is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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Because of the size of our combined sites, we're a good litmus test for the Finance space, and we also saw a strong Q1 for advertising and Q2 has started out substantially stronger.
On any engine I've worked on, you don't necessarily have to remove the crank all the way to replace the rear seal, but it's basically the same amount of work.
Unless you can get the pan out (unlikely in most RWD vehicles) with the engine in place, you're yanking the motor.
Technically, you only have to get the main caps loose and the rear cap off to replace the rear seal, since doing so will allow you to pry the rear of the crank just enough to do the replacement. The weight of the crank might just be enough to have it give you the slack you need.
If it were me, I might be tempted to tear out the old seal any way I could, after removing only the tranny and flywheel, and very carefully tap a new one in. It's how we replace seals in motorcycle forks. Destroy the old one taking it out, and drive a new one in. But seal-drivers are readily available that put the new seals in quickly and without any risk of damaging them. I've never seen one large enough for a car's rear main seal. And wouldn't swear it's not locked into a groove in the journal anyway. If memory serves, I don't think I've ever encountered a rear seal that was any more than a press fit.
But if you find that you can't replace the seal this way, no harm done because you're yanking or at least unmounting/raising the engine anyway.
If you attempt the easy way, the most important thing is to make sure you don't turn the crank at all once you've loosened the mains, as one or more of the bearings may've stuck to the crank instead of staying put in the crankcase, and you could have a real mess if it gets out of place. If at all possible (assuming you're trying the in-car replacement and have loosened the mains to make it easier or get around a locking-groove or too-tight fit problem), make real certain all bearings are where they belong when you retighten the main caps. You'll know pretty quickly if one is out of place because light torque on the nuts or bolts won't close up the gap between the cap and the crankcase. More than 99% of the time, the bearings will stay where they belong, but don't thumb your nose at Murphy.
What? Isn't the answer <whiiiiiiffff> obvious?
Of course. Otherwise I wouldn't have commented at all.
A lot of what was mentioned has already been discussed on this side of the screen. Especially that the scale has gotten so enormous that the job has gotten too big.
iHub is currently running at about 75% of the pace SI was when I was having to work 80 hours per week just to keep up. I wouldn't have lasted as long as I did were it not for changes that were made that we plan to implement here when we're ready and capable.
Don't ask for further details, as I won't get into them.
This is really quite the puzzler. Of course, we've encountered good puzzlers and gotten through them before.
Dell is at the ready to put a new motherboard in the machine as soon as I give the call. Got a case number and everything.
Don't want to go through that until I've explored all possible software/configuration causes.
<hic> I wash shteering jusht fine, you shnot-nosed lil'.... <thud>
Well, there's still tonight.
I've run out of ideas from just looking at the old config and SI's config and no changes I made seemed to have helped.
Time to (<shudder>) Google this one. And/or call Dell.
What's really puzzling is how quickly a "Timeout expired" error message appears. Instantaneously.
Yeah, it's either a problem with a NIC (was originally) or something different in the way it's interacting with the db, which I've moved to the top of the list of suspects. I'll do a side-by-side comparison today.
I'm also not going to rule out the possibility that IIS6 doesn't close the db connection without being explicitly told to do so in the asp. And I'm not sure we do that.
The number of locks on the db half an hour before the market opened while using the new box was about triple what it is right now, during a busy time of day, running the old box. Highly suspicious. We might be hitting some threshhold on the number of users/locks allowed, or some or all of the locks are too aggressive.
I'll have to do some studying and see if it's not cost-prohibitive to open/close the db connection on every page load because I can't help but be suspicious that 220 locks is a problem.
Unfortunately, we don't really have a comparable model to use to make sure everything's set "right". SI is the only other webserver running this OS and version of IIS, but it's all running ASP.NET rather than the old ASP we're using here.
Edit. I can't believe I did that. I thought I was posting privately!
Actually, your posts have been read and discussed behind the scenes. A lot of what you addressed is more my problem than Matt's and is taken under advisement.
