So I noticed you guys playing the Geography game on the forum... and decided to cheat. So I'm a cheating bastard like that, so bite me! Yeah, yeah, yeah, you cheat too, probably with Google or Wikipedia, but my way is much cooler. Well, OK, it's definitely much geekier. Interested? Read on!

WARNING! Toxic amounts of computer geekiness ahead. And it gets even worse: it's Linux geeky. The good news: it won't make your head explode.


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Yeah, long time no post! What can I say in my defense? Nothing much other than I've been crazy busy... And to add insult to injury, this post is somewhat technical, so if you're interested in the techie geekspeak type stuff (not too much of it), read on...


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Recently I came across this website that claimed that they have proof that God exists. Scientific proof, no more no less. This certainly piqued my curiousity, so I decided to check it out. Here goes:

Quote:
Ummm... one suggestion: let's face these questions using the scientific method. Not "squarely".

Quote:
Wow, dude, you sure are a believer. I'm glad that watching science shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy and reading grade 9 science textbooks gave you an idea to reinforce your beliefs. Whatever works for you.

If you want to know what would work for me, I'll let you know. Send me a crate of your finest crack, and somehow persuade me to smoke it all... maybe bring in your inquisition team and force me to take it, whatever works for you. After that, I just might believe your argument. At the moment, however, I don't think the paragraph above even deserves to be called an argument.

This David C. Pack guy completely misses the point. He keeps on rambling on how awesome and complex the universe is, and how it must have been created by God. Nice logic. Following the same line of reasoning, since Windows is by far the most complex system in the world of computer science, therefore it must have been created by God. There you have it, Windows was created by God, and not by Microsoft. I think a copyright/trademark infringement lawsuit is in order.

You may have noticed the occasional slowdowns on our website. I just found out the reason for these slowdowns and I am pissed. Some idiot (or idiots) on our server are doing some unholy things (like using a persistent database connection without bothering to close it properly) to the database server. I just logged on to the server and the load average (the average number of programs requesting CPU attention) was 40!!! Yes, four-zero. That is friggin insane!!! I noticed that there were hundreds of MySQL processes spawning all over the place.

Thankfully our webhost is smart enough to rectify the situation without my involvement (i.e. me having to yell at them to log on to the server and restart the MySQL service), but nonetheless, this is an annoyance. I think I will write a small script that will log the load averages on this system, and if I notice a regular trend, I will present it to the staff here in a form of a complaint.

I changed the colour for some of the text and links in the photo gallery module. It was really annoying, because it was white text on light gray background, so it was pretty much unreadable.

I also brought back the quote button on the forums, by popular demand.

I finally set up the Google AdSense stuff on this website. I don't really expect to make boatloads of money off these ads, and since they are fairly unintrusive (thankfully Google keeps them sensible and not vulgar), I figured there'd be no harm.

Of course, if you're strongly opposed, please let me know. The proceeds from Google will be used to fight evil and douchebaggery everywhere. Heck, if we get popular enough to make a ton of money, maybe we'll even have an SDSA party on Google, eh? Although I doubt that. Seriously, though, if we do get any sizeable profits, they will be used to cover the costs of operating this website (webhosting fees, domain name fees, etc). And if we actually do end up with a surplus... the sky's the limit!

On top of that, any users visiting this site with Internet Explorer will be given the option to download Firefox! For every Firefox download that we refer, SDSA will also get some dough from Google.


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Just updated the Flashgames module (needs new logo) and the forums module (needs template tweaking and bugfixes). The stupid thing didn't update its database backend properly, I had to add a few extra fields manually. GRRRR!!! Buggy piece of &^$#!!!

Oh, and yeah, we really need a good website logo... and some overall template tweaking wouldn't hurt either.

I discovered some issues with the new forum system... In particular it seems like the printing functions are broken (everyone gets an "access denied" type of error when trying to print a thread). Send to news article function has been removed or disabled. Also, converting a thread to PDF format is now a lot more awkward. Rather than clicking on a PDF icon next to a post, one needs to click through several screens to get to a PDF version of the thread. Finally, the highlighted/unread issue was only partially solved; if one goes directly to the root of the forum after posting (or to a forum section other than the one they just posted in), the post they just made will appear as "unread".

Uggghhhh.... Well, since the old system will no longer be maintained by XOOPS developers, I guess upgrading to CBB won't hurt. Hopefully all of these silly issues will be addressed by the developers eventually.

Things are definitely looking up with theSDSA.com! I think I have all the exploding and disappearing stuff under control now (still can't believe how stupid I am sometimes), and now I am focusing on revamping the navigation system (specifically, the navigation menu on the left). As usual, your feedback is not only appreciated, but very much requested!

The good news is that I think I managed to track down the source of the problem with the whole disappearing act that the website did yesterday when I tries to upgrade the forums. I feel so stupid now. In a nutshell, I screwed up the data encoding when transferring the database from one server to another. Such a n00b mistake.

The bad news is that today I managed to lose some data... when I had to roll the database back to tonight's backup version, which basically wiped out any changes on the site (including forum posts) that happened after midnight. From what I can tell, we only lost one of my blog posts and one forum post (possibly more). I'm really sorry about this, it's totally my fault. Now that I know what I'm up against, I'll be testing my theories on the test site http://test.thesdsa.com/ before tweaking the real site.

Actually, when I rolled back the database, I meant to update the test dataset, not the production dataset... Such a n00b mistake...