You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.

Subtitled For The Thinking Impaired

Can anyone point me to a subtitling program that doesn't screw up my files? Subtitle Workshop and DivXLand need not apply. Something that actually works without deleting text or formatting or both would be nice.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 45 words, total size 1 kb.

Karma: Piss Poor

Did I torment kitties in a past life or something?

Anyway, my new HDTV has not arrived. Yes, they called me yesterday to tell me I could come and pick it up. No, it's not actually there, as such.

Eh.

Okay, off to set up Apache 2.2 and stuffs.

Update: The other advantage of going for the borrowed word is that I could understand it as well. Context helps, of course.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

You Think You've Got Problems

Not only do I have a denial-of-service attack to worry about, I've got 3000 incoming trackbacks per minute.

And that's after I firewalled off the worst offenders. Don't know what it was before, because it made Apache seize up.

And my notebook, which is where I keep, well, pretty much everything, BSOD'd on me earlier, and is now giving me random Unknown Hard Errors.

Yes, I know. BACKUP NOW. What do you think I'm doing?

Update: Whoops, there it goes again. Okay, time for rsync.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:21 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 95 words, total size 1 kb.

Blue Tuesday Friday

My baby done left me.
My cat left me too.
Can't get this code to compile
No matter what the hell I do.
I got the Blue Screen of Death Blues.

My server got DDoSed.
My hard disk got fried.
Got everything fixed, then
Movable Type lay down and died.
I got the Blue Screen of Death Blues.
Yeah, I got the Blue Screen of Death Blues.
Should have stayed home in bed -
Now I got the Blue Screen of Death Blues.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 89 words, total size 1 kb.

Trackbacks Are Dead

We are running a very non-standard trackback system here at munu. The standard trackback script is disabled, and our custom one simply logs the trackback request in a text file, taking a small fraction of a second. Another process comes along once a minute, scoops up the log file, filters out the crud, and posts whatever remains. But that happens entirely in the background, and since 99.8% of trackbacks are spam, and it can detect and reject a spam trackback in 50 microseconds, the processing is very, very efficient.

Nevertheless, we are getting enough trackbacks right now to tie up fifty Apache processes. That's over half a gigabyte of memory dedicated to returning 404's to spammers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:43 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 122 words, total size 1 kb.

Overhead, Without Any Fuss...

I was feeling good this morning.

The chaos caused by the DDoS attack was largely over.

I have an interesting new project at work that will have spillover benefits for munu.

My new HDTV has arrived.

So has my copy of Rumble Roses XX.

I'd even had seven hours sleep, which is a record for the month so far.

The only problem left to fix was trackbacks, and that wasn't a huge priority. Trackbacks are nice to have, but 99.8% of them are spam anyway.

Oh yes, and the Zarkster had croaked.

So I settled in at my desk at work -

And then I find, over at munu, without any fuss, the blogs were going out. Every time someone got a comment, the main page of their blog would go blank.

I have absolutely no idea why this was happening.

All I know is that it didn't affect Ace.

Ace was running his own copy of Movable Type. An identical copy (in theory) but still a copy. Using the same database, but still a separate copy of the source code.

It took me a two hours of screaming frustration to find this out, but then I switched everyone over to Ace's copy of MT. And then whacked the server over the head repeatedly. And then it worked.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 226 words, total size 1 kb.

Fiddlicreepi

When tasked with building a huge and complex database application, it is valuable to have already spent half your life doing exactly that. Because then, when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, you can simply cast your mind back to how you solved it last time.

Having said that, multi-master replication still poses problems. Having said that, we're not running a bank here. We can say the order of transactions is not guaranteed. The detail lines are in a different order in Japan as compared to the Netherlands? Doesn't matter. As long as they're all present and correct, and the ordering isn't too badly screwed up (minutes matter; seconds don't), we can get away with it. It's a bit annoying that we need an extra field (the original server number) to guarantee uniqueness on some tables, but that's life.

And for the tables that need to be centrally controlled, well, we centrally control those ones. Makes up 0.01% of transactions and 0.0001% of database operations. No biggie.

Look for it on a website near you, probably around September. I can't divulge the details just yet, but don't worry, you'll know it when you see it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 197 words, total size 1 kb.

Um...

From the O'Reilly book, Ajax Hacks:

For example, if you have ever used Google Maps, the way you can drag outlying regions into your view conveys the impression that you have all of the maps stored locally on your computer, for your effortless manipulation. Imagine how unpopular this application would be if every time you tried to "drag" the map the page disappeared for a few (long) moments while the browser waited for another server response.

Imagine living somewhere other than the United States.

Actually, the screen doesn't go blank; instead you see the wrong map for a while as it downloads the tiles, blip... blip... blip... blip... blip...

The application would be so sluggish that no one would use it.

Yeah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 120 words, total size 1 kb.

Right

50 milliseconds to start Python and load the cgi, cgitb, MySQLdb, os, psyco, sgmllib, string, sys, and time libraries. (It's not currently using psyco, because it has no benefit for such a short program, but I left it in.)

50 milliseconds to connect to MySQL. (CPU time. Elapsed time is roughly the same, I think.)

7 milliseconds (elapsed) to return the 50 most recent matches from Ace of Spades for the word "bush".

10 milliseconds to process the results.

I'm going to set up a miniminx to get rid of 1 & 2. Just by way of experiment.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:27 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.

Taking Stuff For Granted

Ten hours ago I was intently focused on trimming my search routine down to single-digit milliseconds.

Right now I'm just happy to have a working server.

The DDoS attack came back.

Fortunately, this time I had working NFS and no drive failures. Much faster and less painful that way.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.