141

Status Notices / Scheduled maintenance, 2015-02-07

« on: February 04, 2015, 11:56:38 AM »

The forum, wiki and IRC will be going offline for about five minutes on 2015-02-07, between 08:00 and 08:15 UTC.

For convenience, this means:

EST (USA east coast):
2015-02-07, 03:00-03:15

UTC (UK):
2015-02-07, 08:00-08:15

AEDT (Australia east coast):
2015-02-07, 19:00-19:15


The intent is to install security updates on the server which hosts the forum, wiki and IRC. These will be non-disruptive to functionality, as the server is running a stable OS release that gets critical fixes only.

142

Technology & Information / My weekly OpenBSD time

« on: January 30, 2015, 12:41:30 PM »

I've decided to get serious about contributing to an open-source project. In the past, I've submitted patches here and there, but never seriously taken the time to contribute regularly. That's going to change.

Starting this Sunday, I'm going to spend three hours every Sunday afternoon (from 14:00 to 17:00) working on OpenBSD. The first hour (14:00 to 15:00) is reserved for working on and submitting fixes to problems I know I am capable of fixing. I might spend over an hour on that, but an hour is the reserved minimum, unless I fix all such problems beforehand.

The remaining time will be spent learning about things that interest me. This includes things such as reading source code, debugging complex issues, and testing experimental code from the mailing lists. The intent is that I'll probably be interested enough most weeks to continue working on this after the time allocation. There's lots of stuff I want to do, but I keep forgetting about it and then remembering at odd moments when I don't have the time for it.

I'm going to post what I'm working on here, because if I don't post it somewhere others can read it, I'll forget and/or give up easily. If you aren't interested, just don't read this thread.


Sunday, 1 February, 2015

Problems to fix (in no particular order)

• Submit patch against the net/pidgin port to make nick colours in MUCs deterministic. I've been using this patch for a few weeks at the office, so I know it works well, I just need to send it to the developers.
  
• Fix a typo in pfsync(4) I happened to notice.
  

General learning (in order of decreasing interest)

• Read through the sndio(7) audio subsystem source code, and understand how it fits together. Exercise: Try writing a headphone crossfeed DSP for sndio.
  
• Read the USB 2.0 specification and try to implement transaction translator support in uhci(4).
  
• Write a port for xpra.
  
• Read and try to understand the inteldrm(4) video driver, as a prelude to debugging an issue with my dual-head configuration at the office.
  
• Try to implement virtual consoles in the console driver for the Lemote Yeeloong.

I might add more stuff later, as I think of it.

143

Philosophy, Religion & Society / MOVED: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

« on: January 01, 2015, 10:44:07 AM »

This topic has been moved to Complete Nonsense.

http://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=2207.0

144

Technology & Information / New (used) laptop

« on: December 26, 2014, 05:44:01 AM »

I've been looking for a decent laptop that can run OpenBSD (recent Chromebooks are nice in terms of battery life, but suck at hardware support from anything but ChromeOS). I trawled the OpenBSD mailing list archives a bit, and found that the Lenovo ThinkPad X201 is supposed to be very reliable and well-supported, as well as being fairly small and light. It's a bit old, so it's not exceptionally lightweight by modern standards, but I can live with that.

I found and bought an X201 on eBay for $300. Bargain, considering the reputation this laptop has for reliability on the 'net. I can't wait to get my hands on it and install OpenBSD.

Meanwhile, my recent PC Case Gear order has been delayed by a lack of the SATA cables I ordered. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise, as I can now request an additional SSD to be added to the order for my new laptop, to replace its HDD.

At the moment, I'm mostly considering an Intel 530 Series 120 GB model. I won't use more than 120 GB on a laptop, and the X201 is old enough that it doesn't support SATA 3, so capacity and performance aren't worthy considerations. On the other hand, that Intel SSD has very lower power consumption (fuck yeah battery life), as well as a 5-year warranty (I care more about drives failing in laptops than in desktops, because I might be travelling with no access to backups when it happens).

I'll think about it some more and add an SSD to that order later today or tomorrow. Meanwhile, feel free to post suggestions.

145

Technology & Information / My SSD failed

« on: December 16, 2014, 04:08:35 AM »

I began observing strange hangs and high load averages today. After a while spent trying to troubleshoot, I rebooted and my BIOS couldn't find a bootloader. It kept trying to boot from what is now the first hard drive, a 4 TB drive with only data.

I'm going to download a rescue image onto a USB stick and restore my OS from backups onto my hard drive. Thank fuck for rotating disks, huh?

