I think I’ve fixed most of the teething troubles, but the database upgrade does seem to have done a rather nasty number on any unicode I may have used, or for some reason any copy-pasting. I think this is really caused by a bug in old Wordpress versions but nevertheless I’m annoyed. If you do spot any posts with higher-than-usual concentrations of €, æ and  symbols strewn through them, do leave a comment and I’ll try to fix as much as is plausible. That said, the archives have been through enough CMSes by now that I reckon they’re probably mostly exposed markup code and errant unicode by now.

Oh, well.

Let me know if there are any compatability issues, rendering glitches, or comments you have.

Also let me know which sidebar features you want back. Tell me in a comment, or if I’ve accidentally broken comments, let me know that by email (taylor.andrew@gmail.com) or Twitter (@Andrew_Taylor).

IE users should switch to Chrome (not because it is better than Opera or Firefox but because it will be less of a culture shock). IE users on a computer network that forbids the installation of alternate browsers should invest in a pen drive and switch to Firefox Portable, and then petition their IT department to fire the morons that put that policy in place.

If someone wants to write an IE-compatible version I will use it, but I don’t think IE users would know what to do with that level of functionality. I can see them not pressing it in case other people on other computers want to use the sidebars, or rebooting to get them back.

For people who use the site a lot, the link seems to work as a bookmarklet.

I’m going to get all Ann Maurice on my sidebars’ collective ass (I imagine they have one collective ass, much like two legs do, assuming they’re the same person’s legs) and do a major de-clutter on them. First plan is to widgetise both sidebars and thereby collapse the frankly ridiculous archive list into a drop-down menu. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I should really fix the search page, although I doubt anyone sees it much. Suggestions welcome, even after I’ve done it (such is the joy of widgets — non-Wordpress users, you don’t need to know what I’m talking about, just trust that this all makes sense).

The FriendFeed widget on the left is one I found on the internet somewhere and have hacked and modified to show comments, and I use it primarily in place of Google’s practically unstylable, commentless and Javascript-dependent Reader Shared Items clip. I much prefer my new version. You may have also noticed a “recent comments” panel has appeared beneath it.

To be honest, I’ve found Friendfeed more useful for syndicating to other sites, such as here and Facebook, than for actually using as a website. This may be because I have two ‘friends’ on Friendfeed and neither has shared a single item. If you would like my customised version of the widget, then email me and I’ll send it to you. Note that my nickname is hardcoded into it so unless you change it, it’ll display my comments about your items, not your own. (This is more a feature than a bug, really.) Google Reader, on the other hand is fantastically useful, and I keep meaning to put up a post about the clever system I have slowly evolved with about four Google services and a Firefox plugin that have between them made my online life so much simpler.

Fuck off with your bullshit comments about browsers.  If you like Firefox that’s fine, but don’t tell other people what they should or should not be using.  Wanker.

I deleted it, because it was abusive and not relevant to the page, and I don’t really need that on a page which, since being featured in the b3ta newsletter, has racked up over 5000 hits and 97% of the site’s total pageviews. But I pride myself on the openness of my comment system so I thought I’d air it here and respond properly.

First of all, fuck you, Bogwart. The notice in question appears at the top of the page when using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and is there because the browser in question fails to correctly render my website, and I’d rather people realised it was because I can’t be bothered making special efforts to accommodate bad browsers than they thought I was just incompetent. Internet Explorer makes up less than 40% of the traffic to this site, usually, but if I made the site render properly in IE it would probably have taken 70% of the effort involved in making the layout. That doesn’t suit me. The “bullshit comment” reads

Note: Your browser is displaying this page incorrectly because your browser is crap. I know it comes with Windows and I know it’s easy to find and I know it’s the simple option, but honestly it’s the worst browser available. Get Opera or Firefox if you want to browse webpages. (I recommend Opera.) Go and do it now. It’s okay; I’ll wait.

I don’t think I’m being overly political there. I’m not saying people ’should’ switch for any reason other than “Firefox is better”. I don’t even say I like Firefox: I explicitly recommended Opera over it. I’m no more being a wanker than a critic is being a wanker when recommending one film/book/videogame over another.

But ultimately, I could have got political. I could have said that Internet Explorer’s non-standard and proprietary behaviour makes it distinct from true HTML web browsers, and the fact that it’s bundled with the only widespread operating system for non-technical PC users means that its rules, which other browsers aren’t allowed to mimic, become a de-facto standard. This is clearly either an abuse of Microsoft’s monopoly designed to make other operating systems impractical or else it’s just incompetence.

I could point out that IE is full of security holes — they even managed to sneak one into the JPEG display code, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible — and that this meant I was forced to choose between ’standard’ looking websites and security. I could point out that, while Firefox and Opera certainly crash sometimes (and to be honest I’ve never used a browser I really like — Safari is gorgeous but just doesn’t have enough functionality for me) they don’t do so nearly as often or spectacularly as IE — taking down the taskbar and any file browsing windows I may be using.

There are moral, standards-based, functional, security and practical reasons to avoid using IE. I don’t think I’m a wanker for advocating that.

