Each person starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People
who are tagged need to then report this on their own blog with their 7
things as well as these rules. They then need to tag 7 others and list
their names on their blog. They are also asked to leave a comment for
each of the tagged, letting them know they have been tagged and to read
the blog.
Well, okay then:
I have broken every major bone in my body, with two exceptions.
My favourite sport is parasailing. I do this every Sunday without fail, except when I am actually in traction. (See 1.)
I own a 6-foot teddy bear named Inigo Montoya.
I once ate an entire Thanksgiving turkey without gravy.
I am a tetraploid mutant, having 92 chromosomes. I also have two livers.
Despite that, I am unable to metabolize alcohol. Any alcohol I consume remains permanently in my system, like dioxins do for other people.
When asked to provide random facts about myself, I invariably lie.
1
Are you sure about two-layered navigation with the site-wide bar on top and blog-wide bar below? It looks a bit... frame-ish. The picture going under the top bar seems like an attempt to counter-balance the stackiness and create a more integrated appearance. However, my difficulty is, I don't know what to suggest. Overall, looks pretty good.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, June 20 2007 03:48 AM (9imyF)
2
We pretty much need that full-width bar at the top, for the ad and the mee.nu logo. Below that we (and the users) have a lot more freedom. And if you're a paying user you can do anything you like.
Our designer is working on variations of this, and she's better at it than I am, so she might come up with something better.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 20 2007 03:54 AM (PiXy!)
I'm also coding up a module to automagically crop, mask and filter images so that you can just drop them into the standard template without having to mess about in Photoshop.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 22 2007 02:08 AM (PiXy!)
5
Heck yeah! I want one of them sweet awesome layouts
Posted by: NthPower at Saturday, June 23 2007 01:12 AM (PV/4J)
6
What's the skinny on that update scheduled for the 24th we were talking about? Did it cause more problems?
Posted by: Will at Thursday, June 28 2007 01:01 PM (olS40)
7
I've forgotten what I was planning to do on the 24th... I think it was the user groups/forums/multiple authors thingy, in which case it was delayed due to the database bug (and also due to it not being finished).
If that was it, then I've finished coding it and I'm testing it now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 28 2007 09:31 PM (PiXy!)
8
That sounds like it. I'm going to be away from the tubes for the next day and a half, otherwise I'd volunteer to be the guinea pig.
Posted by: Will at Friday, June 29 2007 02:20 AM (SOx9v)
Pixy, that is absolutely an awesome looking design and the variations are exactly what I'm looking for. So with a mu.nu url, (gratis via your more than overwhelming generosity) when will the old munuvians begin to be able to migrate to Minx? I'm waiting with bated breath (but I can only hold it for so long... heh!).
Again, beautimous designs.
GM
Posted by: GM Roper at Sunday, July 01 2007 10:27 PM (S60yG)
Also this week I'll be working on a theme-builder to let you create designs based on the overall template and layouts demonstrated above. I need to do a bit of messing around with the image-processing library to automatically size, crop, mask and blend your images, but that shouldn't take too much work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 02 2007 04:11 PM (PiXy!)
11OUTSTANDING... I can hold my breath for a week ;-)
Posted by: GM Roper at Monday, July 02 2007 11:27 PM (S60yG)
Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal –
the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of
absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is
legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender,
ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that
at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts
rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells
him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts
wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a
half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there?
Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that
he should leave his fucking stilts at home.
That problem I mentioned about quote marks truncating post titles still seems to be happening. I went back to make a stealth edit to that "novel" post I made and the title changed after the edit. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it's dropping that text when it brings up the edit screen, forcing me to retype the title again before saving.
Also, right after that happened, when I tried to access the post management page, minx puked up a hairball.
It worked on the second try. Do you want me to send the text of the error page?
Posted by: Will at Saturday, June 16 2007 03:26 AM (SOx9v)
That problem I mentioned about quote marks truncating post titles still seems to be happening.
Whoops. I was busy with things blowing up and forgot about that. Will fix.
Also, right after that happened, when I tried to access the post management page, minx puked up a hairball. Do you want me to send the text of the error page?
Yes please!!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 16 2007 03:36 AM (PiXy!)
