I'd like to apologize to everyone for being prickly the last couple of days. I'm not really feeling very well, and I'm also feeling a bit pestered.

When I first started blogging in the spring of 2001, I had a bulletin board system installed on my server to act as a place where people could comment on my posts. It was interesting, but eventually I decided it was a mistake. The problem was that it ceased to be a place I myself enjoyed visiting. I was the host of the party, but I wasn't having any fun. Instead of a pleasant dinner party with sparkling conversation it had turned into a drunken brawl. I had to go in every once in a while and break up fights, and sweep up the litter, but the rest of the time I stayed outside.

So eventually I shut it down. And for five years I blogged without any kind of commenting system.

When I switched over to using Pixy's server, about fifteen months ago, I decided to see whether I could allow comments again, as an experiment. I think it's mostly been a success, but there have been posts where I knew I wouldn't want to allow comments, and I've had to do a fair amount of policing. I've been following the "broken window" approach: the best way to solve a big problem is to fix it before it becomes big. So I've been closing threads which involved too much topic drift, and have deleted comments occasionally, in hopes that what made it through would establish a pattern.

But I think I'm going to have to be more explicit about what I do like and don't like in the way of comments. I'll mull it over and see if I can't write a clear explanation of what I like and why. I don't know how long it will take, though, so no promises.

What I don't want to do is scare everyone away. I've done a lot of policing but I've only used the death penalty once, because that guy's comments invariably set my teeth on edge and I always hated seeing his name in the comment list. (No, I'm not going to name him.) Even so, and even though I ended up deleting more of his comments than everyone else combined, he never seemed to figure out what it was that I didn't like. Finally I decided I'd had enough, and used the ban hammer on him.

There isn't anyone else right now who inspires that kind of reaction in me. But recently it's been the case that policing the comments here has been more pain than pleasure.

While I'm not ready to be explicit, a few guidelines:

* Comments are to respond to what I've posted, not to change the subject to something else you feel like writing about.
* Comments are to say what you think, not to tell me what someone else thinks.
* Don't offer advice, even covertly, unless I ask for them. "...you might want to consider..." is my most hated phrase in the English language.
* Don't hassle me or other commenters. Everyone is friends here, and nothing we're talking is important.
* This is my blog. Don't make it into a place that I hate to visit.

I'll get back to you on this. In the mean time, I apologize again for being prickly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Yesterday I added an admonition just above the comment entry form. Today I saw this. And I had two reactions to it.

First was that I considered putting that picture above the comment entry box.

Second was that it looked like a perfect photograph to make into a flash "Caramel Dancen" animation loop, except that the text is in the way.

UPDATE: Also, I'm not sure that's an anteater. It looks like a possum to me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1

I think it's a sloth.  I can't remember the name but I've seen it before.  It's from Central or South America, and actually looks kinda cute in some pics.  I think it's really small, like "palm of your hand" small.

It's a shame the pic is really too big for your comment entry box.  But you could link the "I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice" note to it....

 

Posted by: Toren at August 18, 2008 01:38 PM (B7yHJ)

2 Hmm, yeah, the claws do look vaguely like sloth claws.  OTOH, only one of them per foot. . .

Posted by: metaphysician at August 18, 2008 01:46 PM (12xNi)

3 It's a pygmy anteater.  Some videos showed up on Cute Overload the other day.  Ridiculous-looking little beasties.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 18, 2008 09:43 PM (PiXy!)

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This is just to let you know that my server may die soon. It's actually rather surprising it's lasted this long; I bought it in late spring of 2001, and except for a month two years ago, it's been operating 24 hours a day ever since.

It's rebooted three times today. The second time I did it because it was suffering from a half-crash. The first and third were spontaneous.

It's possible that my problem right now is heat-faults. It isn't massively hot today, but that's not the issue. When I first bought the server, I opened it up so I could stuff it full of RAM. It hasn't been open since, and it's been operating in a (ahem) dusty environment ever since. My guess is that the inside is fouled with dust, and likely the cooling fan on the CPU has stopped.

