Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Republicans don’t trust women.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Is There Anybody Out There

Is There Anybody Out There

by | 203 Comments

This post is in: ,

Server has apparently been tits up all day, and we are doing a furious email conversation behind the scenes to figure out how to go forward. The problem is we have three million comments in the archive and (given my limited understanding of this crap), it’s fucking up the mysquel or whatever it is called.

At any rate, my brother was talking about a book he read by the Dalai Lama years ago, and the basic gist of it was that if you smile and are happy around people, they will be happy, too, and nice things will happen. So let’s keep that in mind this Friday night as I give you a brand spanking new open thread for you to spread your bile. Shit. That wasn’t nice or happy.

Reader Interactions

203Comments

  3. 3.

    Belafon

    I would think MySQL could handle 3 million comments, even if they are averaging about 1KB each. I’d be more worried about the hardware underneath.

  5. 5.

    dollared

    I think you might want to pay for SteveBallmer’sSQL, which is a more reliable product. Smiley face.

  11. 11.

    Redshirt

    Ban everyone.
    Problem solved.

    Make the “stylesheet” of the blog a blank white screen – your mysequel should be able to handle that.

  12. 12.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    The idea of three million disembodied archived comments roiling around in storage makes me think of that scene from Ghostbusters. Particularly since they’re comments from this place.

    Whatever you do John, don’t shut down the grid!

  13. 13.

    gogol's wife

    Boy, is The Awful Truth good. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne can’t be beat, and whoever the lady is who plays Aunt Patsy is (I’m too lazy to google) is pretty damn good too.

    Night all.

  14. 14.

    Ruckus

    What you are trying to say is you hit the big time and now wonder what it takes to run a system this popular. HHS might be able to help. They know how to set up a system with archives that will handle much more traffic than BJ gets.

  15. 15.

    Chickamin Slam

    Those 3 million comments are historical documents. They are part of the heritage of this country, Internet, blog.

    Oh heck. If you really need them I’m sure Keith Alexander has a copy in his database. He’ll be glad to share …

  19. 19.

    Hungry Joe

    I first came across the expression “Tits up” just a few years ago, as the title of an Annie Proulx short story: “Tits Up in a Ditch”; I don’t know if it has caught on all of a sudden or I just started noticing it. The Proulx story is flat black and chilling.

  20. 20.

    srv

    Argle bargle. What you have here is a classic MySQL Pepsi Syndrome.

    This is why you need a libertarian FP’er to do your IT.

  21. 21.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Little Boots: I’m not getting the reference sorry, but then I only saw the first one, I think. I can’t remember.

    To me the Ghostbusters scene is what came to mind, every nasty, snarling thread from the entire BJ history in concentrated form suddenly loosed howling on the unsuspecting world, anarchy, naked mopping, dogs and cats eating together, it’s too terrible to imagine.

  28. 28.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Ruckus: It’s from the UK. I mean it’s very commonly used there, and for a long time. May be catching on more on this side.

  29. 29.

    Yatsuno

    @Bill E Pilgrim: That was in the first one, which is really the only one even close to worth watching. Don’t even get me started on the animated atrocity.

    We are all the Swedish Chef now. We should embrace our borkitude.

  30. 30.

    max

    At any rate, my brother was talking about a book he read by the Dalai Lama years ago, and the basic gist of it was that if you smile and are happy around people, they will be happy, too, and nice things will happen

    One must suffer happily and discard one’s attachment to things to escape the great wheel of life.

    Which I suppose could be interpreted to say you should stop whining, archive the ‘old blog’ and then nuke the old comments and start over. I was NOT thinking that or about that when I typed out the line, which is the penny version of Tibetan Buddhism. So you could also interpret it to mean you should happily endure the slings and arrows of outrageous now-commercial databases.

    Whatever. It’s all groovy! All India Radio – A Low High (2009) – Lo-Fi Groovy (MK mix)

    max
    [‘You could change your name to The Swedish Chicken!’]

  31. 31.

    Hungry Joe

    @Ruckus: Yeah, it sounds old, all right — I just never heard it until the Proulx story. Makes me wonder what other common knowledge has just passed me by. (“Are you kidding? EVERYBODY knows that.”)

  32. 32.