3
I sent the text in an email. (it turned into a jumbled mess when put in the comment box)
Posted by: Will at Saturday, June 16 2007 04:12 AM (SOx9v)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 16 2007 02:02 PM (PiXy!)
6
Oh, and thanks, Will. It's a known problem, fix is in the works.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 16 2007 02:03 PM (PiXy!)
7
No problem, and thanks for the fixes. Is there going to be some way for we beta free-loaders to turn ads on? A bar at the top really doesn't bother me all that much.
Posted by: Will at Saturday, June 16 2007 03:21 PM (olS40)
8
Quick question... trying to post with text in the "more" window, but when I do, I get a "more" link that doesn't reveal any text. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Monday, June 18 2007 09:38 AM (PyY3O)
9
Never mind - was choking because I hadn't titled the post. Post titled, "more" functioning properly.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Monday, June 18 2007 10:19 AM (PyY3O)
10
And Yes it's gay, I got it from Average gay joe.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Monday, June 25 2007 09:25 AM (QTv8u)
Still having issues with memcached. I might have to disable it for a while.
It just seems to stop responding, but apparently only on the new server. We have way more than enough CPU power for now, so disabling it won't even be noticeable.
Update: Added a global switch to the cache, and set it to off.
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Ready To Roll
That banner up top is the draft version of our ad-supported site banner. Yeah, it's a bit too busy, particularly on this site; I'll be handing it over to our designer who's working on the new standard templates to produce a nice clean version.
1
The location moves a bit during the rendering (in Firefox), which looks odd. Since it's a fixed-form design anyway, it probably wants a few static pixel values sprinkled on it. I'm mentioning it because you might not observe it on your system depending on what was cached, CPU speed, etc.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, June 15 2007 02:48 AM (9imyF)
That's what was behind the bug I've been tracing for seven hours.
I need a drink.
...
Okay, so while I was crawling around in the logfiles I was able to find and fix a couple of intermittent bugs that have been plaguing us for a while. Including a nasty one where the session management code would, under certain circumstances, delete the database cursor for a thread and so ensure that the subsequent page request would drop dead. (The error management code would reinstate the cursor on the next request, but that particular page would fail. It happened to me just now, editing this post.)
I haven't completely switched the application from a console-based app (which makes for easier debugging) to a daemon, so I whacked a nohup into the startup script. That worked, until I ended up putting two nohups into cascading scripts and it all went flooie.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 13 2007 03:58 PM (PiXy!)
4
I guess the "convenience" argument is now somewhat weakened...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 13 2007 05:25 PM (PiXy!)
5
Just checking that the distributed cache is distributing...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 14 2007 03:19 AM (PiXy!)
Finally tracked down what's going on on the production web servers.
The system automatically flushes the cache when you update a page, so
people don't get old copies of the page. That's timing out - it
eventually happens, but it takes more than ten seconds, so the reverse
proxy times out and returns a "System not available" error. Since the
cache flush is handled by the redirect module (which all update pages
have to call), you never receive the redirect because the proxy closes
the connection first.
It was particularly confusing because (a) the updates actually worked
and (b) because the error was inside the redirect module and redirect
logging was at the start of the redirect module, the log files showed
that the redirect was happening but no browser request was following it.
And the reason for that is that (a) I didn't have a local cache
running and (b) the remote cache is blocked by the firewall. It seems
that cache lookups time out immediately, but cache flushes take much longer.
Which should have been obvious.
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Sunday, June 10
How To Create Your Own Zombie Army!
Sort of.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Saturday, June 09
Fascinating
The new servers are acting poopy: While they are working fine for the database and files, and even for delivering pages out of Minx, when you submit a form you get neither a response nor an error... But the form does in fact work. I've misconfigured something somewhere, but because I'm not getting an error back it's slow going trying to work out what.
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Encouraging Signs
Just finishing the preparations for the launch of mee.nu.
I loaded a copy of the current beta database onto the production cluster. By the time I could switch screens and bring up phpMyAdmin, it had already finished replicating.
Hello everyone: I’m the new Buzz.mn content-wrangler. I’d say “editor,”
but to me, the words “James Lileks, Editor” look like “Wile E. Coyote,
Genius.”
Chances are still slim, but since the patient appeared to be DOA just a week ago, that's a hell of an improvement.
