Service will be resumed as soon as possible
What a hassle. So I have reinstalled Radio. I have rethought, no I haven't rethought, I have realized that the design doesn't, probably can't work. I quite like this default.
But what happens now?
What went wrong?
Well, having ftp'd to Uni I could restore original settings. I couldn't find away of doing this through any normal means, nor through editing the radio.root file.
But i have come to the conclusion that this is not an environment for messing in, which is not, in my opinion good. There seem to be no good guides, no step by steps, no forums that are easy to access and browse. Now contrast this to Java. It really gives the feeling of a minority sport.
It seems to me that the troubles begin with the attempt to use script to handle the client side environment. This is not helped by claiming, for instance, that the .root file is an object database! Well I guess it depends what you mean, but to me it is just a text file, or, if you like, a string data base as befiting scripting. What it all boild down to is that it is very difficult to manipulate because it is not clear what things are, where they are or what their function is. Moreover, looking at radio.root it seems to full of a lot of junk, why is it there? Stuff from past incarnations that I have never used. I think it is there because the whole thing has evolved in a more piece meal fashion than the publishers would like us to believe, on the basis of many people's enthusiasms. This comes to another problem. The whole thing is sold. This is a problem because there is no direct line to support of any kind. So there is no feeling of a company behind the scenes, infact I have rarely bought software from an outfit with such a thin presence. Next, it seems that a lot of this is dependant on other peoples contributions, but this isn't Open Source, nor are they obviously rewarded so what is the reward mechanism? In Open Source it is above board. You know what you are getting into and you also have the satisfaction of sharring with others to mutual benefit. In this community I can't see how that works. You would think that be centred on a commercial product wouldn't present these problems but my impression is that it does. I'm not saying there is no community, or that people don't produce great things, or that they are not helpful. There is, they do, they are. But there is also a dirth of clear open information that would allow someone to get in there. There must be a reason for this. Usually I find mailing list that intimidate me and that I just lurk on, but not here. So this is rather paradoxical too, given that blogging is all about sharring information.
Finally, I have also found Radio to be very unstable under NT 4SP6. There are frequent memory read access faults if I do the wrong thing, such as shut down radio by right clicking on the tray icon and various other things especially to do with browsing the directory with is being served. This shouldn't be. While I would like to "blame" NT I have to admit none of my other programs cause the same problems at the moment.
So we will have to see what happens in the process of restoring service on Radio Free Java!
1:10:24 AM 
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