is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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You saying there are things I suck at? LOL
Love that pumpkin graphic!
Next time I'm at RA, let's swap cars for a session or several.
Did we tell everyone here the story about your broken rotor and resulting trip? It was the only thing you could do, but it still cracks me up thinking about it.
"Ummmm, excuse me. Can you tell me how to get to Canada Corner from here?"
Initially, I could've seen myself stopping to ask that of a corner worker.
I think you should tell the story if neither of us has yet.
Thanks. Europe Rinse.
Yeah, "DERBOSS" was the name I chose for this laptop since the name "DADDY" was already used on my office machine.
Okay, I've got MailBox working now. Had to change the index around a bit.
This weekend is going to be full of slowdowns as changes get made.
I did start all this at 4 in the morning, but it's simply not possible for me to work full-time-plus, and still work the graveyard shift to do all the changes that're needed. Sorry, gotmilk. It is what it is.
Have you got a TS session going? I lost mine and can't get back in. too many connections.
Could you disconnect my session please?
Take it from me (the programmer), we haven't.
At least not intentionally. I've been doing a lot of work to the posting routines, but nothing that should've interfered with the insertion of charts. If charts from other sites work, then it's iVolatility doing the blocking.
I did the same yesterday and when that happens, it's a pretty good indication that they've blocked hot-linking.
There is major index restructuring and database re-orging happening this weekend. Started at about 4 this morning.
As for using what I know and already have available, what's wrong with that?
iHub was on a platform and using a programming language I know very well. Insane to suggest that because Linux is argued by some (many) to be better, I should've switched to that.
MSFT's working well enough for us. No reason to change it just because something else would be free and faster, if I spend money I can't afford to hire people to change it over.
Many cite Silicon Investor's change from MSFT/SQL to Solaris/Oracle as the beginning of the end for it. A MSFT setup was good enough for Brad and Jeff. A MSFT setup was good enough for iHub when I came on board. It was good enough to continue with.
And SI runs a helluva lot better having been rewritten on an MSFT platform than it every thought of doing with 3 1/2 times as many machines running Solaris.
If living well is the best revenge, the fact that we're doing well is the best response to that one.
Kinda odd that with so little knowledge of how all this stuff really works, and how well the sites have done both as sites and a business, you opine that I've done so badly by them.
Oh, something about programmers. They're kinda expensive. When taking over a site with about 10k hits per day (over 3 million now), if one is himself a programmer, one would be ill-advised to hire programmers one can't afford to pay, when one can do the job himself.
As for Matt's entreprenurial (sp?) spirit, it's a trait we have in common. Otherwise, this just wouldn't work. Had we run it as a big company, as you seem to believe we should (hiring programmers that'd be helpful but that we don't need and can't afford) we'd have gone belly up ages ago. I think SI stands as a good example. It was on a doomed path.
As would be going completely ad-free. To use your WalMart analogy, it'd be akin to just opening the doors and giving everything away for free, but still selling lawn mowers.
If you've got it figured out so well and know all the answers and I'm effing things up so badly, it'd probably be a good idea to buy my shares from me and show us how it's done. I mean, if you can make revenues and profits a multiple of what they are now, it'd be the best purchase you ever made.
Nope.
They might be blocking us.
Though I consider Microsoft an "evil empire" and had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into using their products because my future earnings capability depended on it when I was a consultant, I disagree or otherwise take exception to a couple of statements the guy made on that site.
1. "Startup Costs": MySQL might be free, but it can't hold a candle to SQL Server in terms of performance at this scale and some key features (stored procedures, for example) are very new to it. I've used MySQL, though will admit I haven't used it very recently nor tried it at this scale. I'd be curious if anyone's done a comparison of the two products on the scale at which we work them. We're talking a 25-gig database handling along the lines of probably 50 million transactions per day (I could be WAY underestimating that) yet with peak-period utilization averaging about 15%.
Does MySQL even have a full-text search?
