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Cap'n Refsmmat

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Posts posted by Cap'n Refsmmat

  1. 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.

  2. 2 hours ago, studiot said:

    Are you sure the problems are all 'in house' ?

    Watching the activity of my PC it seemed to be redirected offsite to other http & www addresses several times to move from one site page to another or to call up some of the popup subroutines.

    I timed the wait time for some of these and listed them earlier, some run into appreciable fractions of a minute.

    I know that SF needs to attract advertising and interface successfully with the web advertising industry.
    I do not find the level of adverts intrusive and indeed one or two have been quite useful.
    But the web ad industry standards and protocols are changing and I wondered if the new forum software was properly compatible with them?

    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.

  3. 13 minutes ago, geordief said:

    Just got 502 Bad Gateway again.(just a hiccup perhaps.Seems fine otherwise)

    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.

    2 minutes ago, MigL said:

    Spoke too soon...

    Gotten progressively worse.
    waiting about a minute to navigate between pages, sign in, or save a post.
    ( feel like I'm on dial-up again )

    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.

  4. 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.

  5. 9 hours ago, Endy0816 said:

    Still wagering not really practical for a Terrorist group to pull off. They tend to go for fairly cheap actions and half the time are a bit stupid(a good thing in this case).

    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.

  6. On 9/19/2017 at 8:59 PM, Endy0816 said:

    There are radiation detectors out there. Think major cities and ports.

    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.

    On 9/19/2017 at 0:15 PM, zapatos said:

    I think it is extremely likely that a nation could have smuggled a nuclear bomb into a  major city. I also think it is extremely unlikely that a nation has done so.

    According to a book I'm reading now (Raven Rock by Garrett Graff, page 104),

    Quote

    Several months into his presidency, John F. Kennedy invited journalist Hugh Sidey to dinner in Palm Beach... Kennedy paused, fork between plate and mouth, and told Sidey, "You know, they have an atom bomb on the third floor of the embassy."

    Sidey brushed off the remark, "Sure, why not?"

    No, really, Kennedy replied. The president told Sidey that U.S. intelligence believed the Soviets had smuggled atomic bomb components into Washington using diplomatic pouches and assembled it in the embassy's attic. "If things get too bad and war is inevitable," he said, "they will set it off and that's the end of the White House and the rest of the city."

    Hugh Sidey's account is in a Time article from 2001.

    So apparently it could have already happened?

  7. On 9/9/2017 at 8:15 AM, Tub said:

    Now my name is permanently on the Who's Online list! I've e-mailed the Administrators about this so we'll see what happens.

    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!

  8. 11 minutes ago, scherado said:

    I was not permitted to alter (edit) my profile, the button for which I found.

    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.

    7 minutes ago, Tub said:

    Hello again, Cap'n. Just to add a little to my other posts above, i think i've isolated the problem on my Windows8.1 phone and it seems to be just unable to load the Home page.

    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.

  9. 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.

  10. 2 minutes ago, Enthalpy said:

    I didn't find how to insert pre-formatted text, or equivalently for my purposes, obtain a fixed-width font.
    The equivalent of html <pre> </pre> tag, or to courier new.
    It would be useful to align lists of numbers, for instance there at the end of the message:
    http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/76627-solar-thermal-rocket/?do=findComment&comment=1011042

    Or is it already available somewhere? Thanks!

    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.

  11. 49 minutes ago, Sensei said:

    Download Apache OpenOffice and try whether it's able to open your .xls file (first copy it from flash drive to regular disk).

    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.

  12. 6 minutes ago, Enthalpy said:

    for instance this address used to send to a message on Aug 3, 2014 beginning with "A mission to Jupiter's moon Europa"
    http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/76627-solar-thermal-rocket/page-2#entry820007
    but presently it sends to the beginning of the page. The proper translation to the new address would have been
    http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/76627-solar-thermal-rocket/?do=findComment&comment=820007
    so maybe the address translator doesn't do its job completely.

    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.

  13. 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.

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