@Blip is [no longer] down.

Blip.TV, the video provider relied upon by many independent digital shows has been down since a little after 2am PST, according to isitdownrightnow.com.

Because of this, any videos hosted on Blip.TV (for example, Category5 Technology TV on-demand and main RSS feeds) are entirely inaccessible, and even the Blip.tv web site is not available during the outage.

I must say, this is a first that I’ve ever seen such an extended outage for Blip.TV, who have always been pretty reliable in spite of their growth. Their Twitter feed is silent, and since their site is down, we know nothing yet about what’s going on, but we know it’s down, and has been down for several hours.

Update #1 – Auto tweets and blog entries continue to auto-post (albeit, laced with deadlinks), but no sign of any realtime notes from Blip.TV directly.

Update #2 – Tasherre Risay commented below that Blip.TV is located in New York.  Absolutely understandable then that there’d be issues.  I hope everyone is okay, and our thoughts and prayers go out.  Hoping for at least an update as to the status and what’s actually happening.

Update #3 – 11am Eastern: as Peggy George commented, the Error 503 message has been updated on Blip.tv to the following:
I received a note from Blip “We are currently experiencing unexpected downtime due to flood water in Manhattan affecting our colocation data center. We expect to be back up within the hour as the generators come online but may experience temporary outages through Friday.”  Our thoughts continue to be with the Blip team and all those who are affected by Hurricane Sandy.

Update # 4 – Annie Tsai (Blip.tv’s social media manager) informed us below that she’ll be able to update us via social media now that she has access to power.

Update # 5 – 12:45pm Eastern – Blip.tv is responding and serving up videos!

Walk-in Wifi Responder

Had a thought this morning that wifi could be used to do some pretty rad stuff… like detecting when I get home by noticing my iPod touch.

Since most of us carry wifi-enabled devices with us at all times, and most of us have them set to auto-connect once in range of our routers, I thought, why not use that data?  It could be as simple as logging coming and going, or as sophisticated as automatically turning on my favorite music when I walk in the door.  Or even adjusting the thermostat when I arrive home to save energy when nobody is around.

As a very brief proof of concept I whipped out a simple algorithm in PHP which can be run from any Linux computer on your network.

Usage:  php wifi-check.php –device=devicename

 0) {
      $tmp=@explode('=', $ping);
      $result=@explode('/', trim($tmp[1]));
    }
    if (count($result) > 0) {
      // Now we know the device is connected; do something
      echo 'Device active.' . PHP_EOL;
    } else {
      // Device is not connected.
      echo 'Device inactive.' . PHP_EOL;
    }
  } else {
    echo 'Usage: php wifi-check.php --device=devicename' . PHP_EOL;
  }
} else {
  echo 'This script is designed to be run from the Linux terminal, not a browser.';
}
?>

My thinking is to put something like this in a looping script and let it run every so many seconds or something, calling particular functions if the device is detected as active vs inactive.

I’d welcome your thoughts in the comment section below.  What practical things could this be used for?

Ignite Barrie – What a Great Event!

Tonight I had the honor of participating as one of 8 speakers in Ignite Barrie, a fun event designed to inspire the community of Barrie, Ontario by allowing each speaker just 5 minutes to present something that they are passionate about.

The event was hosted by the wonderful The Creative Space, and the venue was pretty packed.  I literally had to push three people over just to get to the sandwich buffet.

Let’s take a look at an overview of the evening.  Keep in mind, each speaker had just 5 minutes to say what they wanted to say, all timed to a PowerPoint slideshow.
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