What happened? Twelve years! You hit me with a cricket bat! Ha! Twelve years!
Thursday, November 14
Quick Site Note 2
Load on the server is up with some more sites coming over to Minx; I've assigned more CPU resources to the application, and allocated more threads to the proxy. We're still peaking at only about 40% of server capacity (plus we have a spare server sitting idle right now), so this not an issue; I just needed to reconfigure the virtual machines to better allocate the hardware resources.
It looks like the proxy was the main problem - when it ran out of threads it would simply drop the HTTP connection. And I haven't updated the config in two years - the proxy had been running without interruption all that time.
Also, I've installed Redis for improved element caching; I'll bring that into production this weekend.
Update: Redis deployed! Works nicely. I was using in-process caching before, and with lazy key evictions and the increased number of worker processes, that was using up a fair bit of memory for a so-so hit rate. Redis works much better.
Did something change in how you're displaying the time stamps? Used to be they'd all render in my zone time, for me. But now they seem to be rendering in the owner's zone time. For instance, Wonderduck's time stamps are now all CST. (It was a bit strange leaving a comment there, and seeing the time stamp on my comment two hours in my future.) Your timestamps are all Sydney time.
Was that a deliberate change?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, November 17 2013 09:23 AM (+rSRq)
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Huh. Comment timestamps should be in the blog's timezone, not the commenters'. And the recent changes shouldn't have affected that.
I'll take a look.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 01:17 PM (PiXy!)
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Wait. It sounds like it's working how it should. You mean, all the timestamps on my site are Sydney time, all those on Wonderduck's blog in CST, right?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 01:38 PM (PiXy!)
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Yes, that's correct. I thought it used to render all the timestamps in the reader's time zone.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, November 17 2013 01:53 PM (+rSRq)
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Tuesday, November 12
Speaking Of When I Were A Lad...
The tracks below date to my late teens (or thereabouts); I won't assault you right now with the music I liked in my early teens, when I had no taste at all.*
Nik Kershaw's Wouldn't It Be Good? (Or as I called it at the time, the be kind to aliens song.) Blancmange's Living on the Ceiling? Howard Jones? Depeche Mode? Spandau Ballet? Icehouse? INXS? Oh, hey, Swing Out Sister, cool. But really, the Pet Shop Boys? Cheap Trick? Men at Work?
Looking at the list, though, it's really heavy in Brit and Aussie bands, so maybe those songs are obscure elsewhere in the world, and your formative years weren't saturation-bombed with Electric Blue and Original Sin.
Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing...
* Toto Coelo? Haysi Fantayzee? Seriously, early-teenage me? But then, I suppose, points for The Stranglers and Altered Images.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, November 12 2013 09:56 PM (+rSRq)
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Yuck. Fortunately, all from the one source, so cleanup was easy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 12 2013 10:30 PM (PiXy!)
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Yeah, I have a lot of those songs. Maybe the person who made the playlist was a little young at the time, and didn't realize just how many of those songs were in heavy rotation on radio and MTV, making them far from obscure. Seriously, Twilight Zone obscure? Everybody have fun tonight? Bond soundtrack For your eyes only?
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, November 13 2013 02:02 AM (+cEg2)
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Nik Kershaw and Blancmage didn't exist in the US, much like Falco's original version of Der Kommissar. ("Wouldn't It Be Good" didn't crack the top 40 here, and I don't ever recall seeing it on MTV). There's some other stuff on that list I'd genuinely consider obscure, at least US-wise, but there's also a lot of stuff that AFAIK was a massive hit everywhere like "West End Girls" (now being introduced to under-35s by GTA V).
Posted by: Ian S. at Wednesday, November 13 2013 11:21 PM (102Hx)
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Nik Kershaw most definitely was available in the US in the 80s. There was an awful cover of Wouldn't It Be Good in some Molly Ringwold-style movie or other, and I remember buying the album Human Racing and probably at least one other. The cover might be why you don't remember seeing anything on MTV--it might have poisoned the well, and there might not even have been a video of that version.
