is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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I think starting an SI thread to discuss SIS and different ways to use it would be an excellent idea. And would get me lots of feedback and give me lots of ideas to make it something that's getting used more often.
And possibly defaulting to a "5" rather than "No Vote" so that if someone's ambivalent about giving a rating, that gets measured rather than ignored. I'm also planning to make it so that it's not a 24-hour cutoff and instead have it default to their last non-no-vote choice and if their previous one was the same day, a change to it becomes an edit. Because intraday events can impact how one feels about a stock's timeliness.
Then make the results page a lot more feature-rich. For example, letting you not only look at results, but look at changes in results and, for example, list in either order, the tickers with the largest amount of sentiment change since x days ago. And provide access to other fields so users can make and save their own queries using the fields in any way they like. Like being able to factor in the number of votes, or the percent change in number of votes, for example. And when people have come up with their own queries that test well as forward indicators and they want to share and openly discuss their accuracy, save those as pre-built queries that anyone and everyone can run.
We have the rather unique ability to gauge investor/trader sentiment right where the rubber really meets the road, and I'd like to make that a useful tool for everyone. One worthy of weekly or monthly press releases.
I'd like to have it on iHub when it's completed on SI, but am not in a hurry. I'm not yet convinced it'll be as valuable here because what's most likely to happen is that the penny-scam dejour will get a ton of 10 votes, and it's not terribly helpful to use that as a negative indicator when you can't short the stock.
The same is true on SI and I've already had to take steps to thwart the manipulation of a certain unnamed user and his friends, but each time I throw something in to hobble their manipulation, they figure it out and how to get around it. For example, you might notice that on the homepage, there are no stocks listed that're rated as 10's because that list is only the top scores that're less than 10. I consider "perfect" scores to be unhelpful and likely manipulative. Although no such filtering takes place on the detailed results page.
In any event, it'll be a much more useful feature if the voting participation increases. When only 2 people cast votes for a ticker in a 2-day span, that's not very meaningful.
Very intriguing!
If it'd be helpful, I'd be happy to have the system let you specify a number of days worth of votes to report on. It may already do that, but I don't remember. Wrote it a while back.
But I'm very keen on seeing increased usage of it, both on the voting side, and on the results-viewing side. And so far it would seem you've discovered a useful correlation indeed!
I see that Matt already answered, but I wanted to add that as a courtesy, we have the system send you a Private Message reminder when your subscription is nearing expiration, and if you renew before your current one expires, the new one is added to the end of your existing one.
Test back atcha.
No.
We're under attack my Murphy's law here. This is not a major infrastructure change. We simply replaced the webserver with a faster one. Even if we spent all the money attempting to duplicate the new setup in a development environment (at a cost in the tens of thousands of dollars), we could never perfectly duplicate it, and I strongly suspect the current problems wouldn't have surfaced in any amount of development-environment testing.
It literally could be something as simple as a poorly-constructed patch cable. Which I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of because of the speed with which the site often returns "db not found" errors while the db is sitting there quite functional and quite underworked. Though it's also possible that shrinkfile is locking pages, which can't be avoided. Shrinking the db has been needed for a long time and all I can do is let it do its thing and get done in the hopes that doing so will improve performance.
Thanks, Phil, but you don't need to report all the current errors that're happening. There's definitely a problem with the new webserver communicating correctly and consistently quickly with the db. Earlier, the intranet was getting flooded as were the db CPU's, but that's not the case right now, so I'm going with the assumption that the dbcc shrinkfile operation is locking pages in the database while it does its thing.
Not sure what's up with that. I got one, too. But the intranet and the db CPU's were just idling along. Despite the fact that I'm trying to shrink the database using the brute-force method. I haven't successfully shrunk the db in several months and am trying the dbcc shrinkfile method now. Been running for almost 2 hours, which seems awfully long. But needs to be done. The db is 35 gig in size but there's only 26 gig of data in it.
If it hasn't shrunk it by late tonight, I'm going to shut off access to it so the process can have exclusive access to it and see what happens.
You might want to take a look at what's going on with that new drive in the adserv db box. Doesn't show up as a volume. Have tried setting it up both as Dynamic (default) and Basic, and it's taking a drive letter, and shows as being healthy, but you can't browse it. And nothing but the Computer Management snap-in can see it.
