loading the kernel module. I loaded the module and it showed right up. I added the module to modprobe.conf so it would auto-load on boot.

In my playing with kernels, somehow this stopped working after a reboot and I couldn’t figure out why. It kept saying that the ohci1394 kernel module was missing. It ends up that it was in a blacklist file. I removed it from that file and all was well.

That was it for install and configuration and met all of my first goals of recording microphone and Skype tracks. Next I played a little with reducing latency. The default load was about 24ms (1024 buffer with 2 periods for ALSA and 1024/3 periods for firewire). I dropped this down to 128/2 and was down to 2.5ms, but as mentioned above, the CPU spiked at 100% and Skype audio cracked up. The interesting thing is that no xruns were reported and my microphone tracks in Ardour didn’t have any drops at all. I’m curious to see if monitoring tracks while recording causes drops or xruns but didn’t have a chance to play with it.

I tried a few different settings; 512/2, 512/3, 1024/2 and 2048/2. The default of 1024/2 really was the sweet spot. I don’t know if KXStudio always sets that as default, or if it did it based on my hardware.

I believe if I had a modern machine with dual, quad, or more cores and a faster system bus that everything would work just fine at 5ms, or maybe even 2.5ms. My primary desktop workstation is still no prize winner as it’s almost five years old, but it is at least dual core. I have the KX repositories on it, but have only used them to get the latest builds of Ardour, Audacity and JACK.

Now I’m going to do the full upgrade to KXStudio and see what kind of latency I get on it. Though, the audio interface is either the internal sound card on the motherboard or my Sennheiser usb headphones, so I don’t know how much they’ll impact things.

If I get some time I may haul the mixer upstairs and try it. The wife and I have been talking about making our normal computer room the studio, thus removing the need for a dedicated studio machine anyway. That is not likely going to happen until we move though, so I don’t know that I want to go to the trouble of connecting things and tearing it down again just for testing.

I hope this at least inspires your experimentation, if not helps you – feel free to ask for assistance if you go this route and get stuck!

Here is an excellent reference document that explains (in simple terms) why audio on Linux is so complex:
http://tuxradar.com/content/how-it-works-linux-audio-explained

Update:

I went ahead and did the full KXStudio upgrade on my primary workstation. It’s a 4.5 year old Dell with the following specs:

• Intel Core2 1.86 gHz cpu
• 2 GB ram
• 667 mHz bus
• Sennheiser usb headset
• Using the lowlatency kernel (same issue with nvidia driver, so no realtime kernel for me)

Jack is set at 48 kHz (native for the audio chip on the motherboard as well as the Sennheiser cup). I am able to playback and record 16 tracks with 6 effects in Ardour (a couple reverbs, compressor, 4 band parametric eq, fast look-ahead limiter) with a latency of 2.7ms CPU at 80% (spiking to 100) , DSP 17%

I can’t wait to get to Balticon this Memorial Day weekend (May 27-30, 2011) and honored to once again participate as a panelist, performer, and moderator. What’s that? Why no, I didn’t just paste this over from last years post! And I’m insulted that you would suggest such a thing

Here is a list of the events I will be participating in. Come on by and say hello- I’d love to meet you! The schedule is pretty stable, but there is always a possibility that some of the times or rooms may change – so please check back before heading out to make sure you’ve got current info.

Sound Design & Extreme Audio Effects
When: Friday 10:00pm – 11:00pm
Where: Derby

Our expert panel of professional sound designers and audio engineers will explore various topics and techniques surrounding sound design and the art and science of extreme audio effects. They will share insider tips and tricks to help you squeeze strange and unworldly tones and textures out of the equipment you already own, inspire you to build and record uncommon noise makers, and to turn ordinary sounds into sonic landscapes designed to enhance your next multi-media project. They will cover both basic and advanced recording, tweaking and extreme manipulation techniques to provide you with the take-away know-how to shake awake audiences and transport them to strange new worlds.

