is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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I'm pretty sure it'll only return messages containing the word "test", since the rest are noise words.
You don't have the most recent Windoze Media Player.
What I did to get around this is go into Tools (in our menu; not IE's menu), select My Settings and set "Sound for New Message Notification" to "None".
The problem is that iHub is trying to play a sound to notify you of a new message, but you don't have the latest and greatest software for doing that.
I'm not at all pleased with IE lately with some of these changes.
Like how they "accidentally" made it so Flash content (like ads) won't respond to the first click (but will respond to the second one) if you're not running the version of Flash that was put out to get around that problem.
Edit: In other words, Microsoft needs to get some anti-trust attention again. They seem to be going even more out of their way now to make sure that every computer uses only their software, and always has the last several-MB patch to fix security holes in it.
Edit 2: Oops. They're not "patches". They're <cough> "Service Packs".
Was thinking I had. Need to check. Or get them all in the same place again and do another picture.
Thought you'd bought one much larger than that! Like a 400cc 4-stroke twin?
I was watching and knew that'd have to be a tough call for Matt. On one hand, if a guy's busily digging his own grave, and is being a real dick about it, you tend not to want to take the shovel away from him.
On the other hand, whether a "greater good" was happening or not, the guy was breaking the rules.
I'm going to be all over this again today. I'm more convinced now that I was chasing the wrong wild goose. Unfortunately, it's so hard to test it because it doesn't happen often enough. It's happened to me exactly once since putting the new db server into production and I'm the one it most needs to happen to since I'm the one who needs to crack the hood open as close to the instant of it happening as possible.
Believe me, I wouldn't mind the help since I know I don't know everything (which is why I've hired a far more experienced programmer with nearly every Microsoft certification imaginable), but we have to, for the most part, hide code snippets and database structures (field names, etc) from public view. Standard security stuff. Don't make it easier for the script-kiddies and hackers.
Yeah, I think she ended up going with a new Corbin. And is supposed to be getting other lowering items for me to install. She's barely tip-toeing the bike right now.
I think that's what my best friend's wife recently got.
Odd that it'd happen right now when the load is so light.
I'm going to have to play dirty with the db. It sounds like the insertion process isn't working sometimes (probably due to locks and blocking), but not erroring out.
Now that I think about it, I can't 100% swear that when it happened to me, my new post actually "took" and I was redirected to the wrong post as I'd originally thought.
I may've been chasing the wrong wild goose.
I hope not.
A running joke is that we can all be in the same room, yet still have to use laptops and instant messenger to communicate.
However, I've also found that the more I/they drink, the better we understand each other.
So he accounts for a large number of the new registered accounts today, a surprisingly large percentage of which became posters?
Impressive! Bring 'em on! We've got the horsepower now.
Just need to figure out the remaining post_info bugs.
You been checking the db histogram? Feels like it's got an infinite amount of horsepower and can handle ANY load thrown at it. Haven't felt like that since, well, since installing the old webserver. And the one before that. And remember how the 1.9Ghz beige box we started with was considered a "firebreather"?
What we've got now is the equivalent of 4 3.0Ghz processors.
And no sooner did I get this box than quad dual-cores at 3.4Ghz are available now, or roughly 2 1/2 times the power we've got now for about 30% more cost.
Nice to know if we need it, it's out there, though.
Pardon.
3 1/2.
Parking Lot?
And at our current scale, it's really the only sensible way to do it. Well, once we wean ourselves off of session variables so we can more easily use multiple webservers when needed.
We're having to shift our basic philosophy from not worry about database write costs to really paying attention to them because thought they're still just as rare as they ever were in comparison with reads, they're very numerous. We get more writes per day than a lot of "successful" websites get reads.
Kept as a reminder.
I think I could keep John busy for a month just on the huge list of minor things that need to be done, let alone the big projects like migrating iHub to ASP.NET
Actually, the mind is the second thing to go. I forget what the first thing is.
Dave started working on a wonderful to-do list tracker that hopefully he'll be able to finish sometime if I can get him and Matt some relief on Admin duties.
Since there will be 3 of us programmers soon (me, Dave, and John), along with folks in England who can help here and there, project management definitely needs to mature past the current stage of me occasionally telling Dave and Matt "Okay, I can devote 3 or 4 hours. Each of you give me a list of 5 items and I'll see which of them I can get done."
On smaller bikes, I've worked really hard to learn to keep them upright when nearly stopped, and can also do it briefly while they're completely stopped. Usually I can have it moving so slowly it appears not to be moving.
Not so with bikes like the K-bike.
Reminds me again what you got?
I haven't been riding much lately. I used to ride motorcycles as a kind of "escape" and a way of relaxing. But the paperwork, etc of this acquisition has been so grueling, that I really don't have the energy to go riding lately. This too will pass.