2. "Performance per dollar": Can't argue with that at all, although we have to put orders of magnitude more emphasis on performance than performance per dollar. One of my biggest long-running beefs with MSFT is that they've never put enough emphasis on making their stuff *fly*. They just add functionality and expect you to throw a ton of hardware at it.
Also, I'm sure a LOT more money was spent on hardware and programming for the old SI than for the new, but the new has more features and is much faster and more reliable. And the new version seriously underworks 2 machines where the old one overworked 7 of them.
3. "Finding tech staff is easier": In this part of the country, total bull.
I replaced SI's 7-machine *nix-based (Solaris) system with a pair of MSFT-based machines over a year ago and have only recently found someone capable of backing up, erasing, and specing out the old SI equipment so I can sell it.
And I found them in St. Louis. About 4-5 hours from here.
4. "Perception of scalability". Can't argue with that one, either. As far as webserving goes, we've got infinite scalability via load-balancing. Not so with the database side of things. There is only so much work that machine can do. Fortunately, we're not even close to flirting with its limits and it'd take an unfathomable amount of very active new users to approach those limits.
5. "That Microsoft doesn't care about small businesses". Agree.
6. "That open source makes it easier to fix problems and/or build custom solutions." True enough, though of little use to me since I don't speaka da lingo and would have to hire unobtainable people to do it for me.
7. "On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms". I don't even understand this one.
8. "They don't want to take shit from their friends (or, even, their Venture Capitalist)" Irrelevant to me. All my friends are Windoze geeks. As is apparently most of the local geek population.
9. "No lockin". Heartily agree. Being a Windoze shop does limit my choices when it comes to software, but the number of choices I have is more than adequate for me.
10. "More security". Amen! I'm pretty tired of installing service packs (bug fixes) for an expensive operating system whose failure can be my business's failure. And don't even get me started on the amount of time I spend squashing viruses, trojans, etc when family members or employees get careless.
11. "More agility". Since I never need to be able to buy a server and have it up and running and doing a real job in less than 30 minutes, not an issue for me. Though I also think the "less than 30 minutes" for Linux is a major exaggeration.
12. "The working set is smaller". This is a core component of my beef with MSFT about not focusing enough attention on speed and efficiency. I'm still often taken aback by the fact that the operating system I'm using takes more *memory* than what my first *hard drive* had. Anywhere from 10-100 times as much.
How about now? You might've caught it during one of my query runs that didn't look like it was tapping out resources, but apparently was locking too aggressively, so I won't run it anymore today.
What's the consensus on performance this morning? If anyone's noticing a routine that's taking longer than usual to run, let me know which one.
Actions yesterday were just a small but important part of something we're hoping will yield significant performance benefits soon, though the specific actions taken yesterday likely didn't make anything faster right now and might've made a few thing slower that I didn't catch.
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Selling the Wing took us down to 12 bikes, but I picked up this cute little number for my daughter this weekend, so we're back at 13.
That's awesome!!!
Was the toaster really that clean or did you do something to make it look shinier?
Well, yeah, the toys were handy for getting us where we needed to be whilst wielding the aforementioned cordless drills.
And a rented one was really handy for lifting the enormous supports into place on the big building. And moving stacks of siding around.
Personally, I don't like trikes. They steer weird, and it kinda bothers me that a good bike is gonna no longer be a bike.
Oh, well.
I should add that that garage, like the bigger workshop, was built my me, my son, and my dad with our bare hands. Well, and some cordless drills. A lot of work went into them.
My son and I were taking pics of a couple of the bikes last weekend and he suggested we get all the non-buried runners in a pic, so here it is.
From left to right:
1. 65 Honda CB160 with incorrect exhaust, air filter, missing side panels, and missing speedo. Have a parts bike with all these parts in excellent condition. The parts bike is an enigma. The tank on it is from a 150 (presumably Dream), which is a very rare bike). Side covers also say "150" on them, but have the word "Warrior" which is a total mystery to me. I'm not aware of any Honda that would have "Warrior" on the side covers, and I know my old Hondas pretty darned well, and the verbage on the cover looks very OEM.