146

Announcements / Possible weird behaviour in Who's Online

« on: December 13, 2014, 05:46:24 AM »

I've made a couple of fixes (one undoing some of the other; my first fix was somewhat overzealous) to Who's Online behaviour:

https://github.com/TheFlatEarthSociety/forum.tfes.org/commit/0edba326c6638ae6de3f23046955377b3e94d353
https://github.com/TheFlatEarthSociety/forum.tfes.org/commit/26cea71234d9b3d9b2bc42093f72735fda760099

The purpose of these fixes is to get rid of error spam in the database log, so that we can more effectively tune up PostgreSQL, and also to help us notice real problems. That said, it's possible I've missed something important; the SMF code for updating the online log is very weird and complex.

The second fix linked above fixes an issue where the same user could appear multiple times in Who's Online, caused by the first fix. If you notice any other odd behaviour, please let me know.

147

Announcements / PLEASE READ: An important appeal from FES admin Parsifal

« on: December 06, 2014, 06:12:57 AM »

This week marks the one-year anniversary of this forum. I just wanted to make an announcement as a sort of milestone, and also to say that I'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish. I don't know about you guys, but this is the best online community I've ever been a part of, and I appreciate all of you who have helped to make that a reality, whether you've contributed to the website design, involved yourself in community discussions, or just been part of making this a great place by posting here.

That being said, some amount of what I had originally wanted to accomplish for this website has not transpired. Some of it turned out to be ideological dreaming, or simply overkill for a website this small, but others I still intend to work on. In the coming months, I'm hoping to make this place more robust than ever. Some changes that are in the works, or being considered, roughly in decreasing order of priority:

• Migrating FES services off my personal VPS and onto something pizaaplanet can better help to maintain in case of unexpected outages. Making this happen is a goal before I go exploring New Zealand in January, as I won't be around much in that time.
• Setting up a monitoring server. This is something I keep talking about and not doing, and I'm hoping to change that. I want to be alerted if the website goes down, rather than happen to notice a few hours after the fact.
• Tuning up the various bits of the site to make sure they continue to perform well as we continue to grow. We're making a start on that next week.
• Testing our modifications to SMF on the recently released 2.1 beta version. This may not happen until February or so, but if anyone with epic design skillz wants to step up to port our theme to 2.1, please let me know.

And of course, the reunification conversation is still proceeding. We'll hopefully have something to bring to the community soon.

Finally, I'd like to remind and encourage everyone to create threads in S&C if you encounter bugs, or anything that frustrates you about this forum. I'd like to do what I can to make this the best community on the Internet for all of you, as it already is for me, but I can't fix problems I don't know about. Help me to help you.

Your friendly local sysadmin,
Parsifal.

148

Status Notices / Scheduled maintenance, 2014-12-13

« on: December 06, 2014, 05:57:58 AM »

The forum, wiki and IRC will be going offline for about five minutes on 2014-12-13, between 08:00 and 08:15 UTC.

For convenience, this means:

EST (USA east coast):
2014-12-13, 03:00-03:15

UTC (UK):
2014-12-13, 08:00-08:15

AEDT (Australia east coast):
2014-12-13, 19:00-19:15


The intent is to install security updates on the server which hosts the forum, wiki and IRC. These will be non-disruptive to functionality, as the server is running a stable OS release that gets critical fixes only.

Additionally, the opportunity will be taken to perform some tuning on the forum database server, which has been running on default settings since this website was set up; and to migrate the wiki off SQLite, which it was originally configured with. We now have enough real data and traffic that it is worth looking at what tuning is required to make the website run smoothly.

149

Status Notices / Unplanned outage, 2014-11-20

« on: November 20, 2014, 11:52:53 PM »

The server that hosts the forum, wiki and IRC was down for about six and a half hours, from about 17:00 to about 23:40 UTC, 2014-11-20. I'm still looking into the root cause, but the reason for the duration of the outage is that it happened in the middle of the night here, and I was asleep.

In response to this incident, I'm going to be looking into setting up proper monitoring soon. It's something I've been planning for a while and never got around to because the server has been very reliable until now. Hopefully this won't happen again, but I'd like to be prepared.

150

Technology & Information / OpenBSD

« on: November 08, 2014, 04:42:16 PM »

I pre-ordered a copy of OpenBSD 5.6 a while back. It arrived a few days ago, and I lost no time in installing it at work. I've also just installed it on my Lemote Yeeloong to play around with at home. It really is a fantastic system to work with.