If it gets much more unreliable I'll try to find the courage to open it again and try to blow the dust out. But if it really dies, that won't help any.

Another possibility is that someone is trying to hack me. Sun stopped issuing OS updates for this box years ago, so I'm running old versions of lots of things. Someone did hack this server in August of 2003, and after I noticed it and deloused as much of the stuff they enabled as I could, I set up rules in the firewall to lock down every port that wasn't absolutely necessary. But someone may have found a new hold in my unpatched stuff.

But that can be coped with. Eventually the hardware will bag it. I'm not sure what I'll do if it happens. Most likely I'll go buy a blade server. I have backups of everything important, or at least I can reproduce it without too much trouble.

Anyway, if you've noticed problems loading the top rotation picture today, it was probably because my server was rebooting.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I would like to make the following statement: I include pictures in the top rotation from a series because I think the pictures look good, not because the series itself is necessarily worth watching. Note that in the most recent update I included pictures from Girls High which even I didn't watch.

As to the ending of Magikano, I think Aroduc rather overstates it. It's not the "worst ending imaginable." But it's far from really being satisfactory. I've seen worse, but I've also seen much better. It's one of the very few cases I've seen, maybe the only case, where a reset isn't a cop-out. The ground work is laid well for the reset, and making the reset happen takes all the power of all those who are there. And they all know what they'll lose because of it, especially Ayumi.

Nonetheless, resets are always frustrating.

After I'd finished watching the series, it made me wonder: if everyone is caught in a time loop, one which has repeated dozens or even hundreds of times, and if, somehow, Sora and Hajime are dimly aware of it, then maybe that's why they're so nutso. It's because deep down they know that nothing they do matters, and deep down they know that reality as it appears is a lie. And deep down they know that Haruo is in the middle of it. Maybe with all their weird equipment they managed to come up with a way of communicating forward from cycle to cycle.

Pete writes: Consensus seems to be, abandon the show with 2 episodes to go. Except that when you've reached that point, you won't want to quit. And you probably shouldn't; there are worthwhile things in the last two episodes, most notably the reappearance of the baka neko. (Who, when he shows up again, gets the best single line of dialog in the entire series.)

UPDATE: Here's what I said about the ending in my review:

This is one of those endings that feels satisfying just after you watch it, but becomes quite hollow a day later. (Scrapped Princess was like that, too.) The good guys don't lose, really, and that's fine. But they don't really win, either, except in the sense that not losing in a situation like this is a victory. It's bittersweet.

It's not a trainwreck. It has the emotional punch it needs to have to wrap up the story without feeling like an anticlimax, and what happens is well founded in the characters and plot line, and makes complete sense. It isn't contrived.

It's just that by that point I wanted something else, something better.

UPDATE: Speaking of botched endings, this one isn't nearly as bad as the ending of Venus versus Virus.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Comcast just sent me a mailing telling me that they've doubled everyone's upload speeds. I think that was a mailing intended for residential customers, and I'm a commercial customer. (It's a long story.)

So I'm curious to know if it's true, but the only way to find out is to try it. I remember once there was a web site where you could benchmark your speed, but I don't remember any more where it was. Anyone got a URL for me?

UPDATE:

Well, that stinks. It's exactly the same as before, and what this means is that I, as a "premium" customer (business class) who pays twice as much per month as a normal user, now have the lowest upload speed the company offers.

I know why this happened. There is parallel hardware using the same wires. We commercial customers have our own backbone. The company that serves the normal home users just did a change to their backbone, and the company I get my service from didn't. But it still reeks.

UPDATE: This was ill-conceived on Comcast's part. It looks as if they sent this message to every one of their customers, even though not everyone got the upgrade. And there's nothing I can find which formally allows me to determine if I'm one of the people who was supposed to be upgraded. For instance, I would have expected somewhere on their web site that I could go which would tell me "Yes, you should be getting the higher speed" or "No, you should not be". After all, they should be able to tell from my IP.