    Karmus

    we have three million comments in the archive

    Don’t let Rand Paul know. He’ll ‘write’ at least six more books with that.

  33. 33.

    Little Boots

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    oh sorry, it’s the destruction of alderaan, “as if millions of voices cried out in terror and suddenly were silenced” (probably for the better)

  34. 34.

    dance around in your bones

    Y’all just do this to make us all go into hot & cold sweats, chills, and cravings to comment, gawd dammit, comment!

    Waitin’ for the Ballon Juice man, 26 comments in my hand.

  37. 37.

    MobiusKlein

    I like “Tit’s up” as a tech descriptor.
    I also have used “Jacked up”, as in some hunk of code that is akin to that guy who has 20 cars on his front ‘lawn’ all on jacks, all in dire need of repair.

    soooo many terms for ‘wow, that shit is way fucked’ I can’t begin to start.

    Ok, I start: Frozen, hung, crashed, wedged, BSOD, on the blink, hosed, fluxored, jacked, glitched, stuck, munged, …

  39. 39.

    jl

    I say, separate out the old comment archives, and make them into a new blog. Then when we are not arguing with each other about what we say now, we can back and rehash stuff that was said unlimited quantities of time ago. It’ll keep us off the streets and making trouble. Call it the BJ Archive Funhouse blog or something.

    First yokel who smart asses that we are still arguing about same things as unlimited quantities of time ago, gets to go make sammich for Steve.

  42. 42.

    MobiusKlein

    @Anne Laurie: It was mostly used in Britain, till BBC America or thereabouts…

    WRONG.

    I’ve used it since ’96, probably from my Canadian born co-workers.

  43. 43.

    Ash Can

    @Karmus:

    He’ll ‘write’ at least six more books with that.

    That might not be a bad idea. Everyone would get disgusted with his potty-mouthed material, not to mention his repeated references to skull-fucking kittens, and no one would pay any attention to him anymore.

  44. 44.

    different-church-lady

    @efgoldman:

    …on charges that he bribed other Navy officers into giving him classified information in exchange for prostitutes and cash.

    Oh, so at least it was a fair trade.

  45. 45.

    NotMax

    Pouring a cup of really strong tea into the improbability port of the server will get things humming.

  50. 50.

    fuckwit

    Hey Mistermix, have you thought about moving to some other blog software, maybe even something homegrown, instead of FYWP? And using other storages than SQL, which are more parallelizable?

    It’s been years since I dealt with FYWP as a sysadmin. There are better storage options these days, but I have no idea what other blog software is out there that uses them, and how they compare to FYWP.

  51. 51.

    Cacti

    Just saw that tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), one of the seminal albums of 1990s hip hop, and of Generation X in general.

    Damn I feel old.

  56. 56.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Not to worry about the 3 million comments. I’m sure The Cloud (TM 1993, National Security Agency, all rights reserved) has several archived copies.

  58. 58.

    danielx

    Shit. That wasn’t nice or happy.

    No, John, but it’s definitely you and we wouldn’t change a thing.

  59. 59.

    lahke

    Happy, happy, joy, joy. Just came back from Beethoven’s 9th played on period instruments, at pretty much the tempo that Beethoven designated, which means that the last movement went at a pretty fast MARCH DOUBLE TIME, THERE!!! Very exhilarating. I’m off to YouTube to listen to 17 other versions now and figure out what I like.

  67. 67.

    ranchandsyrup

    Tony Giardino: So who’s in this Pentavirate?
    Stuart Mackenzie: The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds, *and* Colonel Sanders before he went tits up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee *beady* eyes, and that smug look on his face. “Oh, you’re gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!”

  70. 70.

    John Weiss

    Hey John,

    ‘tits up in the water’ was a Texas expression from the time I was a teen, which has been awhile ago.

    The Dali Lama is right. I try to follow his example. You should too; it really works.

    Happy trails,

    JW

  71. 71.

    Mark B.

    MySQL is crap since Oracle took it over. I’m guessing that Postgres is probably the best open source option these dates if you’re sticking with a Classic SQL model.

    The low impact way to do this is to move all of the old comments into an archive database and just serve the ones left in the last year. You can solve the problem of letting people read ancient comments later. Since those comments can be read-only, the database maintenance can be simplified for the archive.