Only times I've been riding lately have been when all of my shoes are too muddy for me to want them in the Subaru. And even that's been too much of a pain, so I'm driving the Subaru in sandals, which I really hate doing. I'm very anal about the exactly position of the wheel, seat, mirrors, and everything, and having sandals on just feels so wrong. If I'm driving far, I just take them off and drive barefoot.
My tentative plan, though, is to add about 10 bikes to the collection this winter while prices are down. Still not sure if I'll get a ZX14, but am very tempted. But definitely want to pick up some old ones.
Yes. I no longer trade or even watch it. I've accumulated all of it (through position-trading) that I ever wanted to have, and now it's in the "cold, dead fingers" part of my portfolio. Have no target selling price. I'll simply have a look at it every year or so and see if it's still a keeper.
I'm sure you realize the net was after payroll and bonuses, right?
One effect of this deal that I expect will trickle into the combined corporate culture is that we, being Americans, are not balance-sheet oriented and instead focus very strongly on profits. We've rarely distributed balance sheets in-house because the P&L's tell the story we're most interested in reading. And that mindset isn't going to change on this side of the pond. Profit excites us and we're especially excited about what they can do for our profit picture and we can do for theirs. The whole thing of being greater than the sum of the parts.
I'm really looking forward to getting rolling on this. Money in the bank? Yeah, that'll be cool, but it'll be forgotten soon, as I shift my attention forward again.
The things that excite me most about this deal mostly are the way they'll fill in areas in which we're sorely lacking:
1. A devoted accounting *department*. I've gone through bookkeepers like Spinal Tap went through drummers. Much of it because, though back in the day when I was a college professor, accounting was actually one of my subjects, I absolutely DESPISE counting or even touching the money. I just want others to count the beans and tell me if we made some more. That'll now be covered and I'll be uninvolved except as a person seeing results. And I'll see them as one of a number of metrics I can use to gauge my own performance.
2. A dedicated ad sales team. Face it. I SUCK at selling ads. The few times I've been able to devote some serious time to it, I've done alright. But it's been ages since I've made the email equivalent of a cold-call. I'm not a salesman, and the fact that I had to do it or it wouldn't be done not only made me personally miserable, we haven't come anywhere near seeing the kinds of ad revenues that real salesmen with real contacts can achieve for us.
3. Marketing dollars and effort. They have people who do it for a living. I haven't a clue how to do it and have always been extremely reluctant to let go of any money in the interest of marketing. I know you have to spend money to make money, but I'm a tightwad who prefers to spend money on computers, and then only when I see that I must soon.
4. An exciting and huge new set of features we'll be able to incorporate into the sites, making them supersites like Silicon Investor once was.
5. The ability to hire local geek talent and access to a team of geeks on the other side of the pond. I'm a geek, but I'm not the kind of super-geek we need. Super-geek has been hired and starts shortly.
I've always done best for the company and the sites when I can be more big-picture oriented while still keeping control of the geek side of things, and for the first time in years, I'll once again be free to be that person. And Dave and Matt can confirm that I really haven't much enjoyed my job since those days came to an end (out of necessity) some time back and I haven't been quite as effective as I can be.
So the best part of this deal to me is that the parts of my job I've always loathed and/or been poor at, are now the responsibility of people who love doing it and are good at it. And now I get to focus on the parts at which I'm pretty good and have at least basic competence.
Unfortunate they'd use a SQL reserved word (well, reserved in ANY programming language) as their ticker.
Oh, wait. Search terms are apostrophe delimited. And the "Filtered out" means it's a "noise" word. That can be fixed, but will have to be on a weekend, as it'll require a complete rebuild of the full-text catalogs.
I just made a minor change that's really about as aggressive as I want to get during the trading day. Doubt it'll be of much help, but we'll see.
But, hey! Isn't Full-Text search extremely fast and realtime now?
Please say it is, so I'll be less disenchanted with the rather expensive upgrading we just did.
ztest
Double-check. I'm pretty sure the post you wrote "took", but you were redirected to your previous one rather than the new one.
Lemme know.
Huh? Having a blonde moment? Re-read my post.
Ram water pumps are definitely fascinating. However, they're not a good solution for producing electricity because what you gain in head height, you lose (and then some -- a LOT) in volume. But if all you're trying to do is raise a small amount of water and don't care how much water is "wasted" in doing so, ram pumps can't be beat. I've toyed with the idea of putting them at the big lake someday to trickle water into the ponds that're a good 50 feet or so uphill from it.
There was somewhere in Missouri (I think Warrensburg) where we once rode the train to and back and at the station they had lots of old locomotives (I was in gearhead heaven!) and also had a functioning ram pump.
I think my family was happier thinking of it as "magic" prior to my explaining how/why it worked.
You're thinking zipper.