Master’s Session: Audio Excellence in Podcasting
When: Saturday 9:00am – Noon
Where: Derby

Our panel of expert audio enthusiasts will discuss various topics surrounding audio engineering for spoken word, music, and everything in between. They will help you get the best sound out of the equipment you have, help you pick the next piece of important equipment within your budget, and help you avoid burnout by streamlining your workflow to shorten the time you spend editing audio. The audience is encouraged to bring questions and even samples of problems they are having with their own work.

Concert: Ditched by Kate
When: Saturday 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Where: Garden Room

New Media participants Phil Rossi and Chooch Schubert bring us alternative rock with their band “Ditched by Kate“.

Unlikely Disasters to Plan For
When: Saturday 10:00pm – 11:00pm
Where: Chesapeake

Because more things may uprise than just zombies and robots!
So much attention is paid to how one might survive the zombie apocalypse or robot uprising. But aren’t there a whole lot of other things we should be planning for? How about mole men? Insect sentience? Or grey goo? Join our panel of possible-apocalypses scholars enumerate the conceivable threats. We might even have time to figure out how to survive one or two! Audience participation encouraged!

Into The Blender: Live!
When: Sunday 9:00pm – 10:00pm
Where: Chesapeake

Geek Media: One size does not fit all
The IntoTheBlender.com podcast is back for another live show. This time we’re taking on a touchy subject: There are countless arenas of geek affection, but some seem near universal: movies, television, and books. Whether it be Star Wars or Firefly; Lord of the Rings, or Buffy; Gaiman or Pratchet – there are things you are SUPPOSED to love as a geek. Well, we don’t love them all and I bet you don’t either! Come compare your likes and dislikes with an assorted panel of lovers and haters of every genre. Take My Geek Card (I Dare You!)

Open Source Software for Everyday Use
When: Sunday 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Where: Derby

What we use at home and at work to free us from software giants
Do you feel that your creativity is held back because you can’t afford programs like Photoshop, Final Cut, or Microsoft Office? Our panel of experts have freed themselves from the bonds of expensive closed software ecosystems and you can too. Whether you’re just fed up, want to try new things, or can’t afford to pick up the software you want, there is an open source alternative available to you. Find out what packages our panelist use, how to find software that fits your need, and how to join the amazing communities that spring up around open source software.
Chances are you probably use some OSS, and you don’t even know it. Our panel of open source developers and evangelists discuss the facts and help you find the OSS packages that can free you from outrageously high costs, bizarre licensing practices, and poor interface design. Come and learn ways to save yourself money, improve your productivity, and secure your computer. You don’t have time or money to ignore OSS anymore. Set yourself free.

Things have been a whirlwind around here and I just realized that I never posted my entry to the Angry Robot Remix contest.

You see, Angry Robot Books has a theme song composed by John Anealio and they thought it would be great fun to have people remix it. They posted the original song elements and a contest was born.

The contest closed on April 1st. I’m not sure how many entries there were, but they are now being judged. The winner gets a role in Matt Forbeck’s next novel for Angry Robot – and a very nasty death is guaranteed too!

Below you will find my submission. The original version can be found on John’s bandcamp page.

A little about my mix:

• I decided to stay close to the original with some added elements for flavor. Including a “robot voice” seemed a moral imperative.
• I used all free/open source software for new elements as well as mixing including:
  • Ardour (digital audio workstation)
  • Hydrogen (drum machine)
  • ZynAddSubFX (synthesizer)
  • JAMin (audio mastering)
  • Steve Harris plugins (audio effects)
  • lv2vocoder (audio effect)
  • JACK TimeMachine (buffer recorder)
  • all running on the Ubuntu Linux 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system

Certainly not mine any more!

A few months ago our websites underwent some significant down time. The dust has settled and my schedule has finally allowed a little time to write about it.

Here’s what went down: GoDaddy decided that something was wrong with one of my sites one day and initiated a move of my hosting account to the server ghetto. This is the place where misbehaving children are sent for a time out.

My dozen or so sites were reasonably up to date, but I immediately went to log in and update their code (several WordPress blogs that were in the middle of being consolidated under a single instance as well as some forums, photo gallery sites, etc.). I had never had any problems, so I wanted to check to make sure I wasn’t hacked or anything.