I see every good reason to have both the pro and the con viewpoints expressed BY INVESTORS IN THE COMPANY CONCERNED. But by the same token I can not see where constant bashers, who are admittedly not holding shares, should be allowed to disrupt the boards when everyone is supposedly here to try increase the value of their investments.
Wow! Did you really just say that? I get more incredulous with every read.
Ownership of shares shouldn't be a prerequisite of discussion and using posts to increase the value of a stock is just way wrong.
Bob, revealing what a person says to you by PM is a violation of the TOS. Maybe you need to read it again.
I stand corrected. And quite surprised.
BTW, revealing what was said is a violation of the TOS.
Ummmmm.....
Are we reading the same Terms of Service?
I'm not an Administrator here, but I've gotten pretty good at predicting Admin action and I think there's gonna be some repercussions if a certain Admin gets here and sees all this stuff happening in his board.
It's in the long-term plan.
Anudder test.
Site's really crawlin' for me, Cap'n.
I think it's proven to be consistently fast if all the ports are open.
Have we tried setting the open ports to match SI's webserver rather than iHub's old one? Might be worth a shot since they're both the same OS.
What Serf said.
Although I hadn't considered that the font used in the text entry box might be under browser control.
I just know that I never did find a way that I could control that on the application side of things, short of using a bunch of Javascript, which I won't do.
While it would be possible to approximate the width on edits, because the text entry box of a form uses a monospaced font, there could be as much as 20% innacuracy in that estimate. Or more, I'd think.
test
Keep lookin'. <g>
Been like that for ages. Hiding the iBox and hiding the Quotes are two separate things. Although I thought I had the quotes hidden by default.
Fixed. Both of them.
Note to self. Need to grab noise.eng from the old box. And check to see if there are any other references to the WINNT directory, which is the WINDOWS directory on this box.
I think the new box will be just fine now. I'm satisfied the whole problem was with the NICs and doing a Windoze Update fixed it for some inexplicable reason.
What I'm really looking forward to is what kind of load this box is under Monday. It's got quite a bit more oomph than the old one.
Edit: It took a helluva long time for this post to go through. No timeouts yet, though, which is the problem we were having before.
Submit on Edit took forever too. Darnit.
Mind putting the new webserver into production while you're at it? It should be ready to go, and no time like the weekend to test it.
I encountered the exact same situation many moons ago with a BB company whose office was local to me. I went over there and talked with them at length a few times and I ended up being pretty optimistic about the company and was a frequent contributor to a board on SI about them. I hadn't yet learned that "call the company" is insufficient DD and that many of these companies will tell you what you want to hear so you'll buy their stock.
I found out the CEO had been lying to my face about the OS, the float, and his own holdings, and that the IR person for the company was posting incognito on the board, touting the stock.
I posted about it, was called a basher, and just left it at that.
If you find some negative info, all you can do is post it, and do so in a way that doesn't bring into question your own credibility (vulgarities, etc), then leave it at that. You can't save fools from themselves. And shouldn't want to. They'll only learn the hard way. The smart ones will independently verify what you've reported and take appropriate action and won't get hurt as bad as the rest.
Close-minded cheerleaders deserve their eventual fleecing and you can take comfort in that and hope they don't sucker in too many others.
She ended up scoring a 1 at State on the solo, too.
And I finally got around to converting last year's and this year's solos to MPG format.
Last year's solo was Concert Etude by Alexander Goedicke, who, as it turns out, was a pianist, not a trumpet player, which explains why the "background" instrument is so aggressively-written. It's really more of a trumpet/piano duet. The piano part is so aggressive that we learned the hard way at district that I needed to test the piano's feel before diving into the song and if it was a piece of junk (as is the one I'm playing in this video), a lot of fast stuff needs to be left out because you can really butcher it if you don't have a good piano to work with. At State she asked if I wasn't gonna test the piano and I pointed to the "Yamaha" on the keyboard cover and said "Nah. It's a good one." Wish I had a recording of that, as it was our best performance of it by a substantial margin. I didn't have to leave anything out on the piano, and she nailed it pretty well. Surprisingly, she got a 2 rating, being dinged for "interpretation". She consciously decided not to play the song mechanically, as she's always heard it done. In her words "There's a real nice song hiding in this 'Study' and that's what I want to play."