Was that the post you'd written immediately prior to the one you'd just submitted?
I suspect so since that's what sublime reported happening to her.
The change I made yesterday *should* have stopped that from happening. It's the thing I just wrote in an essay-length post about the webserver somehow seeming like it's getting ahead of the database server.
Looks like I've still got some work to do on that one.
That should no longer be happening as of yesterday afternoon.
Long version for those who like the geek details...
I finally had it happen to me, so I was able to dig in and see all of the details of what'd happened.
When you write a public message, it being inserted into the database is handled now by a single procedure that's wrapped in a transaction.
10 lines later in the ASP, a separate query is issued that finds the message_id of the last message you wrote. What happened in my case, and I'm sure you'll find happened in your case, is the message_id that the query returned and the system tried to redirect you to was that of a PM you wrote. That results in the "No Such Board" error. Similarly, if the last previous message you wrote wasn't a PM, I suspect the system would take you to that message instead of the one you just wrote.
It's been a bit of a puzzler. Largely academic at this point, as I changed the 10-lines-later query yesterday to read uncommitted data (data that the system thinks is still in the process of being written to disk), so that problem should quit happening.
What's been puzzling me is that 10 lines later in the ASP, what happened 10 lines up actually hasn't *finished* happening. If it had, the message_id of the message you just wrote would be the one returned in the 10-lines-later query.
It's like the webserver is getting ahead of the database server somehow.
A real head-scratcher.
It was suggested that in the message-insertion query I just grab the message number of the new message and hand it back to ASP, but I think that would likely make the problem worse. Because if the new message didn't "exist" 10 lines later, why would it exist only 2 lines later?
I'm going to try it, though. Because one factor might work in its favor.
The time it takes to pull off the redirect (load user data, the top menu, and grab the message), while extremely small in human terms, is an eternity in computer terms, and might be long enough for the new message to finally "exist".
But it's going to bother me and I'll be obsessed with finding the answer, because a committed transaction should "exist" immediately afterwards. Not a few milliseconds later.
AARRGGHH!!!!
Hopefully that's at least happening less frequently. Or maybe it happened while I was running a process that was probably pretty aggressive about locks several minutes ago?
In any event, there are ways to avoid that which I can now explore, having finally moved that whole thing to a single procedure at the database.
Probably because of the routine I just ran that synched reported message counts for boards with the real numbers. It should go away once you use those boards.
Really don't have a clue why that would be. Ad-blocker software perhaps? Paulie's pictures are hosted by our ad-server.
Well, my suspicions about some boards having inaccurate message counts was right and wrong.
A few did. That's fixed.
However, that's not the cause of the problems on any of the boards that were reported here.
I suspect a message-numbering problem (either a skip in the sequence or dupe numbers), which is Dave's area and he's out of pocket until Friday.
You're not Canadian are you? Most Americans in this part of the country know a handful of Spanish words because of our relative proximity to Mexico, even though we like to spell them phonetically.
I think French/Canadian slang for "cucaracha" is "churak". <g>
That's what I'd expect in the version of the problem Churak and Susie have pointed out.
I'll try to get that fixed today. What you and Susie are describing are both two symptoms of the same problem. Well, the same symptoms, but presented differently.
Not sure if this started when the old post_info had had enough because of the traffic, or the initial teething problems for the new post_info.
Has nothing to do with session state or cookies.
For each board you've got marked as a Favorite, a separate table is storing the number of the last message you read. The way the Favorites page works is simply to take the number of posts a board currently thinks it has (stored in the board table -- not counted each time from the message table) and subtract from it the number of the last message you read (as stored in that separate table for Favorites).
Susie has shown (and I saw) where some boards have an inaccurate total post count. Because at some point, post_info was broken in a way that a post would be submitted, but the counter in the board table wouldn't be incremented. Was broken that way for a span of about 30 seconds, but it was enough to throw the number out of synch.
And I think there was also at least once that the board counter was being incremented without the post actually going in.
So we've got the problem both ways. The board counter can be too low (what Susie and others have pointed out) or it can be too high, meaning the number of the last post you read can never reach what the system thinks the number of posts actually is.
Churak version: It's broke. I'll fix it today.
A spillway is in the plans. When it was breaching last year, I'd only just finished repairing the dam where it'd been washed out about 15 years ago. Hadn't gotten to the spillway yet.
The problem was that the spillway wasn't anything more than a slightly cut out part of the dam. It needs more substance to it than that (concrete) and needs to not be used as much (by dramatically increasing the freeboard, thus the total volume of water the lake can hold.
Hope Dave's got something that fixes post counts on boards. That one's a result of an error condition we had for about 30 seconds this morning.
Edit: I *think* all the problems with weird redirects happening occasionally after submitting a post are fixed. It finally happened to me and I was able to really dig in and see what was happening.