2. 66 Honda 305 Dream with incorrect exhaust and incorrect chroming of side covers. Have good side covers on another good runner but factory exhaust unobtainable. The other one has (amazingly) the original whitewall tires in surprisingly good condition.
3. 73 BMW R75/5. All correct except centerstand. Definitely my favorite bike. Have the non-toaster (6-gallon) tank for it but I like the looks of this tank. About 22k made, but this one is from last 6 months of production when the swing-arm was extended 1 1/2" to increase highway stability. No idea on the production numbers for the long version. Only green one I've seen, including on eBay. Would guess long green production measurable in dozens.
4. 03 Honda GL1800 Gold Wing. Finally sold on eBay and delivering soon. Buyer is in the business of turning these into trikes.
5. 05 BMW K1200LT. Nice all-around bike and very capable tourer. Lacks the charm of the older bikes, though.
Edit: That's a 1200 sq ft detached garage. The workshop is 6 times as big. And barely has any floor space visible. The "little garage" is just for parking cars, so it stays pretty empty.
Shouldn't be anymore.
I don't know if someone realized that "Go To Post" with a date rather than a message number is really expensive and was hitting it a lot or what, but it was showing up as getting a ton of action, and it was horribly expensive. As in timing out and swamping the CPU so much, others were getting timeouts.
I had to do an index change and code change and now it runs instantaneously and appears to cause no detectable CPU load. At least right now when I'm watching with the threshhold set to 200ms of duration.
Duration on it earlier was in the 30-60 second range.
Just occurred to me that if the system wasn't sending an expiration notice because an old one existed, it likely wasn't expiring the account. About 800 accounts probably just got expiration notices and got expired.
I just manually deleted the old system message receipts. I need to add a date field to that table so it'll be easier to automate it.
I thought I'd changed it so it would delete old system messages upon renewal, but maybe not? If someone got a subscription expiration reminder previously and the system hasn't cleared it, they won't get a new one next time their subscription nears or reaches expiration.
13 after the Wing's gone.
Please email me some examples and I'll get right on it. Specifically I'll need to know, if possible, if it's the private messages or public messages being counted incorrectly, and a few userid's I can run queries on.
I haven't done anything with the Inbox Status field, so not sure why things would be wrong now.
Got the Wing sold. Selling to the current high bidder and ending the auction. Tired of cancelling higher bids from people with zero feedback.
The buyer lives just an hour from where I'm gonna be in a couple weeks, so I'll haul the bike with me, making it a pretty easy transfer.
Daughter saw the 77 Suzuki GT185 on eBay, loves it and says she'd be happy to ride it to school on warm days and talked me into raising my bid. Just won it.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4583106477
Should have an interesting picture posted this week.
Had my son taking pictures of the two BMW's yesterday to be used in an article I'm writing for another site and he got the bright idea of getting *all* the bikes out and getting a picture of them.
Since the workshop is a fair ways downhill from where we were posing the bikes, we ended up going with just the runners that weren't buried in the far corner of the shop, which turned out to be 5 of them. Ranging from a tiny CB160 to the huge GL1800 and K1200LT.
Quick mental inventory:
1 Kaw G3SS (barely runs, only on ether)
1 Hon CM90 (runs and looks new)
2 Hon CB160 (1 runner, 1 parts)
1 Hon XL250 (runs fine)
2 Hon 305 Dream (1 runner and another soon-to-be runner)
2 Suz GT380 (1 runner, 1 parts)
1 Hon CB750 (no key or battery, so no idea)
1 BMW R75/5 (great runner and my favorite in the stable)
1 Hon GL1800 (runner, for sale on eBay, again)
1 BMW K1200LT (runner and I'd sell it if I could get what I owe for it, which I can't)
Total: 13 bikes (33 cylinders)
I do like the K1200LT. A lot! But on any nice day when I have my helmet in hand and go to the garage to throw my leg over something to take me to work, it's almost always the old R75/5. The 1200 hardly ever gets ridden, but I'm paying about $600 per month in payments and insurance on it. If I didn't have that, there are a LOT of older bikes I could buy.