I suspect the BIOS can't handle the size of it. I installed CPU-Z, but it's not reporting any BIOS info, so doing a remote BIOS upgrade isn't gonna be possible.
I'll try to schedule another trip to the ISP soon to either put bigger SATA drives in the adserv frontend (and take this one to the office as a backup drive) or move this one to that box. I installed it in the db box simply for convenience. That box was a LOT easier to get at than the frontend box.
I'm going to do a reindex just to be sure. Gonna be slowness and outages for about an hour and a half.
When I got on an hour ago, the Intranet was going nuts. Pegged.
Just now checked utilization on the DB box and it's also been going nuts for quite a while, and I was getting timeouts.
Site running fine now and db box utilization is way down and I've started a trace. A blown-up index would explain a lot, but would be awfully coincidental.
I'm also a wee bit suspicious of the patch cable. New one.
Some performance issues hitting some people here. Not hitting me at all.
The huge drive I added to one of the machines is formatting. Will take hours. Took about 10 minutes to get to 1%. Turned out it's on the latest service pack, but I had to add a registry key to enable 48-bit addressing.
Running pretty darned fast for me right now, even on dialup. Haven't seen a timeout yet.
John was somehow able to edit the registry remotely to allow remote access, then remotely reboot it so we could TS to it.
Have at it. Dave, if you're looking, I enabled parent directories.
Actually, the old one was also dual Xeon's. This one just has 3.8Ghz processors and 2 gig L2 cache compared to the old pair of 3.06Ghz Xeon's and 512 meg L2 cache.
Having problems, though. Apparently some timeouts? And I can't remote-desktop to it. Bummer, because the new ISP doesn't have someone there we can walk through working on it.
Long been a wish of mine since we used keystrokes, not mouse clicks, back in the BBS days and I've always felt it was much better.
It'll finally be a lot easier in ASP.NET 2.0. A method called Console.Readkey.
So, yes. Unfortunately, I have to add the qualifier "eventually". It'll be part of our ASP.NET rewrite. Which is the biggest programming project slated for this year.
These spammers are just a tiny bit more resourceful and a LOT more aggressive than most.
Reminds me of what I tell cold-calling brokers. "If you're trying to get me to buy it, it's because you're selling."
Correct. Yes, we could add "Next 50" to Search right now, but Search really is an expensive mess with this kind of traffic on this version of SQL Server.
We're working toward it. The new webserver will be installed this Saturday. Doesn't help Search, but it's a step toward it. Next up (1 to 3 months) is a new database server with SQL Server 2005.
Once we're on SQL Server 2K5, then we'll tackle search. At this point, I see any effort put into search as effort completely wasted. Like doing open heart surgery on a death row inmate a month before his execution. Most of how it's currently done (on both sites) will be completely scrapped to take advantage of new functionality. And I'm hoping and half-expecting that I'll no longer have to break search tables out by year.
Define "work".
While you're at it, define "here".
Wow. Wouldn't surprise me if they were the source of the spam. It's really horrible.
Speaking of horrible, the English in that excerpt! I'm gonna say they're not based in a country where English is the primary language. Right?
I don't know about you guys, but if I could short this company, I would be doing so in massive quantities right now, for one simple reason:
They are being spammed relentlessly all over the internet. And unfortunately, I'm dealing with a lot of the recipients of the spam, who do a Google search on the ticker, and find us at the top of the list and think the spam came from us.
I make it a rule to never invest in companies who are spammed by either themselves, Investor Relations, other paid touts, or unscrupulous shareholders.
If I were a betting man (and I am), I'd bet that the price appreciation being seen right now is due largely to a lot of suckers believing everything they read in their inbox, and that tankage is on the horizon.
Not crushed worse by the fact that the response was negative? Bummer!!! :)
Just a little note to let everyone know that we're planning to replace iHub's webserver on May 6th and also move its existing webserver to adserver duties, and add some big hard drives to the adserver's database server to give us copious space for backups, log files, etc.
For the technoids among you, it's a noticeable, but not huge increase in horsepower for iHub. Its current dual-Xeon 3.06Ghz box (Dell 2850) is getting replaced with an 1850 with a pair of 3.8Ghz Xeons. The new box has Windoze Web Server 2003 on it, so we'll have the platform in place for our eventual rewrite in ASP.NET.