It's been a very tiring and frustrating week, for reasons I'm not going into right now, but which started with the bandwidth and server problems I mentioned earlier.
This is just the latest example of the herds of bleating nuisancery that flock to my inbox every day:
Effective immediately, .NU Domain has modified its policies and now permits the registration of .nu domain names using only one or two characters, including numeric characters - such as aj.nu, 92.nu or mu.nu - under our new Premium Names Service.
Hey, nice example there, given that I registered it in 1997.
The cost to register a two-character .nu Premium Name is 250 EURO (2 500 SEK) per year.
Crapsprockets. It was 60 Euros for two years. And yes, they've upped the renewal fee for existing domains.
Fortunately I'm already paid through to November 2011.
Update: The president of the .nu registry just apologised for that. Seems like a nice guy, apart from the bit where he increased my renewal fees by 700%...
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I don't agree with him all the time, but he's consistently entertaining and insightful.
Update: Bought. While I was browsing the atheism section, and getting irritated by books like this one, another guy came up and also picked up a copy of God is Not Great.
1
I hereby proclaim your new comments thingy being attached to the RSS feed a smashing success! Here are some of the reviews:
"I used to think there was no God. Then I saw Pixy Misa's 'new comments thingy'." - C. Hitchens
"I didn't have anything to say, but it kept pulling me back in!" - A. Pacino
"The new comments thingy is the only thing that matters on this entire planet. Perhaps even the universe." - NYT
Pat yourself on the back for me, would you? And then fix the jawa
.
Posted by: Kevin at Tuesday, June 05 2007 01:58 AM (1cRKV)
2
Oh, yeah. Rusty is running on a different system again. I really need to get both Rusty and Ace migrated to the new system, and if the damn servers would stop blowing up, I would do so.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 05 2007 02:12 AM (PiXy!)
3
Ace works fine for me, but the jawas are a pain to comment on. More reviews:
"Use the new comment thingy, if you want to live" - A. Schwarzenegger
"New comment thingy? We need a steenking new comment thingy!" - Mexican federales discussing my pet jawa.
"Four out of five dentists prefer the new comment thingy" - ADA
"Peace is great. New comments thingy is better." - Free Republic
"The new comments thingy is better than p-shopping blackface on people! - Firedog lake chick
"A 'must comment'!" USA Today
Was that last one too vague? I was aluding to the 'a must read' statement that many reviewers use,. I'm predicting the connection is weaker than I hoped. Nevertheless, I stand by it! It's a 'must comment' system!
BTW, these are actual quotes, as far as you know.
Posted by: Kevin at Tuesday, June 05 2007 04:31 AM (1cRKV)
I wrote a post with quotation marks in the post title and saved it as a draft. When I opened it for editing later, Minx chopped the first quote mark and everything after it out of the title. Is punctuation in the post title going to be a no-no? The post URL doesn't seem to be affected.
Posted by: Will at Tuesday, June 05 2007 09:01 AM (SOx9v)
5
Not a no-no, just a bug. Need to escape those quotes on the edit page! Thanks.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 05 2007 10:22 AM (PiXy!)
6
Here's another weird bug: If you type your comment in, then pound your computer repeatedly with a hammer, minx deletes the comment, and it's not recoverable as far as I can tell. Please let me know when you have a workaround for this.
More reviews!
"Any comment system that is not the 'new comment thingy' can kiss my grits!" - Flo
"The tautology of the lugubrious pecuniary jejune (of quotidian proportions)
that forces us to expurgate the abstemious, yet abjurious moiety, is, in fact, the new comments thingy." - William F. Buckley
"My diet is now successful, thanks to the new comments thingy" - Rose O.
"Now that I've seen the new comments thingy, I realize that Jews aren't really that bad!" - random muslim
Heh,. Seriously though, your system is very impressive, and VERY fast. I hereby swear that I will never ask you to use perl again. For a while. Like, a week or so.
Posted by: Kevin at Wednesday, June 06 2007 03:32 AM (1cRKV)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 06 2007 09:38 AM (PiXy!)
9
I put Hitchens' book on my list, too. Then I realized I don't read books any more. Slowly, as I buy books and don't read them, my home is filling with literature. And guilt.