    The next level of sophistication would to create a scheduled job to archive old comments.

  73. 73.

    Geoduck

    @Yatsuno:

    That was in the first one, which is really the only one even close to worth watching.

    No. The Empire Strikes Back was just as good, if not better. Return of the Jedi, yes, had some problems.

  77. 77.

    Cain

    I thnk your brother (and by extension the Dalai Lama) is correct. That’s how I am every day regardless and nice things do happen.

  78. 78.

    Mark B.

    @fuckwit: yeah, I’ve been working with MongoDB, which is great and is much more scalable than traditional SQL databases. I don’t know about blogging software that uses it, but it seems like it would be relatively simple to do.

  80. 80.

    burnspbesq

    @lahke:

    Minnesota Orchestra, conducted by Osmo Vanska. Modern instruments, but the orchestra is scaled down to what would have been common in Beethoven’s time.

    A nice change of pace for those of us who were brought up on the big, bombastic Berlin Phil/von Karajan recordings.

  82. 82.

    Steeplejack

    @Anne Laurie:

    I have heard it used among American military and engineering types as far back as the ’60s. It probably goes back at least to World War II.

  84. 84.

    The Galloping Beaver

    Well, shit. That wasn’t very nice, was it? On the other hand,i can’t think of a better way to put it. We need three tools in the kitchen: A good hand; a sharp knife and; a server that works.

    Hang in there, mate. It always gets better.

  85. 85.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @MobiusKlein: The expression has been used in the Army for yonks. Usually it is expressed as Tango Uniform from the military phonetic alphabet words for T and U.

  87. 87.

    Tommy

    John feel free to email me, even though I know you have no clue who I am. NOT trying to sell you anything, but I do WordPress sites for a living (I mean that above email isn’t even my business email). And not small ones. Not saying Sayontan Sinha doesn’t know what they are doing, but I believe in Karma. And I often offer to at least listen to a WordPress related problem in a forum or elsewhere, cause well folks helped me seven years ago when I started doing this :). Heck somebody in a WordPress forum (and I get this isn’t one) last week for free. I find, funny thing, everytime I help somebody, it seems out of the blue, something so not related, well something “good” happens.

  88. 88.

    fuckwit

    @Mark B.: There are even better ones. CouchDB. Apache Zookeeper. Amazon has DynamoDB. Google has some Map/Reduce thing. There are probably a dozen cloudy NoSQL databases. I’m sure someone has written a blog that is backed by those and does not go tits up.

  92. 92.

    pseudonymous in nc

    Did I end up in moderation jail? Was it the “MongoDB: Snapchat for databases” joke that did it?

  96. 96.

    burnspbesq

    One website that wasn’t down most of the day was Covered California.

    Obamacare, we haz it.

    Farewell, crapola individual-market non-coverage. Burn in hell.

  97. 97.

    Mark B.

    @pseudonymous in nc: I know what you’re talking about, and there’s a very funny video about that. But Mongo is a whole lot better than it was when it started, and it supports transactions, rollbacks and real time commits now. But I wouldn’t use it for a mission critical or financial application, but it would be finer for a blog. As fuckwit said, there are a lot of other nosql DBs out there, many of them better than Mongo.

  98. 98.

    Tommy

    OK one other comment John, and not trying to be a dick here. Really, really, really.

    You are using the commenting system of WordPress as a forum basically. Not how it was meant to be used.

    So yes every comment, as well as all your posts, are being pulled out of your MySQL database, which WordPress sits-on-top-of (kind of).

    There are many solutions out there, cause well WordPress is open source. But look at something like bbPress to start with. I don’t think this would work for your site, but it shows what is possible. Also, and I can’t see your WordPress install clearly, but things like EditFlow rock to handle the multiple authors you have.

    Again I am NOT trying to sell you a single thing. I just was a lurker here for years and years before I started posting a few months ago. And I love your site.

    My two cents.

  102. 102.

    JordanRules

    Whew, finally got my facial exercises in now that I got my fill of comments. Some of the faces and laughter I make from reading here have got to burn at least a few calories.

  103. 103.

    Tommy

    @burnspbesq: Hearing all the stuff about how well KY is running (and what you said). Makes me wonder, and I do web development and I know what I am about to say isn’t easy, but I sure hope somebody at the Federal level called a few of the state exchanges that are working and said, “hey could we talk for a few?”