This is a particularly aggressive song for a high school student to attempt. Especially a sophomore. Trumpet Performance majors often use this as a recital piece at least a couple of years into college.
Noteworthy in this video is how "into" her songs she gets in this setting. She never gets nervous before these kinds of performances. Only when she's playing in a room looking at a judge and wondering what he's writing down. She's very much "in touch" with the music she's playing and what's happening, including with her pianist, as is evidenced twice in this video when I lost the rhythm in one section and she instinctively turned toward me and gave the downbeats more emphasis so I could get back on track, and near the end of the song when the wheels suddenly fell off in an important measure (she'd already played a lot that night, including sitting in on Tuba with the junior-high band, and her chops were at the ragged edge) and she turned to me so I could use body language to show her the downbeat of the next measure.
I've also noticed that she (like I) kinda "dances" to the song she's playing, which you don't often see.
We've always communicated very well when we're performing.
Anyway, here's her solo from last year. Anyone who thinks they might want to watch either of these multiple times, please just do me a favor and right-click the links and save the files to your computer so we can save on bandwidth. At about 45 meg each, you don't want to wait on the internet if you want to watch one a second time.
http://adserv.stocksite.com/images/Darth_Soph_Solo.mpg
This year's solo was Willow Echoes by Frank Simon. I didn't think much of this song the first time we ran through it because the piano part is a lot easier than last year's, and to this day I find the ragtime piano interludes really weird. They feel like they belong in another song.
Unlike last year's solo, she absolutely nailed this one at concert time. Though, as you'll see, it's FAR more difficult for the trumpet player. The hardest part for me is just keeping up, even with my relatively simple parts. Her performance being much earlier in the program definitely helped her.
Again, in this one, she's dancing to the song. I love how at the end of the opening cadenza, her body movements are in perfect synch with what's coming out of the horn.
Again we see communication happening between us. I lost my place (I don't know what I was thinking at the moment, but it had nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing) and didn't play for a measure or two while I tried to find my place on the chart. She turned toward me to make sure I hadn't fallen off the bench or something.
A couple of funny things in this one. You'll note she gets a solid round of applause at the end of the second section when (at least to us), the song obviously wasn't over. I'd actually warned her the day of the performance that this might happen, and in this section in particular, because by Boogerville standards, it's a real face-scorching section. I told her if it happened, to just enjoy it, and know she's gonna flatten them against the back wall of the building on the last section, which she has always nailed.
The second funny thing is that when we rehearsed it that day at lunch, within 4 measures or so of the end of the song, finishing up the most blistering section of it, she paused for a VERY long time in a place where I'm accustomed to her simply taking a big breath for the high C she has to hold out at the end. During rehearsal, I started cracking up because she took a swig from her ever-present water bottle and chided me for my laughing and said "Wait for it....".
The idea had occurred to her while she was playing it and we decided to incorporate it into her performance. I thought the big pause was even more obviously not the end of the song, but it fooled the audience. I even played it up by keeping my arms poised ready to slam back down onto the piano, but we still tricked them. You can see the band director (my page-turner) snickering as he realizes what she did.
Anyway, I really love this performance. What a difference a year makes! She's got plenty of high notes in this song and though she can't play as high as I can, she's got the sweetest-sounding upper register I've ever heard from a trumpet-player, bar none! Some of it might be because of her playing Mellophone in drum and bugle corps (in case I hadn't mentioned earlier, I'm the 1st Soprano player and horn section leader for a local senior corps that's in start-up mode and she's the only kid and only Mellophone player in it). I've been trying to find a copy of Chuck Mangione's "Feel So Good" to hopefully get her interested in taking up Flugelhorn. She's got the tone and control for it.
Without further ado, here's the solo we played this past Tuesday.
http://adserv.stocksite.com/images/Darth_Junior_Solo.mpg
Hold down the Alt key and press the Print Screen key.
Open a decent graphics program. I'm not sure which ones support this, but I use LViewPro.
From that program's menus, select "Paste". Ctrl-V might work. I've never tried it.