OpenBSD is a project I've had an idle interest in for some time, and with all the drama around systemd going on in Linux-land at the moment, it's finally got me fed up enough to move. It's going to take a while before I can move my home desktop, because OpenBSD can't read Linux encrypted filesystems and I have about 2 TB of data to migrate, but I'll get there in the end.

Moving from Linux to OpenBSD reminds me of when I first migrated from Windows to Linux; aside from a few teething problems as I get used to the differences, everything seems much cleaner and simpler, and it's a lot easier to understand how the OS works. This is made even easier in the case of OpenBSD, due to a combination of them including the full source code for the operating system when you buy a CD, having very high standards for their own code, and having documentation that is second to none. I've had it installed less than a week, and I've already spent a while exploring the internals of the codebase, and it's all very neat and tidy.

You can obtain a copy from http://www.openbsd.org/, although I would encourage you to buy a copy from https://www.openbsdstore.com/ if you're going to install it, as CD sales are one of the primary sources of funding for the project. I'm enjoying it enough that I already plan to buy OpenBSD 5.7 when it comes out in May.

151

Status Notices / Unplanned outage, 2014-10-11

« on: October 11, 2014, 03:12:34 PM »

From approximately 14:50 to 15:10 UTC, 2014-10-11, the forum, wiki and IRC were offline. This was an unplanned outage initiated by the hosting provider, as a result of problems on the server unrelated to FES.

I indirectly take responsibility for the outage due to negligence, as I was informed of the situation 24 hours in advance and did not see the correspondence. I intend to address the problem in the short term by investigating why I didn't notice the correspondence and remedying that.

In the medium- to long-term, FES's hosting will be moved off my personal VPS and onto its own dedicated VPS, which will solve the problem more generally.

Many apologies for the inconvenience.

152

Technology & Information / The great (well, not so great) storage upgrade

« on: October 04, 2014, 04:01:07 PM »

As some of you may remember, some time ago I bought a new computer with 2 TB of storage, plus another 2 TB for backups. Well, two and a half years after that fateful purchase decision, I am now almost out of space.

Just the other day, I bought two 4 TB drives (of the same brand and product line) to replace my existing 2 TB drives. I don't have any spare SATA cables, so I'll have to replace one at a time, but thanks to the magic of Linux LVM I can move data from one drive to the other while the system is running, so I only need to reboot briefly to exchange drives.

I'll also be taking this opportunity, in light of our recent Orwellian legislation, to encrypt the new drive before I put any data on it.

Let's get this party started!

153

Arts & Entertainment / The Pink Floyd discography listen-through

« on: September 27, 2014, 06:38:33 AM »

Pink Floyd was the band that got me "into" music, back in 2005. I haven't listened to much of their stuff in years, so this weekend and next weekend, I'm going to do a complete listen-through of their material, in chronological order, and post a short review of each thing here.

"Chronological" is applied somewhat loosely; I won't be starting with their first release, but rather with their earliest released recording, a DVD called London '66-'67 with two extended early Floyd improvisations. Then I'll begin on the early singles, interleaved with their early albums in the order they were released. I won't include most compilations, but I will include Relics, which is largely just down to personal preference.

I plan to finish with their Live 8 appearance in 2005, the last time the four members of post-'60s Floyd ever performed together. Then I'll return when The Endless River gets released, to post a review of that.

154

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Australian anti-terrorism laws

« on: September 26, 2014, 05:18:51 PM »

Main article: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australias-new-security-laws-explained-20140926-10mh6d.html

This has been all over the news here lately. In short, our government is about to pass laws granting special immunity to agents working on loosely-defined "special intelligence operations", stricter penalties for anyone reporting information about said missions, and virtually unlimited power to access computer systems. In the name of fighting terrorism, of course.

This change has come about rather suddenly, after alleged terrorist plots in Sydney. I can't say I'm too happy with the reaction of Parliament, but this has been supported by both of our major parties, which in practice means an almost unanimous vote. I suppose the one good thing that might come of this is that people might stop voting the same idiots in every few years, but I don't hold out too much hope of that.

This whole thing is sickening to me. According to that article, there is more legislation on the way, which would enable the government to require me to prove that I'm not a terrorist if I decide to take a trip to Syria. There is a fairly substantial Arab population in Australia, many of whom no doubt have family in Syria. Now they may have to conjure up proof (if anyone wants to tell me how the fuck they're supposed to do that, please go right ahead) that they aren't engaging in terrorism every time they visit their families.

As far as I'm concerned, any party which supports these bills is never getting another vote from me.