My wife really surprised me last night when I was going through eBay (I'm higher bidder on 2 Suzuki GT's, but reserve not met, and tempted to increase my bid on one of them, which is a very clean 77 GT185 -- I prefer 76/77 GT's, and it's the same color as the running GT380, but I don't recall the GT750 having been available in orange) and I ran across a few CBX's, one of which was a little rough but very fixable. She said "Is it pearl white?", I answered "Yes. All 82's were." and she said "Get it!". I didn't bid on it. Yet.
None of the CBX's I saw listed had the Honda clock mine had. I happened upon that clock when I asked the parts manager at the shop I used to work at whether he had any of the Honda accessories for that bike and he said "Just a sec" and came back 10 seconds later with the clock for it. There was a clock and an altimeter available for the bike, and I've yet to find a bike that has one, let alone both. Probably never will.
The one I'm scoping out on eBay says the alternator was recently replaced, which does concern me a bit. The alternator wasn't the problem on those bikes. It was the alternator clutch. Because it was such a powerful bike with so little flywheel to it, they put a clutch between the crank and the alternator to reduce the flywheel effect and prevent twisting the shaft in half if you goosed the throttle.
Would like to start snatching up a bunch of bikes on eBay while weather has the prices depressed in St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Omaha so I can take the car hauler and make a big loop of a trip to pick them up, and there are a pair of XS650's north of Milwaukee I found while I was playing at Road America that I've got dibs on for $500 for the pair (both complete and cosmetically good but filthy non-runners from sitting 10+ years in a barn), but I really can't afford to go nuts buying bikes while I'm paying on the K1200.
Edit: We're wanting to get a picture someday of ALL the toys (bikes, cars, trucks, heavy equipment), but haven't figured out the logistics of that shot yet.
Our bookkeeper drives a Jeep Cherokee and had it die on her suddenly and refuse to restart. Turned out to be a fuse. Can't remember which one. She had it towed to the local shop because this happened just a day or two after they'd replaced the crank position sensor (CPS) and we assumed it had to be a CPS problem and the shop's problem since they touched it last.
He found a blown fuse, replaced it, showed us which fuse, and it was running fine.
Friday the owner of the shop called and said he had another Cherokee there with the exact same blown fuse and wanted to know if hers had blown since he saw it.
Turned out it had. 4 times. And she ended up replacing it with a 30-amp fuse (was originally a 15 or 20) and hasn't had the problem since, but had also determined the scenario that'd cause it and was avoiding that.
It was blowing that fuse (and killing the engine) anytime she backed up too aggressively. Or maybe it was anytime she went into Drive too soon and aggressively while backing up. Don't remember.
Leading me and the shop owner to believe something's moving. Likely a bared wire that's just making light enough contact with ground to blow a smaller fuse but not a 30.
He's going to try to find it and when he does, check hers to see if it's got the same problem, and let me know, and I'll post the cause/solution here.
Seems to me if it's happening when she backs up too aggressively, it's either going to do it under heavy braking, or seriously narrow down the possible culprits. If it doesn't do it under heavy braking but does when backed up too aggressively, I'd suspect something mounted to the engine or tranny and/or a too-loose or broken mount.
If I can remember this week, I'll put a 15-amp back in and have her give it lots of throttle in reverse and drive with the hood open (and the brake on) so I can see if the engine is moving too much in either direction.
So the Favorites page has the right time? That surprises me. I'm pretty sure we gave up on trying to get it to synchronize with a time server because it required leaving a port open we weren't willing to leave open. And I think we were having trouble connecting with a time server even with that port open.
Come to think of it, SI's webserver runs Windoze Web Edition 2003. Wonder if that's got the same utility XP does, is more secure, and can then be a time-server for the rest of our machines.
We've got some plans to increase the redundancy, reliability and performance. Upgrades? Yeah, that too. If SQL 2005 (aka "Yukon") ever comes out.