Save it (as a JPG if it gives that option -- full-size BMPs are HUGE files) and send it to Matt.
I'm convinced AdBrite was the sole culprit. Because of the proximity of their code to the line that spits out the message.
But we'll see.
And thanks, Dadd. That helped me quickly fix what'd been proving to be a real puzzler.
Everyone, screen shots are, by far, the most useful tool for us when we're trying to solve a problem that we can't replicate ourselves.
Fixed.
Matt emailed me a link to this message and, for the first time ever, I was able to see exactly the problem being described. Yeah, interesting coincidence that I got to witness the problem first-hand finally, when trying to read a message describing the problem.
You'd think that being the company geek, that would've given me all I needed to identify the source of the problem. It didn't.
I was suspecting the 336x280 ad all along and just patiently waited for it to load and figured once it did, I'd know who the culprit was.
Nope. When it did load, it was an ad I'd seen many times, so I knew it couldn't be a consistent problem-causer, and I had no way of determining which agency was running it.
Then I saw an email someone had sent to Matt that had a screenshot of a totally blank message, but the 336x280 ad was visible.
Much to my surprise, and of infinite benefit to me, was the status bar. We need to collectively thank whoever it was who sent Matt that message because the screenshot was so useful AND because they had their status bar display enabled. I think it's disabled by default in IE.
Hey, and they use my personal CSS. Good taste!!!
Anyway, the status bar shows "Waiting for 4.adbrite.com".
I checked read_msg and, sure enough, right before the line that displayed the message text was the code to call AdBrite to see if it's time to serve an Intermission (Matt calls them InterSexual -- a variant of Interstitial, which he hadn't heard of) ad.
I was already a bit iffy about AdBrite. I love Intermission ads. But we've had various problems with AdBrite before. And their payout percentage is downright insulting, but they're the only company I know of who serves these.
I think they're a bit of a startup. And one of the problems we've been having is getting quality advertisers who are a good demographic fit.
So AdBrite is gone. If they eventually ask me why we're not delivering their ads anymore, then I'll go ahead and tell them.
Speaking of ads whose source I can't identify, if ANYONE happens to catch a good peek at their status bar while that auto-expanding American Express ad is loading, please let me know what it says. I want to kill it, but can't find where it's coming from. It's the 728x90 that expands to 728x300 for 3 seconds when it first loads, covering things like login input fields. It's more intrusive and inconvenient than the Intermissions and I KNOW nobody's paying us enough for an ad that we'd allow it.
We backed out the hardware upgrade the evening of the day we did the upgrade and are planning to move back to that hardware this weekend.
I've fixed the problem and am writing a post in another window about it.
Is it only that ad or is it different full-page ads?
Every time? I checked it out and only got one full-page ad.
Let me know.
That one's pretty darned fast!!!
Edit: I looked around and it appears I deleted mine rather than renaming it. Unless it's in an archive somewhere. I don't personally know where program archives are kept.
If you're talking about the Anagram Solver, sorry to say I removed it about 2 or 3 years ago. Too bad because it was really cool!
I'd come up with what turned out to be the fastest algorithm around (from what I could find) for unscrambling single-word anagrams and, much to my amazement, it was our most frequently-hit page on the whole site for a while.
Finally determined why. Some site or sites were making calls to my program and parsing the results and returning them to their own users as their own content. Yep. Even with the back-and-forth and parsing, it was the fastest thing available.
I didn't mind the misappropriation of my work. I minded all the hits that didn't result in ad views.
I so DON'T mind the use of the algorithm, that I'll share it here in case anyone wants to use it. After I hit upon it, it seemed extremely obvious and I wondered why it didn't seem anyone else had hit upon it.
Warning: Geek-speak follows.
In your word list (in our case, a 250k-word dictionary), add an integer field, then write a program to run through the word list and sum the ascii values of the lower-case versions of each letter in each word into its integer field. Index the integer field.
When someone inputs a word, do the same ascii-summing of the lowercase of the letters they entered, and select all words of the same value in your dictionary. It's surprising how few words will typically be returned.
