is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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You mean you'll do that work on your admin tools tomorrow?
My plate's full.
Don't know about you, but it sure does remind me of something in particular...
The way SI used to be. Where Jeff and Brad were always there. They lived and breathed the site the way Matt and I do this one.
You told Brad about a problem and if it was a baddie, it got fixed in minutes.
In this case, the fix was to check the incoming string (your search words), and replace every space with a "%20", which *all* browsers recognize as a space.
Try it now. It should work.
http://www.ambercat.com/helpdesk/support/issue2_533.htm
Bizarre. They want you to *upgrade* to 3.00???
I'm still seeing what I can do about it on this end. Matt likely already knows, as I see the other searches don't have that problem.
Interesting. I just tried it in Netscape and got the same error.
If you look up in the URL, you'll see "back truck" after "txt2find=". It doesn't like the space. Internet Explorer fills that with a "%20", which is the hexidecimal notation for "this is a space character". Netscape doesn't do that.
If you go to the URL after you get the "incorrect parameter" and replace the space with "%20", it works.
I'll see what I can do about it.
Beats the heck out of me. "back truck" turned up a bunch of results for me.
I wonder if I did anything that certain browsers don't like.
Does the error message give the line of code or the name of the file and line number? Can you cut and paste the whole thing for me?
Question from a guy who usually has answers in this area.
The machines running this site are http://www.powerspec.com/systems/system_specs.phtml?selection=8650
As soon as I can afford it (read: "Subscriptions!"), I'd love to replace the box that's running SQL Server in the background. It seems to be doing okay for now, but the utilization is running high enough that I can see it staying in the 80-100% range permanently if we have about double our current traffic. I have a lot of optimization to do that'll lighten the load, but as soon as is possible, I'd like to have as much horsepower there as I can afford, assuming there's a way to get at least twice the horsepower I've got.
So, looking at the specs for this machine (it's got 1.5 gig of ram, though), is there anything out there that'll blow that one out of the water for its intended purpose? Are there multiple-CPU motherboards out there supporting the really fast INTC chips? What about the hard drive. It's a 7200rpm 100-gig ATA/100 drive. I'm thinking that the current IDE-type drives are real screamers, but considering their single-threaded nature, is there a much faster storage solution out there?
I'm tempted to try 3 gig of memory in that machine, but though it "supports" it, it's not "certified" for it. Whatever that means.
I just know that my cache hit rate for SQL Server is only about 75% and I'd like to see it a LOT higher. When SI was still being run by the Dryers, they literally paid attention to the tenths of a percent on their cache hit rate because they were always running 99.xx %. Which is understandable since Brad's a lot better with SQL Server than I am, I haven't even attempted to optimize the way it's used yet, and any post (not a cache hit) would get well over a hundred reads (cache hit).
While the existing source code works very well, it's not terribly kind to the SQL box, and I'm looking forward to optimizing it. We're doing about 200 hits per minute while I'm typing this and I'm watching the SQL box's CPU utilization hover around 30% with occasional drops to 10% and spikes to 80%.
So, since there's a chance we'll have enough traffic to really burden the SQL box before I get a chance to get done optimizing, what ways are there to throw money at the "problem"? Maybe as cheap as more memory? Anyone running the Intel® D845WN motherboard with 3 gig on it? Does it work? Reliably?
Oh, and the OS is Windoze 2K AS.
Speaking of which, imagine what the world would be like if AMD weren't in it. I suspect we'd still be shy of 1Ghz and the cost would be twice as high as it is now.
Yes, competition is very healthy.
That reminds me of a question a friend and I have disagreed about for years. Perhaps this belongs on another thread, but you reminded me here, so I'm asking here.
I maintain that the more "work" a computer is made to do, the hotter the CPU gets. That, for example, the CPU in the site's SQL box is currently a lot hotter than the one in my identical workstation.
He maintains that in the digital world work does not create heat.
Who's right?
What started this debate for us is that I once had a machine that would work just fine as long as the workload was light, but that if I ever really pounded it, would lock up, and wouldn't boot back up until it'd been allowed to "rest" for a while.
Though I'm "Intel Inside" (ever since my car got stolen at a movie theatre -- but that's another story), I have an awful lot of respect for AMD. They got into a market that was not only already dominated by a gorilla and had a high cost of entry, they made the gorilla flinch. Many times. Now they're a monkey on the gorilla's back, as it were.