My sites were taken offline during the move to the ghetto, so I couldn’t check anything and people who tried to go to any of my sites got a big blank page. I called GoDaddy support to ask how long it would take, and they said the transfers usually take about 48 hours. I was only hosting around 8 gigabytes of data, so two days to transfer it in what should be a state-of-the-art gigabit per second data center baffled me, but I decided to wait it out and not argue the point.

I asked how long my account would stay on the ghetto server and they said a minimum of 30 days, then it would be reevaluated and moved back to the regular hosting server if everything was OK. I found this terribly insulting. Those ghetto servers are where hacked and infested accounts reside. They are given the least provisioned bandwidth since they are doing “naughty things”, but there is no way for me, a human person, to request my sites be checked and moved back in a timely manner. I get a 30-day “time out”, even though I installed from their tools, and stayed on top of patches. They wouldn’t even tell me WHAT my sites were doing that supposedly violated their terms of service and got me moved to the ghetto, just a generic “using too many resources” message. Did one of my sites just suddenly get too popular for them??

After waiting the 48 hours for transfer, my sites were still down. I called and they said that “something has gone wrong, we’ll look into it. Give us another 48 hours”. I gave it 24 and called back. Still no go. I called back every day. FOR.SEVEN.DAYS. A technician finally looked at their transfer script, fixed the hang up, and the sites finished the move to the ghetto.

Now that my sites were accessible, I checked them over, and nothing was amiss. A couple plugin updates, but nothing was tampered with, and there was no sign of anything going haywire. Things were slloooooooooooow though. I called support and got the runaround about having to wait the 30 days before they’d look at the site to clear it and then initiate the move out of the ghetto.

Screw that, I found another hosting company and had all of my sites moved away in a matter of hours and closed the GoDaddy hosting account.

Things go wrong sometimes, and the people on the phones are friendly and all, but 7 days to copy 8 gigabytes of data is insane. Moving you for no provable reason of wrong-doing is insulting. Leaving your sites on a festering hunk of silicon and steel with a bunch of degenerates for an arbitrary period of time for no reason other than “policy” is ridiculous.

On the recommendation of a friend I signed up for an account on imhosted.com and have been quite satisfied. There have been a couple minor down-time glitches, but all seems to be smoothed out now. I am getting to the point of seriously considering moving away from shared host plans to a dedicated VPS, so that will be the next bit of research to undertake.

GoDaddy’s marketing tactics have always left a bad taste in my mouth, but the prices were good, the bandwidth fast, and service prompt. A seven day outage and uncertain future stuck in the slow lane was enough to make me re-evaluate their value proposition and I am happy to say that the healthy amount of competition in the hosting space means I don’t need to take their guff!

The band has a new name for the new year (blog post coming soon), and an inaugural gig! I’m happy to announce: Ditched by Kate will perform live at the Velvet Lounge. We’ve got a ton of new songs and can’t wait to perform them for you!

Where: The Velvet Lounge
915 U Street NW, Washington, DC
(202) 462-3213

When: Sunday, February 6 at 8:30pm

Note: This show is restricted to those 21 years of age and over

Further info:
Facebook event page

Description from the Facebook event page:

See them shimmy see them go
See their painted faces glow
Slow slow quick quick slow
See those pagans go go go go go!

Our first official DC show and my first show back at the Velvet in more than a few years. Want to pack the joint with your crazy faces.

Details on co-billing to come.

Since my life started including portable gadgets I’ve been striving for the note-taking Holy Grail: write a note on any device I happen to be using and have that note automatically sync to all of the other devices. There are plenty of solutions for this, but they all have restrictions on what devices, operating systems, or file formats that they’ll work with.

I have finally struck a balance of tools that meet all of my requirements and it is as if a great weight were lifted from my idea-cluttered brain.