UPDATE: Maybe I spoke too soon. I power cycled my modem for the other test but I only left it off for about 10 seconds. When I've been on the phone to tech support and they want me to power cycle the modem, they always say to leave it off for 30 seconds. So I just did it again, and gave it a count of 30.

Then I tried the test again, and this time it told me I had a megabit per second of uplink. I used to have a nominal 768 kilobits, so this does tend to suggest that I've gotten some benefit here.

Another difference is that I picked a different server for the test. I think I'm going to wait until late tonight and try it again, with more than one test server. But I'm beginning to think it's real after all.

UPDATE: Or I could find a test closer to home:

I wonder if they upgraded our downlink, too? I thought I only had 8 megabits of downlink, not 12.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:39 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Haven't used it myself, and don't plan to anytime soon. But the word is that the big new user-interface feature is modestly referred to as the "awesome bar", and either people love it with a love true and deep usually reserved for family members and kawaii anime chibis, or they hate it with a passion usually reserved for Osama bin Laden or kawaii anime chibis.

Ace has some help for those in the latter category.

(Reading between some lines, I think some of the complaint is that the "awesome bar" has implemented a bunch of new hot keys, some of which are being used by others in other places. I won't be too surprised to learn that FireFox 3 royally fucks up our comment and post editing applet, for instance.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:06 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Here's a curious request I just noticed in my refers:

http://denbeste.nu/join.html?jpage=../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd

I wonder what software or package that's an exploit for? There was only that one attempt, not a series with different numbers of "move up" entries in the path.

Didn't do them any good; there is no "join.html" file in my root directory, so they got my 404 page.

There were two such requests in succession, one from an IP in Beijing and one from Bangkok. (You know? Sometimes I think seriously about blocking 202.*.*.* in my firewall.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:17 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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I'd like to apologize for the performance yesterday and today. I have been having a lot of trouble accessing the site, getting slow responses or outright error 500 timeouts. Pixy is aware of the problem and fingers a background job which seems to be tying the server into knots.

That's how it is when you're involved in a beta. We all need to be patient.

UPDATE: No sooner do I post that then the constipation ends, and meenu is back to its old sweet swift self. I assume Pixy bagged the errant process until he can figure out what's wrong with it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:54 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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So in just a couple of days, the ClusterMap is already an eye-opening experience. Of course, some of the hits are random, some are spiders, some are weird google refers, none of which can I prove since I can't see refers for this site. Just guessing.

Even so, it's strange to see some of the places people have come from to visit.

The vast majority are from CONUS. No surprise there. I'm pretty sure I know who my visitor from Tokyo is. (Hi, HC!) Sydney is obvious. I'm not too surprised to see visitors from Singapore, though I don't know for certain who they are. And I know who the visitor from Israel is. On the other hand...

Bangkok? Madrid? Seville? Cape Town? Montevideo? Abu Dhabi? Good Heavens! Do I really have regular readers in those places? Only time will tell, I think.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:03 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Pixy has a place in the standard template where one can place a sitemeter. I haven't been using one, mostly because I don't trust the big names. There have been a couple of scandals where the big names have been doing bad things to users.

But there's one I've seen around which I think is kind of cool, and I've never heard of anyone complaining about it before. It's called "ClustrMap", and just for the hell of it I just signed up for it and added it to the template. It's down at the very bottom of the sidebar.

If anyone has any problems because of it, I'll get rid of it again. In the mean time, it'll be interesting to see if I get any regular visitors from faraway places like Singapore, or Australia. (Nah; who in Australia would want to read my drivel?)

UPDATE: At the bottom of the admin page there's a place where you can enter email addresses of friends to send them invites. My page informs me that I have 10 invites left.

Which is really stupid because you don't need an invite to use this. You just go to the main page at the ClustrMap home site and register, like I did just now.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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