I’m just amazed that Bogwart took it so personally.

Somebody shut off the power to the entire third floor of our Phoenix location. We are investigating. …

On-site technicians claim this is scheduled maintenance of the power grid. I don’t know who they’re supposed to have scheduled with, but it wasn’t us. …

“Escalate” is now a very angry verb.

The story as of now: the building owner allegedly scheduled this power maintenance. Our colo provider, which owns the cage space in that building where our equipment is located, claims they notified us. They didn’t.

They have finished screwing around with half of our equipment (the “A” power feeds). They will begin shutting down the B feeds shortly. We’re looking to see what we can get running on half power.

Not much. They turned the power back on, but none of the servers. …

They’ve acknowledged their failure to notify us. Small consolation. We’re still working on recovering all the servers that died in mid-file-write.

Our master MySQL server seems to be the primary problem at this point. We are working to resolve it as quickly as it can, but it seems to have blown enough drives that the RAID won’t start. We’re working on multiple recovery strategies in parallel. Unfortunately, the server with the most recent backups is still checking its disks.

We are still hard at work on this. We’re taking care of the physical drive swaps; it’s time consuming to locate enough spares at 5am on a Sunday morning, much less replicate them all. …

Moral of this story: There’s no point in booting FreeBSD off of mirrored drives, because if one of the drives fails (for example by having its power flipped on and off over and over), it won’t boot anyway. We have multiple examples. :-(

For those who want to know, the “power maintenance” was perpetrated by the building owner, Digital Realty Trust. The lack of communication was the responsibility of our cage broker. The time-to-recover is our responsibility, as we had no plan for this many critical servers being rendered inoperable all at once. There will be a reckoning, but I think we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and finish our plans for a truly distributed shared hosting network with zero single points of failure.

Our recovery efforts are proceeding. We are being double-extra-super cautious, because data loss is unacceptable.

On the plus side, they can’t charge me while the site’s down.

Since this update was not very funny, here is a nicely ironic quote from an article I read the other day:

Remember that although English is NOT your NATIVE Language, your writings should conform to the conventions of standard written English (sentence form, grammar, spelling, etc.). Your ideas will have little impact, no matter how well the research, if they are not communicated well. Remember always that scientific terminology very often has precise meaning. Be certain you choose your words correctly and wisely.

Quite. Lastly, an observation.

Every so often Adobe Acrobat Reader updates itself, and every time it makes a little shortcut on the desktop. I have to delete it. Usually it makes a couple more around the place, too. What are they for? Who clicks them? When has anyone, ever, run Acrobat Reader from a shortcut? You double click files, that’s how you get it. You browse to PDFs online and it appears in Firefox. You don’t run it, then click File, Open. It just doesn’t happen. Does it?

Do they just want a tiny, free advert on your screen? Well, they can’t have one.

I read the other day about how to put popular pages on a list using Google Analytics, and very clever it was, although it seems a massively over-engineered solution. So I thought for a while and came up with starring. I think it should be a little more interesting — this way the pages like How To Crack Captchas which feature heavily in search engine hits because apparently people just love cracking captchas won’t drown out that one person who randomly happened across a two-year-old rant and liked it. We shall see, though.

You can’t have the same page on the “starred” list twice. Starring a page already on the list will just bump it back up to the top again. At the moment, the list is set up to display ten posts (once people star ten posts), but that could change. I keep meaning to redesign the sidebars anyway.

I’m not really sure why I called it “starring” when there isn’t a little star graphic. Maybe there will be one day, but probably I’ve just been spending too long using Google Reader. If anyone would like to add this to their WordPress blog, they should get in touch.

Only problem is, it doesn’t work. Not properly, anyway. Works a bit. There were a few problems. First, the URL the login is submitted to. It’s usually given relative to the page, and parsing the source URL to find out what the submission URL will be can be a pain. But that’s a problem I solved. Turns out, though, that some websites fill the login form with all sorts of weird stuff: expiring session IDs, gibberish I couldn’t figure out… I just replicated all hidden fields, and it usually seems to work, although some sites need their gibberish up-to-date and fail. But other websites, like vBulletin forums (like RealVG’s), didn’t accept POST requests from external websites — specifically blocking this kind of site from working. How annoying. (Particularly annoying that it probably does work it you’re running a crappy firewall.)

Feel free to play with it, or even use it, though. Some sites won’t; other sites won’t. I promise I won’t look at the password database. (Really, I ought to encrypt the database a bit — I’d still be able to decrypt it but I’d not see things by accident if I had to do maintenance. But since it doesn’t work, I didn’t bother.) If people think it works well enough I might make it look nice. But as it is I’m happy enough to chalk it up to just a good idea that didn’t work.

Ho hum.

I’m aware that most of my readers won’t be awake at that time, but if things do over-run, then you should be able to check up on progress at http://status.nearlyfreespeech.net/. Any time the site is down, in fact, that page should let you know why and for how long. It’s stored on a totally different server to this page, so unless they’re both down at once, it should always be there.

UPDATE: Back online now. I think I may have miscalculated the times from US time, or they might have done it at the wrong time, but either way we’re back.