First, my requirements:

• Create, read and edit notes on:
  • Linux
  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Android mobile devices
• Synchronize said notes to all platforms
• Notes stored in a secure manner
• Notes backed up/archived and have revisions tracked
• Ability to export all of my notes so that I am never “locked in” to a single vendor or tool
• Ability to search through my notes
• Extra Credit: be free
• Extra Extra Credit: be open source
• Double Extra Bonus Credit: all notes use my own encryption keys

In pursuit of this tool I’ve tried Evernote, Tomboy, Google Docs, and older tools when I lived on a Palm Treo. As I said, each approach has it’s merits, but also has limitations that fall short of my requirements.

What I have ended up using is a combination of tools that surround the SimpleNote service. SimpleNote isn’t Open Source, but it is free. It is a very straight forward service with a good API. On the website you can securely create, view and edit notes through an SSL encrypted connection. You can tag your notes and share them with friends or family. You can search through your notes on the site or locally (more on that later) and all revisions are stored, so you can go back in the lifetime of any of your notes to see what changes were made and revert the changes if you want to.

One negative is that, as near as I can tell, your notes are not encrypted on their servers — so there is risk of your data getting accidentally leaked or stolen. I never keep anything terribly sensitive in my notes: no passwords, financial, or private data – just shopping lists, story ideas, and random notes of stuff to look into – so there would be low impact if my information got out. I wouldn’t be happy about it, since there are song titles, lyrics, and notes on stories in progress or planned to be written some day, but I’m willing to accept the risk.

SimpleNote itself is just a web site, but the API has made it possible for tools on different platforms to sync up to the mother ship. The website has a growing list of projects that use their API sorted by platform. They do offer a native application for iDevices and an official Android version is in the works.

My favorites are:

• Android: AndroNoter
  • Excellent syncing
  • Search Notes
  • Free, though not Open Source
  • Does NOT support note tags
• Linux: SimplenoteSync script
  • A perl script, so will essentially run on any platform with the proper perl libraries loaded
  • Syncs your notes into individual ascii text files
  • Free and Open Source
  • Sync only — does not support tags, search or any other features
  • All of the power of Linux can come to bear on your notes: grep, svn, VI, EMACS, gEdit.. they’re plain ascii files so the limits of what you can do with the files are endless
    • This allows me to automatically check all note changes into subversion and keep a local history of revisions on my own server. If Simplenote decides to shut down or go in a direction I don’t agree with, I’ll have all of my data (minus tags) so there is no vendor lock-in!
• Mac: Notational Velocity
  • Sync to a local database
  • Optional encryption of local notes
  • Intuitive search/create/edit interface
  • Completely keyboard driven, no need to click on buttons
  • Spotlight integration
  • Free and Open Source
• Windows: ResophNotes
  • Full tagging support
  • Import/export notes
  • Multi-pane format with notes list on left and content on right
  • Internal links between notes with [ and ] (wikilink style)
  • Self contained (portable) app option so you don’t have to install it. You can run it from a flash drive
  • Notes are stored inside of an xml file, but the content is encrypted
  • Option to save all notes as individual ascii text files
  • Free, but not Open Source

It’s certainly not a perfect solution. Notes are not encrypted end to end with my own keys and the tools on each platform are a bit different. But it covers enough of my needs to make me happy.

Actually, if Tomboy had a decent client on Android I would move 100% to it. I really like the consistent interface which is available for Linux/Mac/Windows. So far there is one Android project that enables you to sync and read your notes on Android, however you cannot create or edit them yet. Sadly the movement is very slow going as there are only a couple developers donating time to the project – but it’s getting there!

What are your favorite note taking / syncing tools?

I am excited to announce that my short story “The Destruction of Station One” has been released as part of Philippa Ballantine’s Chronicles of the Order. I am very thankful to be included with the collection of awesome authors playing in Pip’s sandbox. The Order of the Eye and Fist series is set in a rich and vibrant land with a deep history and colorful characters.

Philippa’s first book of the Order, Geist, was recently published by Ace and is available now in bookstores everywhere.