The adserver that'll be replaced with iHub's current 3.06 duallie webserver is a beige box I bought in 2001 that has a single 1.9Ghz processor in it. It was a fire-breather in its day. It'll be a door stop or maybe an extra computer for the office now.
There will likely be outages, but by all rights they should be extremely short. In a perfect world, no outages would be perceived by anyone except for people possibly having to log back in suddenly if they're not using cookies. But it's not a perfect world, so who knows what'll happen...
The only extended outage I foresee is the adserving system being down long enough for me to install a couple of 500-gig drives in its database server. That should only take minutes, then things are likely to be a bit on the slow side ad-wise while those monsters are formatted.
test
Anyone know where I can find an MP3 trumpet performance of "Willow Echoes" by Frank Simon? That's my daughter's solo for this year. It's specified as being for cornet/baritone/trombone.
She got a 1 on it at District last Friday so we're going on to State in a month.
The piano part is a LOT less sadistic than Goedicke's "Concert Etude" that we did last year, but the trumpet part is really something else. There's a part in it (last page on my part) where she picks up the speed to a ridiculous level and is playing something like 24 notes per measure when I'm doing about 2 chords per measure and barely keeping up with her. The band director was turning pages for me and commented later that he noticed I was supressing chuckling on that page. Can't help it. She just takes off at a pace that I can't believe I'm hearing a 16-year old girl play. Every time I dive into that page going full-bore I find I'm still struggling to keep up and it cracks me up because my part is so simple compared to hers.
Oh, there was only the judge and one other person in the room, so not the audiences other players were getting with applause, and she definitely prefers audiences.
At the very end of the song, the only feedback was "Wow!". In addition to the knuckled high five I gave her for the first time after a competitive performance. She nailed it! When we got out of the room I asked whether it was the judge who said that or the other kid in the room. Turned out it was the kid. But quite a crowd had accumulated outside the room and she was greeted with applause when she opened the door. The band director from the host school hugged her and said "You're an amazing trumpet player!" She got lots of hugs and praise.
Oh, she said the 1 she got was cheapened a bit, though. Earlier she heard someone playing the song she played last year. But at half the speed she'd played it and still messing it up, but they got a 1.
Let's see if that stops now.
The project threatens to break down the stranglehold on bulletin board stock commentary currently exercised by member-only sites.
"stranglehold"? "members-only"?
We have been both advertiser and publisher (displayer of ads) with Google. No more.
Google will eventually succeed in dominating nearly every line of business out there, but they'll eventually learn that if you're in the habit of entering areas in which your advertisers live, and crush them, advertisers will be hard to come by.
And I think it would be met with universal approval ! imo
Nothing, no matter how elegant or wonderful we might think it is, gets met with universal approval or anything approaching it.
As the guy responsible for the bank account side of things, I don't mind saying that one of the reasons I'm in favor of avatars is that they encourage people to subscribe. I'd been working for years under the assumption that the dollars/eyeballs ratio is higher for free member than for subscribers, but finally put it into a spreadsheet to analyze it, and my assumption was way off the mark. And advertising is a daily (nay, hourly) source of frustration for me, so I've decided we need to push subscriptions. But in the least-invasive ways possible.
I think avatars will accomplish that nicely. When we introduced them in profiles, many grandfathered members bought subscriptions only to get the dollar sign avatar. Even though it gained them nothing else in terms of available features.
Other things we're doing along those lines is taking free members to the subscription page when they first log on or on their first visit to board.asp for the day. And will expand that to Favorites later. And we've reintroduced monthly subscriptions, which is certainly helping.
It's been a long time since I've messed with the "My Settings" page, and there will be a learning curve involved in figuring out how I'm doing what I do there, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me to give premium (grandfathered and subscribing) members the ability to toggle the avatars off.
I'd also prefer to see them for both the author and recipient. It took a few page views before I realized it was for authors.
Oh, and I know I'm mis-using the word "avatars". These aren't technically avatars. They're icons. But because they're so small, and there is a variableness to them, I've just gotten into the habit of calling them avatars.
so how bout a drop down ?
Is this in reference to the Raging-Bull-emulating thing you were talking about earlier with regard to Favorites?
If so, I'm not even close to being sold on the idea as being a good one. The philosophy of our Favorites page is to use it as an on-site "homepage". Plus, it displays quite a bit more information about boards, and is also used to keep track of favorite people and to display URLs that people can add here rather than to their bookmarks.