I have a lot of respect for companies that look at a mature marketplace that's already seemingly wrapped up and say "We think we can do it better" and just go for it. <g>
I was talking with a friend of mine recently who runs one of those small-time computer shops locally. The kind where you go in, tell him what you want, and he puts it together for you using parts he buys at the local wholesaler and slaps his own label on it.
The conversation was about AMD vs INTC. We talked about how it used to be you didn't buy AMD unless you were a bit of a risk-taker. Radical fringe. Because though it was *supposed* to work just like an INTC, it was hard to believe that it was really 100% compatible.
But we agreed that things have changed and that not only is AMD a viable option, it's often the better option. He's an AMD man (and sold me the CPU I'm using in my internet-access box) and according to him, roughly 90% of his sales are AMD. He always pushes AMD and the only time he sells INTC is when the customer demands it.
I suspect this kind of grass roots support for AMD is far from uncommon. And the thing is, INTC man that I am, when people ask me (which happens at least once a day) what kind of computer they should get, I tell them that while their needs may be different from mine, I actively avoid the likes of Gateway, Dell, Compaq, etc because I frequently modify/repair/upgrade my own machines and I won't own a proprietary architecture.
I always steer people toward those small-time shops that build their own. And as a result, a lot of people who are influenced strongly by this INTC man's recommendations end up owning AMD-based machines. How's that for a paradox?
Personally, I've almost always built my own from piece I've bought wholesale. And used to build a lot of boxes for consulting clients. Then I started buying them from my small-time shop friend (an old crony from the BBS days), but in the past month or so, I've bought a total of 5 new machines, 2 of which are running this site, from the local Micro Center store. They carry this PowerSpec line which is decently-priced, and completely generic-compatible.
In fact, here're the machines I use for the site and for my own workstation (each bumped to 1.5 gig memory): http://www.powerspec.com/systems/system_specs.phtml?selection=8650
They seem "solid enough", and I expect they'll last the site quite a while, although when I can afford it (read: "when enough people subscribe"), I'd really like to see if I can get some more horsepower and data-access speed happening on the SQL box. Wonder if there are multi-CPU 1.9Ghz (and higher) motherboards out there.
test ztesty
I always hear "them" saying that the AMD chips are faster and cheaper than the INTC's, but for the comparatively small price difference (as a portion of a whole machine's cost), I sleep a little better at night knowing this place is running on a couple of Intel's CPU's. Whether it's really "better" or not is irrelevant. I buy it because of the brand.
Speaking of Krispy Kreme, I've found them to be a huge disappointment. I love krullers, eh, and the ones at Dunkin are a lot better than at KREM. No comparison. To me, Dunkin is still the more "branded" one, like INTC.
And getting back to INTC, I'll always have a warm place in my heart because, on a percentage basis, my best options trade ever was some INTC July calls about 4-5 years ago. I forget the strike price. But this was back when you *knew* INTC wouldn't disappoint on earnings, and a split was taking place the week of expiration.
I bought a batch of OTM calls for $450 two weeks before expiration and sold them for $8800 the day before.
Have been fond of them since.
What this boards needs is a good ol'-fashioned AMD vs INTC slugfest. LOL
Come to think of it, I do still have one AMD in the house. It manages the internet connections for the other machines.
Will it never end?
This site is running on a pair of what was only recently INTC's finest: Pentium4 1.9Ghz. And I couldn't believe how inexpensive they were.
The rule of thumb that I've heard is that you don't notice a speed increase unless it's about double what you're used to.
So, are we going to go up about 100khz at a time with little effect on the market until we break another major threshhold like 5Ghz? Personally, I know I won't be a buyer again until there's something out there that's a pretty sizable jump from what I've got now.
On the other hand, there are probably plenty of people still running machines slower than 1Ghz who may just be waiting for times like these, when really fast stuff (but not "the fastest") is available really cheap.
Aren't you glad I don't have my thumb on the "suspend" button? hehe
Actually, I forgot. That's *two* real trucks. A Ford F350 duallie (that we call "Truckzilla") and an old Ford 8000 dump truck.
Too bad it's not named "iGrub". Fits so nicely with "iHub".
Hmmm.... I like that. You mean next 10 unread posts of boards you've got marked, regardless of which board they're in, right? If so, Matt and I need to talk about that one and see if we want to add it to the (always growing) list.
You know, you guys have to go easy on me, though. I've whipped out a lot of code since my arrival and the list isn't shrinking. And no, there are no intentional double entendres in that sentence, Corran, JXM, and Poet. LOL
Only because you're into Chevies and I'm not.