Then do the usual thing of sorting the characters of the input word in alpha order and doing the same with the result set, and look for a match and return each word that's a match.
Arguably, the same could be done by adding a field that stores the letters of the word in alpha order rather than an integer, but integers use a lot less room and can be searched a LOT faster.
If you're not seeing the most recent posts unless you hit the Refresh/Reload button of your browser, your browser is caching too aggressively. To speed things up for you, it's displaying the previous version of a page (usually board.asp) you visited as it remembers it rather than as it currently exists.
If you're using Internet Explorer, click Tools, then Internet Options, then make sure you're on the "General" tab (which is the default).
In the "Temporary Internet Files" area is a button that says "Settings". Hit it. With a hammer, preferably.
Where it says "Check for newer versions of stored pages", make sure anything other than "Never" is checked. Personally, I have "Always" selected.
While you're on this page, you should also make another change to a very ridiculous default that Internet Explorer uses. The amount of space to set aside for temporary internet files. I have it set to 10 meg. I think the default is something like 10% of the size of your hard drive. So if you've got a 200-gig drive, it could very well be setting aside 20 gig of space for temporary internet files.
In my experience, if Internet Explorer has a huge number of files cached (anything over 10 meg I'd consider excessive), it starts slowing down something fierce. I first discovered this when I found that I had something like 200 meg of temporary internet files. It was taking longer for IE to check for a cached copy of a page than it would've taken to just download the darned thing over again. I reduced the setting, cleared out the files, and the browser was fast again.
Alternatively, what you're experiencing can be caused by an add-in such as PeoplePC (which claims to make your internet connection really fast, but all it's doing is making Internet Explorer changes you can make yourself if you don't care about nice graphics and realtime pages) or anything that claims to speed up your internet connection.
I avoid them like the plague. In the same way I avoid any and all browser plug-in toolbars because I implicitly distrust them. I haven't had any problems with the Alexa one (though I no longer use it), but new ones like Congoo I steer extremely clear of. Same with Yahoo and Google. I have to feel pretty warm and fuzzy about a company before I'll let them do anything with my browser that could potentially let them see everything I'm doing and a concern I have with Congoo is that since their business model is predicated on giving people free access to premium content, they may grab and store your paid-content page views to deliver free to others.
I ran across that one when I was Googling. I don't think it is, either, since they list their name on their website as "Liberty Petroleum, LLC". I couldn't find anything on their site indicating they're a public company.
No matter which chart I pull up on iHub, the only trades it shows are from today.
Well, that was the case the first time I looked. Now it shows that the last time it traded prior to today was around August of last year.
As far as past trading, perhaps. Hard to tell because at least Yahoo doesn't show historical prices, and the price today of 3 cents is showing as being up 3 cents, which typically has meant first-day trading.
I was just getting ready to post much the same thing myself.
Momo, you need to double-check the header of this board and make sure you don't have the wrong info.
There is apparently a private company named Liberty Petroleum Corporation, and I got an email purporting to be from them saying that they are NOT LBPE.
I'm still trying to independently verify this (I'm not one who mistakes "call the company" as "due diligence"), but so far I'm leaning toward believing that the statements in the email I got are correct and that the Liberty Petroleum Corporation whose website you cut/pasted content from is NOT the publicly traded company of the same name.
I'm currently unable to find anything at all on LBPE to confirm they're not the company who wrote to me.
The company who wrote to me cited www.libertypetrol.com and the email came from the libertypetroleumcorporation.com domain name.
IP and Domain information is inconclusive, but pretty darned convincing to me. libertypetroleumcorporation.com's registrant is in Phoenix and the libertypetrol.com website lists the same address on their Contact Us page.
I believe the public company was cited here as being based in New York. And the person who wrote to me said the same.
As a precautionary measure, I'm going to erase the contents of this iBox and save them on my personal computer in case I'm later proven to be in error in my conclusion that there's a case of mistaken identity happening here.
I'm doing some database tightening up and maintenance.
Also, we think we might be able to put the new webserver back into service pretty soon. It doesn't seem to be exhibiting the same symptoms now, which we narrowed down as extremely slow performance of one of the NICs.