Really captures the frustration of a Sunday, doesn't it?

Anyway, yeah, sorry about the downtime. It wasn't even anything remotely serious in the end - the server we're on decided to, erm, switch itself off for no reason - and it wouldn't respond to remote power-cycling. Unfortunately, the usual sysadmin was away, hence the delay in getting someone to PRESS AN ON BUTTON. Still, we've had excellent uptime since we changed servers late last year. But whilst we always had off-site backups, from now on I'm also keeping weekly on-site ones as well, so we shouldn't have this kind of downtime again.

Incidentally, sorry things have been a bit slow around here recently too. There are PLANS for this to change, however, with some interesting stuff in the pipeline.

See you in about 25 years, then.

Just in case anyone's actually wondering where it's gone, it seems fair to inform my loyal public that due to the busy nature of this entirely secular holiday season there will be no Alternate Cover reviews this week. However, there will be a special Christmas edition going up on Monday! When no-one will be on the Internet to read it! How's that for planning? Normal weekly service should be resumed towards the end of the month.

You know, it's been a shit few months for NTS really. Bad Gateway errors. Stupid problems with the front page. And worst of all - nasty viruses. And recently, the site has been timing out altogether when trying to post a comment; with similar things going on behind the scenes on our admin system. (Which is why we haven't posted much recently.) All of which, I would point out, were beyond our control - they were problems with our hosts.

Well, all that's sorted now, as we've moved to yet another server, with webspace kindly donated by onepointnought, co-run by the excellent Rich Goodwin. And it's a nice and reliable server, so we shouldn't have any more problems.

So: content, then. Best get to it. And our review of Torchwood should be up by the end of the week, so watch out for that...

So. Hello again. For the full story of why we went offline, see this G&T post - it's the same for both sites. Have a read if it if you haven't already, and then come back here. (Short version: we're now clean of viruses, and it wasn't our fault.) But whilst I used that post to complain about our hosting company did wrong - what about what we did wrong?

Continue reading "And now I'm back again" »

You may have noticed that this site was down on Friday evening. This is because we've been having reports that NTS was infected with the VBS/Psyme trojan. This exploits an Internet Explorer-only vunerability.

I've given the site a complete going-over, including a thorough virus scan, and I can see no infection at all. I'm therefore 99.9% confident that this is simply a case of false positives.

However, I'd like to track down exactly why this is happening. So if you get any virus warnings on NTS, then please email the full details (including which page you got the warning on, the name of your virus scanner, and any information it provides) to webmaster@noisetosignal.org.

Thanks!

We've made it to one! Here's our review of the past year, where we all nominate our favourite article on NTS, our best article, and what we think the next year will bring. What better way to celebrate the site than being ridiculously self-indulgent?

Continue reading "NTS's First Birthday Review" »

Just to let you know that if you've been experiencing problems with the front page loading on NTS, that this has now been fixed. Hooray for me.

Also, due to what's happening with G&T, NTS might be a bit quiet for a few days until the new site up. It's unlikely to slow down completely though, as not everyone here is pathetically Dwarf-obsessed.

That is all.

Just a quick note to any NTS readers who are also LiveJournal users, to the effect that our syndicated LJ feed - which has been Broke and Rubbish ever since we relaunched the site - is now fully working and operational again. So if you want to get NTS updates on your Friends List, you can find the syndication feed here.

Just a quick note to apologise for the amount of downtime for our sister sites, Ganymede & Titan, Observation Dome, and Flange Log at the moment. We're trying to sort out the problem. No idea why we're getting Bad Gateway errors at present.

Note that G&T is currently half-asleep at the moment anyway - me and Ian are taking a bit of time out to concentrate on the redesign. More soon, with any luck - it should be pretty big...

A series of articles about the development of this site? Surely that's possibly the most self-indulgent article that I could ever post?

That's undoubtedly true, of course; still, the first incarnation of Noise To Signal is notable for one important fact: it failed. Utterly. In a way that made everyone involved lose interest in even posting on the site. And I've never done a design that just didn't work, before. Sure, early G&T isn't great (well, neither is the current design - but I'll get onto that in another article), but it works. The first NTS design just didn't. So, what valuable lessons can be learned from this?

Continue reading "Noise To Noise, Part One: That Media Site" »