Cap'n Refsmmat

The makers of our forum software believe they know better than we do, and don't intend to create an option for adding back post numbers. This is one of the many reasons why I hate all forum software. However, if you click the little Share icon at the top right of a post, you can get a direct link to the post, which you can use to send people directly to the post you're referring to.

The advertisements (Google AdSense) should be asynchronous: waiting for the ads to load should never block the rest of the page from loading. I believe the ads do make periodic requests while a page is open, though, so if you're waiting for another page to load you may see some ad requests appearing in the mean time.

Yeah, I was trying to debug things further and screwed up for a while. Sorry about that. Should be running fine now, though I'm still puzzled by the high latency.

Just made another tweak: allowed nginx (the web server software) to use 16 processes instead of just 4, since we do have 16 cores available on the server. Perhaps that will decrease some of the latency we've been seeing, where it takes multiple seconds before the server even replies to a request.

I just killed some idle processes on the server and upped the PHP opcode cache memory limit to 128MB instead of 64MB (it was full). Both should help a bit. I'll check in again tomorrow to see if the memory limit is adequate and see if there's anything more I can do.

Yeah, there's a PHP bug that makes it crash occasionally, and you get a 502 when that happens. It seems to happen every few minutes, and one random person trying to load a page when it happens is the lucky winner. I wasn't able to find any bug reports that matched the crash, but I did just upgrade our PHP install, and will watch to see if that fixes it. Backups just ran and sucked up a lot of CPU. Also I was running the upgrades. Let's see how the next day or so goes and that'll tell us if it's fixed.

It looks like we were getting bursts of traffic faster than we could start PHP processes, and didn't have enough spare processes. I bumped the maximum number of spare processes up to 25 (from 10) and the overall cap up to 50. I'm not sure if that will solve the entire problem, but it should prevent some of the Bad Gateway errors. Let me know what you experience over the next day or so.

I'll look into this soon. We had problems soon after the upgrade, which we were able to fix, but I'm not sure what could be making the site slow now.

Allowing users to edit HTML directly is a serious security risk, unfortunately, since you could easily embed all kinds of things in posts (like JavaScript with redirects to malware sites). Is there something specific you're trying to do that you can't do in the regular editor?

Yes, a fission bomb would be a lot more difficult than, say, stealing some cobalt-60 out of a weakly secured hospital and putting it in an improvised dirty bomb. The radiation wouldn't be a serious hazard, but the panic and fear would be. I recall reading a GAO report about the security of medical radioactive sources in the US, and it was terrifying. They found large sources "locked" in rooms with the key code Sharpied on the door frame or stored in rooms with a window overlooking a handy loading dock... and it's not uncommon for industrial sources to be stolen out of trucks or off job sites, mostly by people who don't know what they are and just steal anything that looks valuable.

Uranium and plutonium, the major components in a fission bomb, are not strong gamma emitters; I think they're mostly alpha and neutron emitters, and alpha particles are easily stopped in air or by solid materials, while neutrons are just hard to detect in general. Nuclear bombs are actually surprisingly hard to detect from a distance. I actually worked on a project to detect changes in gamma radiation indicating a radioactive material has been smuggled into an area. It's mostly good for industrial radioactive sources (which are often used for radiography or for sensing at the bottom of oil wells) or medical sources, like iodine-131. Many of these are poorly secured and could easily be stolen and turned into a dirty bomb. With gamma spectrometers regularly patrolling a city, you'd be able to detect an unshielded industrial source at a reasonable distance (under a mile). Many border crossings do have portal radiation monitors which trucks (or shipping containers) go through before entry. Mostly these can detect gamma emitters. Apparently more recent ones can detect the neutrons emitted by fissile material, although I suspect that's still very difficult. I am not aware of any major cities with systematic radiation detection systems. RadNet air monitors would detect materials released into the atmosphere, but not sealed sources, unless they get particularly close to a detector. A few cities have police carrying personal radiation detectors like this one, which I got to use a couple times, and a few other cities have done detailed helicopter-borne radiation surveys to map their background radiation. But systematic anomaly detection is too expensive outside of nuclear installations. According to a book I'm reading now (Raven Rock by Garrett Graff, page 104), Hugh Sidey's account is in a Time article from 2001. So apparently it could have already happened?

FYI, the Contact Us page sends email to me. (I get a lot of interesting emails through that form...) The Who's Online list likely works on a delay: you only disappear from the list fifteen or twenty minutes after you last access the site. You'd think the software would remove you the instant you log out, but I suspect they didn't bother to do that, and it waits for the session to expire on its own a bit later. Glad to hear you got the crash fixed, though!

Depending on what changes you're trying to make, they may not be permitted until you have a few posts. We restrict some profile features because spam robots use them to post spam links. This is bizarre, and I don't know why it'd be happening apart from a bug in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone. I wish I had advice to give you, but I don't have a Windows Phone and don't know how to debug this issue further.

By "the whole browser shuts down", do you mean it just crashes and disappears? That sounds like a bug with Windows Phone; can you check you have the latest software updates installed on your phone?

If someone invented a way to prevent people on the internet from being dicks to each other, they would soon be very rich indeed.

Strange is right -- the latest upgrade required yet another reindexing. Fortunately that's finished now and everything should be back to normal. We looked into ways to improve database performance while the reindexing was ongoing, but there's not a clear solution; I hope we don't need to do it very often in the future.

Another update: We've gone from IPB version 4.1 to version 4.2, which fixes some security issues and bugs and tweaks the look just a bit. (Don't ask me why...) Let us know if there are any new bugs.

What kinds of photos would you like to use it for?

You want the Code button in the toolbar, represented as a pair of angle brackets <>. It looks like this: foobar baz bin sheep You can select whether to have it syntax highlighted for a particular programming language, or just displayed plain.

FYI, Apache OpenOffice is basically dead, and development has stalled; most work is being done on LibreOffice, which has many of the original developers working on it. Worth a shot to see if it can open the file.

That's frustrating. Unfortunately the fragment identifier (the #entry820007 part) is not sent to the server but stays in your browser, so I can't have the server automatically rewrite it. They appear to have been renamed to the form #comment-820007 without regard to the possibility of breaking bookmarks. If there's some way you can write a script to edit your bookmarks, you could replace #entry with #comment- and I think all the links would work.

Hmm, interesting. conanpackages.cmake tries to load conanbuildinfo.cmake, but that doesn't exist and isn't in the Git repository. Maybe post an issue on the GitHub and ask the maintainer what's going on? Not sure I know how to debug CMake scripts.

Does the rtl-sdr package cover what you want, or is there some specific additional software from that page that you need?

What happens if you try installing the gnuradio package from the Ubuntu software repositories? All those dependencies should be installed automatically by apt.

Could you be more specific about what happens and which members?