Working for me now on a 60-second interval.
Actually, it's my fault. Sorta. Maybe.
The server was getting clobbered yesterday, so I took everyone's refresh interval and multiplied it by 5.
I just took out the multiple. We'll see if it works now.
If not, there was a much bigger change I made over the weekend that involves how that data is dealt with. Hopefully it doesn't have to do with that. I changed the default to no refresh, but that shouldn't have any impact on people who've set their own refresh intervals.
You're probably trying to search for some words that I've disallowed but am not yet making the system handle very elegantly. Basically any SQL verb like "drop", "select", "insert", "truncate", etc.
It's how I'm currently preventing SQL Insertion, which is the usually-malicious use of querystrings and form input fields to submit actual SQL statements to a database.
We're taking the overly cautious approach of analyzing every input field and querystring to make sure nobody can interact directly with our db server. Having to be overly cautious because a really malicious person using SQL Insertion can do a LOT of really bad damage.
Other things you can do in Search that'll trigger the insertion-detector and redirect you to the homepage are things like having % in your search string and having something other than a 2 right after it, since people often "mask" their SQL insertion attempts by using the hexadecimal equivalent for certain characters to get around a system that, for example, is trapping the word "delete" but doesn't trap "d%65l%65t%65", which converts to the same thing, %65 being the hex equivalent of the letter "e".
I'm planning to come up with a better approach eventually that doesn't overburden the machines because the word "drop", for example, would be a not too uncommon word people might want to search for on a finance site.
Not having fun right now. The dbcc error messages were pretty useless. Told me there were indexes that had repeated column names, but not which ones. And there are 57 indexes on that table, most of which, of course are of the "hind_[most_unhelpful_name_conceviable]" variety.
This is gonna be a long day.
I'll check into it. The previous time that I'd run it, it failed on some of the message table indexes. I'll delete and recreate those. Surely during the day on a Saturday is fine for that.
Interesting that it only took 26 1/2 minutes to do the whole db when it took only one minute less than that to do just the message table a while back.
Now I can finally cause a very prolonged case of the slows and occasional (maybe frequent) timeouts while I do a much-needed database reindexing and if I'm still awake when it's done, a couple of reboots.
If the price stays the same, you should be able to buy about 30 of 'em soon.
Just so it doesn't slow down the dbreindex I fired off a couple minutes ago. It's already gonna have the system pretty much dead in the water for about 4 hours.
Seems to have stabilized some. I'm going to have a close look at the indexes on the message table this weekend. I think we've got it over-indexed.
Fortunately, I always have the Profiler running and have an html page for looking at the output, sorted in order of most expensive, and though nothing stood out as really clobbering the system, the routine that fetches messages for the MailBox was showing up more frequently than I'm used to seeing it. Looked at the execution plan for it (which only helps up to a point) and decided to reindex one particular index and it seems to have helped.
There are still some remaining inherited structural problems with the db, but the worst of them were taken care of about a month ago. I still need to address the rest, though, and it looks like we're at a point where it'd be helpful to make a full reindex a weekly event.
Looks like it's back to normal now. The scary thing is that "normal" is 25-50% utilization during market hours.
It's a Dell PE4600 with a pair of Xeon 2.8's in it. I need to check to see if it can run the new 3.8's. If so, that and our planned upgrade to Windoze 2003 and SQL Server 2005 should help get a lot more headroom on that machine. And moving full-text indexing to a separate disk subsystem since FT doesn't particularly like RAID 5 or sharing with an already busy drive.
Edit: I'm always reluctant to do any dbreindexes during market hours because it usually swamps the server for a while, but it looked like a necessity this time and looks like it was worth it. Took about 2 minutes to reindex the one index. The last time I shut off IIS (so SQL could devote its full attention), a dbreindex on the message table took 25 minutes and 23 seconds.
And that's just one of many tables. Though it's by far the largest and most heavily-indexed.
That ad is supposed to wait until you've done 4 or 5 pageviews before displaying. I'll check with them. It definitely shouldn't come up if you just go to the homepage, then login.
And yet you.... Awww, heck with it. Gets old after a while.
We're keeping it as-is, but are taking notes and will do the next one differently. Dave hit me with some excellent ideas today.