I did this with magazines for about five years before I learned to stop buying them.
Posted by: S. Weasel at Wednesday, June 06 2007 05:47 PM (MecJo)
I just discovered that the two mee.nu production servers, which I'm about to put to work, had a little glitch in their reverse proxies and somehow managed to exchange a terabyte or so of wasted packets in the past few days.
Over our hosting company's public network.
And since it was a terabyte in each direction, and they bill for both incoming and outgoing data, that means I just used up the entire bandwidth quota for mee.nu for the month.*
Bugger.
Fortunately, Softlayer's excess bandwidth charges are among the lowest in the business, but still... Bugger.
Filed a support ticket throwing myself on the mercy of the accounting department. You never know.
* Excluding the beta server, but I need to take that offline, get the drive replaced, and reinstall the operating system.
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Saturday, June 02
It Takes An Image
Well, I've uploaded Minx 1.0, so it's time I started playing with some of the new features. Let's see:
Automatic Server-Side Image Scaling and Thumbnails (ASSIST!)
Shrink to 200 pixels wide - side-by-side with a browser-scaled image for comparison: [thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg size=200x]
Shrink to 200 pixels tall: [thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg size=x200]
Fit inside a box 100 pixels square, keeping proportions: [thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg size=100x100]
Resize to 100 pixels square, regardless of proportions: [thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg resize=100x100]
This is intended to make it easy to produce image galleries and photo albums where you need to produce images in multiple resolutions. Also, it will be used for user avatars: Since mee.nu users have complete control over their site layouts, there won't be a single fixed size for avatars, and resizing in the browser produces ugly images.
The advantages (apart from the improved quality) are that it makes it very easy to keep the image proportions, and it produces smaller files for fast loading times. (And less strain on your bandwidth.) Doing high-quality image processing is fairly CPU intensive, but we already have 16 CPUs at our disposal, so that is not anticipated to be a problem.
One hitch: This doesn't work for animated GIFs. Neither does the image processing function in the file module; the GIF library I'm using is lacking in several respects.
1
I hope that image resizing isn't being done on the fly every time a page is loaded; that sounds like a real glutton for CPU cycles. But given that it's a tag, I suspect that's the case.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, June 03 2007 08:32 AM (+rSRq)
2
It's cached (both on the browser and the server).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 03 2007 12:26 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 03 2007 01:58 PM (PiXy!)
5
The other reason I'm not particularly worried about CPU load is that our standard cluster node is now a quad-core Xeon. We're not short of CPU power.
And that only costs us 10% more than the dual-core Opterons we originally budgeted for, while delivering 2.5x the performance.
Also, the image engine automatically switches to a less CPU intensive algorithm for large target sizes. Still higher-quality than browser scaling, of course.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 03 2007 02:41 PM (PiXy!)
6
The comparison with the browser is rather impressive.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, June 05 2007 10:19 AM (9imyF)
I took "Zonk" off my list of editors over at Slashdot because, let's face it, he's an idiot.
The front page didn't update for the next 24 hours. Because none of the other dozen of so editors posted anything.
So I re-enabled Zonk, read the page, and then took him off the list again. Gah.
I expect Slashdot's readers to be about 60% idiots, but I can ignore them, mock them, or (when I have mod points) put the boot in. Can't do much to Zonk when he's the only editor who's actually doing anything.
What the world needs is real made-to-order Lego sets. I want my Slayers Lego!
But in the meantime, this is pretty cool.
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Friday, June 01
Aargh! (Part 97 Of A Continuing Series)
Spend two hours debugging a 25-line SQL query only to find out that it is syntactically correct, but that one of the parameters is being passed as a string instead of an int, which causes the interface library to quote it.
The information is there in the error message, but it wouldn't hurt for it to be a little less... delphic:
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ''30'' at line 1.
The program generates the query as a single line; it only became 25 lines after I broke it down for readability.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, June 01 2007 12:08 PM (R/R0E)
2
heh... can't tell you how many times I've had similar things happen to me. You'd think I'd learn - well, I guess I should say that the "same" errors seldom happen twice - but it still doesn't make me more careful reading error messages on new errors. *grin*
Posted by: Teresa at Sunday, June 03 2007 12:39 AM (gsbs5)