  104. 104.

    PaulW

    Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall starts right about NOW.

    Also, my NaNoWriMo word count is above 18,000

    Gonna see Thor 2: The Quickening tomorrow.

  108. 108.

    Redshift

    Since this is an open thread and I don’t have anywhere else to write it that anyone will see it, I’ll say it here.

    The conventional wisdom about the Virginia elections is that if the GOP had held a primary, LG Bill Bolling would have won it and of course he would have beaten McAuliffe, and Cuccinelli only lost because he’s too extreme. While I’m happy to have wingnuts publicly labeled too extreme, I’m not convinced that Bolling would have won. He’s basically spent the past eight years as LG doing nothing. The Virginia LG doesn’t have many duties, and I recall reports that the few commissions and stuff that McDonnell appointed him to he didn’t bother to show up for. The media decided he was some kind of elder statesman solely because he wasn’t as wingnutty as Cuccinelli.

    The fact is that McAuliffe’s team did a really good job of executing the Obama re-election campaign strategy — raise gobs of money early, use it to define your opponent before he has a chance to introduce himself, and build a massive volunteer effort focused on personal contact. Bolling might have done better because he didn’t produce such passionate opposition, but he might have done worse because he wouldn’t produce as passionate support.

    I’m glad the pundits have decided that the answer is for the GOP to be less crazy, but honestly, I think we could have beaten him.

  110. 110.

    Mark B.

    I would also like to plug wpengine.com which is a hosting service where some of my close friends work. Their business is hosting wordpress sites, and they have a lot of expertise in hosting wordpress blogs and handling all of the tech stuff so you don’t have to. And they’re not expensive. It might be a good option for you.

  111. 111.

    handsmile

    @efgoldman: , @burnspbesq:

    [FYWP has just vaporized two attempts at commenting, but the gist was…]

    I had tickets to last Sunday’s scheduled (but canceled) Carnegie Hall performance by the Minnesota Orchestra. An all-Sibelius program with Annie Sofie von Otter as featured soloist, and Osmo Vanska as perhaps the preeminent interpreter of Sibelius today.

    As I trust you know, the on-going labor dispute and lock-out precipitated Vanska’s resignation last month as music director/conductor.

  112. 112.

    tc

    Hey everyone. My niece is a senior in high school this year and she recently asked me what newspapers and magazines she ought to be reading in order to stay informed. I made my list but saw that it was too New York (and America)-centric, so I thought I’d ask you guys. What do you read every day? Every week?

  114. 114.

    Tommy

    @tc: I don’t think I have much (and mine is totally US based). In the early 90s when I moved to DC from the midwest I had a NYT, Washington Post (where I lived), and WSJ on my desk everyday. Got into the habit of reading them daily until like 2003. Then started to find Talking Points Memo and other sites, and I no longer read them.

    Well I do, if linked to.

    For me it is stuff at like Salon (just one) I head to. Or Greenwald. Or this or that blog. Somebody I trust. If they link to an article at the NYT I will read it.

    Now I have a lot of respect for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, LA Times, Times Picayune (New Orleans), and the Trib (Chicago Tribune), but not places I read much to be honest.

    Internalnational Guardian, Der Spiegel. A french paper/site, but I can’t recall the name.

    I assume there are many, many others I am not aware of. Like in Latin/South America.

    BTW: Where do you live?

  115. 115.

    Little Boots

    @tc:

    careful reading of the balloon juice threads would let her understand the derivation of ‘tits up’

    more seriously, no, not really sure. in print? the new york times and the new york review of books, but it sounds like you probably have that pretty much covered already.

    does she really want that? there’s a whole world on line we did not grow up with. the guardian?

  117. 117.

    Steeplejack

    I could have used a working Balloon Juice today. A long commute and a little waiting time at the optometrist’s. Rode the bus/Metro into D.C. to pick up my new glasses, which are great. The old ones were eight years old and had a layer of permasmudge on the lenses that I am really noticing by its absence. Even though my prescription didn’t change, the whole world looks a little sharper around the edges. This must be what cataract surgery is like. And I have already noticed that my eyes are not as tired and dry at the end of the day.