I'm sure I've told you that, all kidding aside, I've got a Chevy truck. Fortunately, I also have a *real* truck. <g>
I laughed so hard, thinking of you,
I have that effect on women. <g>
I'll see it when it hits cable. I don't generally like movies that make you think. I prefer to leave my mind out in the car and just be entertained.
Well, I could only roughly speculate. There were usually comparatively few spam deletions there because before GNET/INSP botched up the code, it was darned tough to mount a serious spam campaign.
For personal attacks, I'd say we're at a much lower rate (per 1k posts) than SI was during its OTCBB (RMIL, DGIV, MTEI, etc) heyday and only a slightly higher rate than SI is now. One constant is that personal attacks in stock-specific bigger issue boards are nearly non-existent. You take the biggie boards on SI (DELL, CPQ, INTC, AMD) and out of several hundred thousand posts between them, I'd guess fewer than a dozen have *ever* been deleted because they were personal attacks. So few that of those boards, I can only remember one person who I had to occasionally warn or delete and who was the recipient of posts I had to delete. I don't recall that I ever suspended anyone for personal attacks in those threads.
It seems an inescapable fact of life on message boards that OTCBB discussions are prone to more "strife".
I don't have the stats in front of me right now (it'd be interesting to calculate them) but I'd guess that at least 75% of this site's stock-specific traffic is currently OTCBB. However the deletion rate is probably far lower than it was on SI. It seems that way at a glance.
There are two reasons that come to mind:
1. On SI, you could really lay into someone and the post would stay there for a long time. Here, it won't see the light of day very long (hopefully). There's less "success" in blasting someone here. You're less inclined to cuss someone out if your work of art will likely disappear in minutes instead of hours.
2. The average OTCBB investor nowadays (at least here) isn't quite the same person they were 3 years ago. There's more tolerance of dissenting viewpoints, more careful consideration of the facts presented, and less of a "cheerleading" aspect to the discussions. Well, maybe not on RB. But that's the way I see it here.
The "strife" that's seen here is only noteworthy to me because it stands out in starker relief compared to the rest of the site than it did at SI. While at SI the OTCBB strife was a huge wall of sound, here it's more like a loud argument in a quiet restaurant.
Anyone who thinks the OTCBB-related arguments are really bad here didn't see SI at the right time. Or RB at *any* time. <g>
So, my educated guess is that deletions for personal attacks are lower on this site than they were in SI's busiest times, or than they *should* be on RB.
Would that that were possible on this planet. :)
LOL!
Actually, that could be done with one keystroke. Say, a mis-typed character in the TOS-reporting routine. Dump 'em all in, say, mr. mark's inbox. <g>
You and Bob are doing a wonderful job creating an important investment site. I know you get lots of compliments, but I'd be more impressed if all posters showed their appreciation by the manner and tone of their messages.
I see you got 4 replies to that. I'd about bet all of them are strong agreements with you. Make that 5.
We're moving to the big time (or trying to) and the conduct of those present will set the tone for how the site is viewed in the future, and to a huge extent, determine its success or failure.
That kid raked in over a million dollars in 6 weeks?!?
I really thought the era of large numbers of gullible "investors" was behind us.
I agree. I very actively dislike "Ignore". I supported it being introduced at SI, because the more vocal customers wanted it, but I never personally liked it and would never personally use it and don't believe it would (usually) be wise to do so.
I didn't think I was going to tweak the Message Search yet, but I did.
First, I put in Matt's suggested formatting changes. Yes, it looks a LOT better. I'm a geek, not an interface designer. <g>
Second, Matt said that some folks including him were getting SQL timeouts. I don't know if it's the search or that I've got IIS logging to SQL (which will change soon), but I went ahead and tweaked the Search to move some of the load onto the frontend and off the backend by trapping the most likely error conditions before they're submitted.
Now if you use words that're either on the Excluded List or contains fewer than 3 characters, those words are excluded from the search before it's submitted.
The "Exclude List" is a list of words that aren't indexed because they'll occur too frequently. Words like "and", "there", "because", etc.
So, if you submit a search for "Matt is the big kid around here", the results will be all posts that include "Matt", "big", "kid", and "around".
The words "is", "the", and "here" are excluded because "the" and "here" are on the exclude list and "is" is too short.
If any words get excluded from your search, you'll be presented with a list of excluded words along with your results.