155

Status Notices / Scheduled maintenance, 2014-09-20

« on: September 13, 2014, 08:18:30 AM »

The forum, wiki and IRC will be going offline for about five minutes on 2014-09-20, between 07:00 and 07:15 UTC.

For convenience, this means:

EDT (USA east coast):
2014-09-20, 03:00-03:15

BST (UK):
2014-09-20, 08:00-08:15

AEST (Australia east coast):
2014-09-20, 17:00-17:15


The intent is to install security updates on the server which hosts the forum, wiki and IRC. These will be non-disruptive to functionality, as the server is running a stable OS release that gets critical fixes only.

156

Suggestions & Concerns / On the notion of FES reunification

« on: July 19, 2014, 06:37:29 PM »

As has been alluded to in another thread, the possibility of a reunification between this Society and theflatearthsociety.org is now open for discussion from the community. Given the uncertainty evident in that thread as to what exactly a "reunification" entails, I want to lay down specifics and allow people to comment on them.

Let me say, first and foremost, that this site exists and always has existed to serve its members. I don't have a political agenda beyond doing what is right by you guys; I've taken the lead in running this website because I sincerely believe I am best qualified, not because I want to be in charge. I will happily work with the other website or independently of them, whichever best suits the community's needs.

It is therefore imperative that everyone has a chance to express an informed opinion prior to a major organisational change, such as a reunification.


As it stands, reunification would likely entail Daniel assuming leadership of the unified Society, while we (myself and pizaaplanet) assume control of the unified online community. Daniel's purview would include things such as the Flat Earth Library and press releases; ours would include things such as the forum and the wiki.

There are details that would need to be worked out, but from a technical perspective, I know very well what concessions I would need from any reunification agreement in order to continue managing the forum as well as it is currently. Rest assured that no reunification will be agreed to that compromises our ability to support the community; any discussion or debate of specific details now would be premature and futile.


What I would like people's opinions on is whether or not an agreement of this sort is, in principle, something the community wants to pursue. If the answer is yes, then we can figure out the details later. If it is no, then there are no details to work out. Please try to keep to the topic; it's much simpler to answer one question at a time than to figure out all the tiny details at once.

To summarise, please consider whether you would like to see a reunion where Daniel heads the Society and myself and pizaaplanet head the online community (forum and wiki). If no, but you would be open to a reunion under different broad terms, please say so. If you would like to discuss something not covered by that, please create a new thread.

Of course, if anything I've said is unclear, please ask me about it. I understand that this can be a delicate situation for all involved, so I want to be crystal clear rather than risk a misunderstanding. Likewise, if anyone responds unclearly, I will ask for clarification.

157

Arts & Entertainment / Frank Zappa 1984 tour 30th anniversary extravaganza

« on: July 16, 2014, 03:53:14 PM »

It's that time again, folks. Zappa's 1984 tour was, without a shadow of a doubt, his most controversial ever. With the combination of an abundance of Thing-Fish material, ludicrous rearrangements of his revered classics, Zappa's first use of percussive samples on the road and a band that (to put it mildly) knew how to rock out, this group consistently managed to pull off sounding funny, demented and energetic all at the same time.

Which one is most important, and whether that is a good or a bad thing, has been debated by Zappa fans for the past 30 years, and it's rare to find someone who doesn't either love or hate this tour. Whatever your opinion of it, it's definitely not one that is quickly forgotten.


Meet the band

Ray White (vocals, guitar)


A veteran of Zappa's touring ensemble, this would be Ray's last year on the road with Frank. He definitely goes out with a bang; apart from reprising his well-established lead vocal part in songs like City of Tiny Lights and Advance Romance, he is a vital part of this band's vocal harmonies (one of its biggest strengths), as well as more than filling Napoleon's shoes in late-tour renditions of The Evil Prince.

Chad Wackerman (drums)


The straight member of the group. Chad was, is, and would continue to be the rock underpinning most of Frank's studio and live work in the '80s, and his is the first year in which he gets a regular solo spot. It is also the first year in which he has pads rather than real drums at his disposal, resulting in some of the most bizarre-sounding drum solos you'll ever hear, including weird dissonant chiming noises and fake handclaps.

Scott Thunes (bass)


The other half of Frank's steady rhythm section, Scott also contributes to this tour with his eccentric sense of humour. He would occasionally yell something half-intelligible into Ike or Ray's microphone, and generally give audiences humorous antics on stage to accompany the music -- incredible, when you consider that he keeps a steady bass line going the entire time.