Or, at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m in the middle of trying to convert all of my WordPress sites into a single Multi-User install. If it works, this means that I will only have to upgrade and patch a single set of plugins and code and all of my sites will automatically be up to date.

Great for security, and certainly a plus for this lazy admin. Getting there, however, is another story. The documentation makes it seem like a simple act of exporting, tweaking some settings, and importing. I am finding that a lot of things don’t come across with an export though, and a lot of hand tweaking is required to get things to look right.

So, this blog will look a bit strange and some elements may be disappearing and reappearing as I enable things and get it all settled. Then I’ll start moving over the other sites if I’m convinced it won’t break anything.

I’ll update here as things progress

[Update 12/17/2010]

It’s been awhile since I’ve worked on this project. I successfully moved two blogs into the MU setup and they’re running great. I tried to move a podcast over, but the episodes didn’t want to play. I think it had to do with caching but ran out of time to test. I’ve got one more standard blog to move into the MU setup, then work on the podcasts.

[Update 12/20/2010]

I was successful in integrating a podcast. I had to manually touch every post for the mp3 files to link correctly, so it took awhile, but in the end everything seems to be working normally. For the next podcast I may try doing a search/replace within the SQL database dump and see if that works without having to touch every post. New posts automatically worked without issue, it was just the old episodes.  So, two podcasts, and one more blog and everything will be humming along under a single WordPress install!

If this proves to be as solid as I suspect it will be, I’m considering offering a podcast hosting service. Pricing and terms are rattling in my head but it would likely be somewhere between free/donation based and $5 a month. Maybe a sliding scale based on the type of site/podcast. We’ll see.

If this were to become a reality, would you be interested in such a beast?

[Update 01/11/2011]

All of my sites have been integrated and all is working very well. There are a couple little things that I dislike. Here are the “gotchas” that I found:

• The default path for “content” files changes a little bit, so I had to hand tweak some templates
• As stated before, I had to “touch” every imported podcast episode for them to play. Editing the SQL import didn’t work and I’m not 100% sure why you have to edit the posts. It went fairly fast though, once I got a rhythm down
  • To accomplish this I went to the posts menu and filtered only “Podcast” category posts
  • I middle-clicked (or ctrl-clicked) the “edit” button of each post on the page to opened  them in separate tabs
  • I used “ctrl-tab key” to go through the browser tabs to the last one.  I clicked on the “Update” button on the post, and left the pointer hovering there
  • Once the browser swirly indicator finished swirling I hit ctrl-w to close the tab, and clicked on the next update button that came into view
  • When I closed the last post tab and saw the control panel for the blog again, I clicked on the “next page” link to get the next batch of episodes (10 or 15 were shown per page) and repeated these actions until they were all done
  • The simple act of hitting “update” without actually changing anything fixed all of the podcast mojo and each episode properly streamed and downloaded again
  • Any new post automatically works, so you don’t have to do anything special when posting new content
• I should point out that all of these podcasts used the Podpress plugin. My only Blubrry “podcaster” site was already in the MU, so I don’t know if it would have any issues like this or not. For what it’s worth, when I get a little free time I’m going to convert the Blubrry podcast over to Podpress as well. I just really like how Podpress works better, and it seems to be getting regular updates again.
• Because of the order of migration; you lose widget configuration and content. Might not matter for some sites, but if you rely on widgets to present custom menus and content, be sure to copy their contents into a holding document so that you can paste them back in
• There is a bug in Akismet. You can enable it for all of your sites (referred to as ‘network enable’) but you will get an e-mail notification when ANY comment is posted, whether Akismet catches it as spam or not!! Very annoying and the only fix seems to be to turn off e-mail notifications for comments. This means that you need to be vigilant about checking your comments on the control panel so that they actually get posted. If you have the option marked, once you approve a person for comments, they won’t get held up in moderation again, which helps

That’s the end of this story.. Oh, here are the links for instructions I used to get my sites migrated. With the few annoyances listed above it really was as easy as the instructions show!

Migrating Multiple Blogs into WordPress MultiSite
WordPress MU Domain Mapping

Next up: a new site template.