Hopefully this will make the Search more useful and a bit faster.
Thanks!
Matt and I have been playing around with the searching for a few hours while I tweaked it. It's a pretty cool new toy! :)
We have Message Search now.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=239438
I've implemented the beginnings of our Message Search function. Expect changes down the road, but what we've got will work pretty well for now. And hopefully allow me to take on a few other pet projects here.
To use Message Search, type in your search word(s) in the "Search" box in the upper right of your screen, select "Message" from the dropdown to the right, and hit the "Go" button.
You can also check the "Messages" radio button at the bottom of the screen and type your search word(s) in the box provided there.
Some notes about Search:
1. It supports multiple words. The results will be an AND of the words you entered. For example, if you type "Hewlett Packard", the search will return messages containing BOTH words.
2. The search the 50 most recent messages matching your criteria.
3. There is no time limit on the search. It searches every post on the system.
4. It's very nearly real-time. New posts show up in the search with 5-10 seconds of being written.
5. I'm leaving it available to everybody for a little while. It'll soon become a Premium function, available only to subscribers.
I haven't implemented elegant error-trapping yet. The use of any "excluded" words, such as "the", "if", "and", etc, will cause an error message.
If it's a word that is likely to appear in nearly every post, don't use it in the search. It doesn't hurt us; you'll just get an error message and have to hit your Back button and try again.
I'm looking forward to hearing feedback about Message Search. Don't ask for new features for it yet, as there are plenty planned. However, I'd love to hear your feedback on aspects such as formatting or any unexpected errors you encounter.
Use this link to provide feedback on this new feature: http://www.investorshub.com/boards/post_reply.asp?message_id=239439
What kind of fuel is Matt feeding this system? I love the speed.
Glad you asked.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=239413
Guess I should've put this in a while ago.
Shortly before I "uncloaked" as being part of Investors Hub, I trotted myself down to the local computer store ("Micro Center") and picked up a couple of PowerSpec machines, brought them home, formatted the hard drives, and set them up to be the machine's we're running on now.
Each machine specs out as follows:
Pentium4 1.9Ghz processor
1.5 Gig memory
100-gig ATA/100 hard drive
100-meg NIC card
Both machines are plugged into a UPS that should give us about half an hour of runtime in case of power outage. The ISP is in a part of town in which outages are rare, and the priority for power restoration is very high.
One is our "frontend" machine and the other the "backend". The frontend machine has an extra 100-meg NIC in it connected to the ISP. The NIC's that were already in the machines are used for our intranet. The frontend machine is accessible via the internet and the backend (hopefully) isn't.
Each machine is running Windoze 2000 Advanced Server, with IIS handling frontend duties. The backend is based on SQL Server 2000.
For bandwidth, we're sharing a 100-meg pipe with all the other machines located at that ISP, which aren't very many. More than enough bandwidth.
So, if the site seems to act like it's running on some decent hardware, it's because it is.
As an aside, we've found that the boot time for the frontend box is about 24 seconds. Not too shabby considering it's not running XP.
test ztest
ztest
The other day you were Don Juan.
Now you're Hercules.
Next week, what -- Buffett? Einstein????
http://www.investorshub.com/images/mb1.jpg
Progress report on message-search. I'm working on it. The part I'm at now is a bit tedious. The code to make the hashing tables. Once that's done, a rudimentary version of message-text searching won't be far behind and I'll implement it and polish it in place.
I'm really in a hurry to get this one done.
As my initial post said, I've got other responsibilities, but am just doing the geeking part right now because it's what's most needed. Once I'm satisfied with all that, then I get to move on to the other fun stuff.
I'll let Matt decide if he wants to put that on my list.
If there's a big enough need (there likely is), I can fix it (later) so that those links will resolve correctly. Matt, if you think we need it, can you add it to my list on a medium priority level?
Made a routine to update the number of boards within categories with the correct numbers. Should be correct now and we can run the routine again later if it gets off again. This is a stop-gap until I can make the routines that need it fetch realtime data to begin with.
Ohhh, unhappy day. This is what I got when I clicked on "Next" at #8737 on The Question And Answer Board at about 5:00 p.m. EST, Friday evening, 01/04/02. A return to #8737 and a retry (after a delay to pen this dutiful note) worked OK:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]SHUTDOWN is in progress. Log off.
/boards/top.inc, line 7
Fred
There was something odd happening on the SQL box, which was draining resources like crazy so we bounced it. It was probably down about 15 seconds or so.
Bob