Pixy's right--all of those bands were at least moderately well-known at the time (well, I don't recall Blancmange or Icehouse, so I can't speak to those two), and some were very popular, so "obscure" is a very poor description. Nobody who lived through the 80s could call Depeche Mode or INXS obscure, for example.
Posted by: RickC at Thursday, November 14 2013 05:45 AM (A9FNw)
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BTW, I just found a video for Wouldn't It Be Good on Youtube. I'd definitely have remembered having seen that, so I guess it didn't get much, if any, airtime.
Posted by: RickC at Thursday, November 14 2013 05:48 AM (A9FNw)
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If a nobody kid in a nowhere town in Nebraska heard these songs at the time, and I did, then obscure was the LAST thing they were.
Posted by: BrianH at Thursday, November 14 2013 12:37 PM (TxhZI)
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This word "obscure"... it does not mean what he thinks it means.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, November 15 2013 01:55 PM (Izt1u)
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I can't decide if Non-Stop Dancers is trying to be Madness or the Stray Cats when they grow up.
I haven't heard that Eurogliders track in... um... a long time. I can't claim to have missed it, but it's a good '80s tune. I see it was #65 on the Hot 100 charts here in the US, but it surely got no airplay in Duckford... it was only the ubercool kids that knew it here. (note: Wonderduck was not "ubercool," except when it came to music)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, November 12 2013 02:06 PM (WWkBJ)
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Despite the name, the Eurogliders were an Aussie band, so it got a ton of airplay here, and hit #2, I think.
Not as much airplay as Who Can It Be Now? That played incessantly at the time. Any time I hear it I'm instantly transported to sitting at my desk with the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's guide and a book of graph paper...
I don't know what became of the Non-Stop Dancers, but that track holds up really well; it has quite the distinctive sound to it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 12 2013 08:14 PM (PiXy!)
I've enabled applet caching in Minx - what this means is that things like archive lists and recent comments might not update immediately, but will be cached for up to 60 seconds. This is a big speed improvement on large and busy sites, reducing page load times in one case from 1.8 seconds to 36 milliseconds.
It seems to be working well, but if you see anything odd, let me know.
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Alas, the spammers are back. (Go check out Wonderduck.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, November 09 2013 05:34 AM (+rSRq)
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Zapped them. The spam filter is still glitching occasionally, and needs some care. It will be fixed by the end of November, I promise!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 09 2013 10:26 AM (PiXy!)
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Sometimes today when I load my own page, some of the images don't load. Just now I tried it and the CSS file didn't load; the page was unformatted. I don't know if it's related to your caching change.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, November 11 2013 03:41 PM (+rSRq)
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It certainly shouldn't do that; the change only affects a couple of specific things. But I'll take a look.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 11 2013 10:43 PM (PiXy!)
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For some reason in IE11 on the main page, I'm not seeing the category icons next to post titles, but they do show up on the individual post pages.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 13 2013 11:54 AM (swpgw)
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Huh...and now after posting that last comment, they're there.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 13 2013 11:55 AM (swpgw)
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Lots and lots of "reset while loading" for a few days now. Seems like a DDoS, unless it's a misconfiguration, or hitting a duff server in a rotation.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, November 14 2013 02:07 PM (RqRa5)
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I've seen a few of those too. I'll reset the server processes, and if that doesn't fix it, escalate appropriately. Or inappropriately.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 14 2013 02:47 PM (PiXy!)
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Looks like load is up. I'll spin up some more back-end threads.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 14 2013 02:50 PM (PiXy!)
The new Nexus 5 is completely sold out on the Australian Google Play store, but it looks like I got my order in in time. FedEx say it should arrive Tuesday.
That will give me a Nexus 4, a Nexus 5, two Nexus 7s, and a Nexus 10. Which might be slightly overdoing things. I don't really need a new phone, but the shiny/cheap quotient was difficult to resist; getting the latest Nexus phone every year works out the same as getting an iPhone or Galaxy S every second year.
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