Alan Zavod (keyboards)


Alan is an Australian pianist, and this would be his only tour with Frank. He is best known in Zappa circles for his "volcano" keyboard solos, so called because he would give the exact same style of performance every night for this five-month tour, in a very dramatic style that his bandmates likened to a volcano erupting. While impressive and awe-inspiring to audiences, these performances would have been very repetitive to the band members he toured with.

Bobby Martin (keyboards, alto saxophone, vocals)


Back on the road after his distinguished success with Frank in 1982, Bobby frequently takes on the falsetto part of this band's exceptional vocal harmonies, and does a magnificent job of such. His instrumental duties this time around are largely accompaniment only, but when he gets his chance to shine with a lead vocal here or there, he makes the best of it.

Ike Willis (vocals, guitar, kazoo, tambourine)


Ike has returned since disappearing at the end of 1980, and is stronger than ever. A key part of this band's vocal harmonies, he is also one of the biggest contributors to its humour, its other biggest strength. He would frequently interject at seemingly arbitrary moments with secret words and other assorted insanity, creating an interesting deviation in even the most frequently performed songs from time to time.

Napoleon Murphy Brock (vocals, tenor saxophone)


Napoleon was only with this band for the first two weeks, but in those two weeks, they had (in this reporter's opinion) the best vocal harmonies of any Zappa band ever. Put Ray, Bobby, Ike, Napoleon and Frank all together in the one band, and you have a recipe for pure, unadulterated vocal supremacy. This is the sort of band He's So Gay was written for, a band that makes Carol You Fool seem to meld together into one quintitimbral masterpiece. Those two weeks aren't this band's high point, as they are still finding their sweet spot, but they do offer a special something that no other Zappa band ever has.

Frank Zappa (conducting, guitar, vocals)


The one and only. This tour, Frank's sense of humour has overtaken his guitar playing -- he does crank out the occasional masterpiece on guitar, but for the most part, his playing isn't up to his usual standard. He makes up for it with secret words and silly arrangements in abundance. This isn't Frank at his best, but it is Frank at his funniest.


See you tomorrow for the first show.

158

Announcements / Sorry about the Tapatalk spam

« on: July 06, 2014, 09:49:41 AM »

It seems Tapatalk is fond of spamming out e-mails without telling anyone or asking permission first. I'd like to clarify two things: first and most importantly, we will never place advertisements on this website or try to sell you anything you don't want. I've neutered the code that sent the spam so that it won't do anything of the sort again. Second, we do not endorse the use of Tapatalk; we are simply providing it as a convenience for users who would like to use it.

To expand on the second point, here's my earlier rant on the matter:

I'd like to set one thing straight for the record. This isn't something we can feasibly support, as none of the admins uses Tapatalk and it duplicates a lot of SMF's own code (from an older version than we're using, in fact). This means that the Tapatalk part of the codebase is going to be missing a lot of our bug fixes, feature enhancements and performance improvements, both from SMF itself and from us.

I don't know how heavily Tapatalk relies on the SMF side of things, and I don't use it so I won't notice if things are broken. We will of course make a best effort to fix problems as they are reported, but the web interface is the one we primarily support and the one that is tested and considered to work well. If you report bugs with the forum using Tapatalk, we ask that you please also try to reproduce them using the web interface.

I'm not trying to be difficult, it's just that this code really isn't supportable the way it is. I'm more than willing to provide it as a convenience mechanism for people who want to use Tapatalk, but understand that in doing so, we can't guarantee that all of the problems we've fixed over the past eight months are going to be fixed for you.

159

Status Notices / Scheduled maintenance, 2014-07-05

« on: June 29, 2014, 07:27:52 AM »

The forum, wiki and IRC will be going offline for about five minutes on 2014-07-05, between 07:00 and 07:15 UTC.

For convenience, this means:

EDT (USA east coast):
2014-07-05, 03:00-03:15

BST (UK):
2014-07-05, 08:00-08:15

AEST (Australia east coast):
2014-07-05, 17:00-17:15


The intent is to install security updates on the server which hosts the forum, wiki and IRC. These will be non-disruptive to functionality, as the server is running a stable OS release that gets critical fixes only.

160

Announcements / Why we won't upgrade to SMF 2.0.8

« on: June 29, 2014, 04:37:08 AM »

SMF released a new version a couple of weeks ago. I've pushed the changes to our upstream branch on GitHub, but after reading through them and the changelog, I've decided not to upgrade.

That diff should speak for itself, but in case it doesn't, it contains at least as many (probably accidental) reversions and errors as improvements, and there are no security fixes to worry about. Until SMF makes another release that is actually going to be beneficial to us, we're better off sticking to 2.0.7 with our own improvements.