Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Footsies

That footnoting function I mentioned yesterday?  Coming soon to a Minx near you!



How does it work?  Simple!  The [note]...[/note] tag encloses a footnote, and leaves a link in its place: [note]I'm currently employed three days a week, and spending the other four working on mee.nu and mu.nu, so having my weekend wiped out by multiple catastrophic computer failures is even less pleasant than you'd normally expect.[/note]

The [notes] tag displays all the footnotes you've accumulated.  If you have a post in multiple sections, you can have multiple groups of footnotes with consecutive numbers.

A little fine tuning is still required, and I'll add the option to use numbers or asteriskses, but it works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Coming Soon To A Minx Near You

Despite the explosions and alarums here at PixyLabs over the weekend, I did manage to get some work done.*  I've added a secure persistence model to the BBCode engine,** merged the topic query code into the post query code,*** rewrote the URL parsing system as a generic engine instead of a whole list of special cases, and started in on the new filter engine.

To see what's going on, you'll need to look at the address bar and then at the page contents:

****

Basically, you can now string together any of the filtering and formatting functions, currently search, filter, tag, keyword, title, archive, author, and feed, to create whatever you want.  If you want a feed of posts tagged "anime", no problem.  If you want to search just the post titles for last October for the phrase "Potato Cats", no problem.  It also magically fixes problems like the limitation of the current search engine, which can only produce one (albeit arbitrarily long) page of results.

Due to the blowing-uppings, it's not quite ready to go, but will get installed next weekend along with some of the other handy 1.2 features (like knowing when you have a new private message...)

* I'm currently employed three days a week, and spending the other four working on mee.nu and mu.nu, so having my weekend wiped out by multiple catastrophic computer failures is even less pleasant than you'd normally expect.

** Which addresses the problem I mentioned where if you put a [slideshow] tag in the body of your post, it forgets the settings in the extended entry.  I'm adding an automated footnote system, and that has to remember such details, so I killed two bbirds with one stone.

*** Which not only fixes some existing bugs, but means I don't have to maintain two sets of near-identical code.  So if I were to embark on a major rewrite of the post query functionality, it would automatically
 apply also to the [topics] tag.

**** Damn!  The new static server code I installed last weekend now does beautiful resizing for GIFs, but still ruins PNGs.  Back to the board of drawing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:37 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Joy

I've been playing with VMWare, as I mentioned before, and it's a memory-hungry beastie, so I decided to take 1GB of memory out of my Linux box (which didn't really need it) and add it to my Windows box, to bring it up to 3GB.

In the process, I seem to have destroyed the Linux box* - right now, it won't even bring up a BIOS screen, though it was working last night - and the DVI port on my monitor.

So, about average.

Update: I've got the BIOS screen back.  It correctly identifies all the drives, but won't boot.  It will start to boot from a Fedora 8 Live CD, before dying of a BIOS error.  I'll experiment further later.

Update: Memory error?  I'll test that...

Update: I've underclocked the CPU just in case, and fired up Memtest86.  I'll leave that to soak for a few hours and see what comes up.

Update: Memtest86 showed no problems, but another attempt to boot into the Live CD gave me a machine check exception indicating that memory bank 4 (i.e. module 2) was faulty.  I removed that, and I no longer get a machine check exception.

Of course, it still doesn't boot...

Update: Not memory.  That would be too easy.  Different modules in different sockets produce the same error, which makes it the CPU or the motherboard.  Both of which are out of warranty and out of production, of course.

So, what are my chances of migrating two software RAID arrays to another Linux box and recovering the data?

Update: Coaxed it into booting off a Knoppix CD.  One of the disks seems to be dead, and Knoppix didn't recognise an of the RAID volumes.  What I really need is a Fedora Core 4 x64 Rescue CD.  Anyone got one of those?

Update: You never know what you'll find until you look.  Let's see if it helps.

Update: Oh, I do have about 260 DVD-Rs worth of backups.  And a lot of stuff that was already copied onto other computers.  And looking at this content list I made a while back, there was a whole lot of crap on there.  It's still not exactly happy-making.

Update: The rescue CD gives me a screen full of stack traces, even when I disable the drive that was causing problems with Knoppix.  Bleh.  Bleh, I say!

* The one with about 1.2TB of anime on it.  That one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Programming -101

That being roughly how many lines of code I've written today.

Just removed the Topic query and replaced it with a special case of the Entry query.  This is slightly slower, because it fires two queries instead of one (the first query returns a sorted list of topic/thread/entry ids; the second retrieves the details), but it means that the odd bugs we've had with the [topics] tag not quite matching the [posts] tag all go away.

Which is good news, since I'm about to add a bunch of searching and filtering stuff and wouldn't want to have to duplicate it all...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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That Next Step Is A Doozy...

Memory prices have dived through the floor recently, with DDR2-800 modules going for less than $25 for 1GB and $50 for 2GB.  (That's a single 2GB module, too.)  Usually when you see the low-end modules getting very cheap there's a high-end module that's still commanding a high price.  So I was wondering where the 4GB modules were.

Here they are.  At $581.99, I don't think they'll be selling too many into the SOHO market just yet.  Indeed, since the only reason you'd get them is to install more than 8GB of memory, it would be far cheaper to buy a server motherboard with 8 sockets and use registered memory.

Guess I'll have to make do with 8GB for now.

The reason I need all that memory is so that I can do away with a separate Linux server for my development environment, running the development and test environments under VMWare instead.  Which lets me do fun things like taking a snapshot of the entire server or create a new server on the fly to test replication, but does eat memory like candy.

Some testing today, though, showed that Linux under VMWare was only delivering half the performance of the same software off a Live CD.*  But then some more testing showed that it actually delivers closer to 75%, and my first test must have been screwed up somehow - probably because another process was running and hyperthreading** was interfering with accurate performance results.  But then, running configure for a Python build is enormously slower on my VMWare/Fedora 8 system than on my native Fedora 4 system, something I can't explain.

It's not all bad news, though.  After installing Fedora 8, the mouse pointer automatically tracked between Windows and Linux even without installing VMWare tools (a good thing, because I haven't been able to install VMWare tools).  And the clock problems that made standard Linux 2.6 builds all but useless under VMWare have completely disappeared.

Boring benchmarks follow.

* After which my PC refused to reboot for an hour, which was fun.
** My current desktop is a P4 2.6.
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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