    I’m especially excited because I splurged and got a pair of prescription sunglasses, which I haven’t had in decades. Sheer luxury! Looking forward to deploying those tomorrow.

  120. 120.

    tc

    @Little Boots:

    does she really want that? there’s a whole world on line we did not grow up with. the guardian?

    I’m not sure exactly what she wants. My guess is that she’s looking for some “establishment” [ie “old] publications to balance out the blogs she’s already reading.

  122. 122.

    Little Boots

    @tc:

    yeah, that makes sense.

    Unfortunately, I think the establishment is racing to catch up with her generation, which makes it all pretty complicated. the Washington Post is bought out by the guy at Amazon just as the younger generation wishes there was a Washington Post they could turn to and trust.

  123. 123.

    handsmile

    @tc:

    Given your niece’s age, I expect she’ll be reading online rather than leafing through dead trees. With the -centric caveats you noted, here are a few to consider:

    Every day: The Guardian (theguardian.com): today’s indispensable English-language news organization

    Most days: Al Jazeera (aljazeera.com)
    Every week: Le Monde Diplomatique English (mondediplo.com)

    A subscription to the New York Review of Books might not go unappreciated (great for college essay assignments).

    And if you love your niece (and I’m sure you do) impress upon her the vital importance of avoiding Time magazine and CNN in all forms.

  127. 127.

    Suffern ACE

    @tc: harpers is still worth checking out. The Atlantic, TNR and the progressive seem to be shells of their former selves.

  128. 128.

    Little Boots

    it’s kind of funny, tc, your neice just wants a damn answer but there’s some pretty big questions she’s raising.

    have you been listening to Randi Rhodes by any chance? she’s kind of going off the rails, but she’s really right that there’s a real crisis about whether any news source is actually trustworthy these days.

    cept balloon juice, of course.

  129. 129.

    tc

    @handsmile: Al Jazeera and Le Monde are excellent suggestions. I think I’m mostly going to give her a list of websites for most of these publications, along with subscriptions to NYRB and the New Yorker.

  131. 131.

    tc

    @Little Boots: Tell me about it. It’s forced me to confront some of the gaps in my own reading (particularly the dearth of non-American sources), so I’m glad she asked me to make the list in the first place.

    I haven’t been listening to Rhodes. I’ll check her out.

  132. 132.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @tc: The Economist is good. One has to remember its center-right stance on things, but it gives non-US-centric coverage to events.

    ETA: The Financial Times is an interesting replacement for the WSJ as a business and economics oriented daily.

  133. 133.

    Suffern ACE

    I’m worried that my answer to Google Doodle’s Rohrschach test was wrong and now I’ll get ads targeted to paranoid psychotics.

  134. 134.

    Little Boots

    @tc:

    yeah, it’s funny. I’m making way too much of this, but still, when you start to ask, why do I believe this?, it’s hard to get an answer.

  136. 136.

    cckids

    @burnspbesq:

    The Economist.

    For reals?

    . I ask because in 2008, when Palin couldn’t stammer out an answer to “what do you read”, Andrea Mitchell & ?maybe Cokie Roberts? were laughing about it, & Mitchell said, “why didn’t she just say, The Economist, everyone says it but almost no one reads it”.

  141. 141.

    NotMax

    @tc

    Can only put three links toal in a post, so will do a second post immediately following this one.

    Several other good places to check for news besides those already mentioned:

    McClatchy

    France24

  142. 142.

    cmorenc

    @johncole:

    if you smile and are happy around people, they will be happy, too, and nice things will happen. So let’s keep that in mind this Friday night as I give you a brand spanking new open thread for you to spread your bile. Shit. That wasn’t nice or happy.

    But John, you ARE at your smiling karma-spreading happiness when you’re railing, fuming, and spitting bile at everything. But your dogs are the window into the real you, and they apparently think you’re ok.

  145. 145.

    Little Boots

    haven’t seen Al Jazzera yet. I heard all the investigative reporters are finding a refuge there, though, as every other station sheds them.

  148. 148.

    Anne Laurie

    @tc: Seriously? NYMag.com reads a lot closer to your niece’s demographic than us old pharts. And if she’s a senior in high school, she’ll especially appreciate their “The Cut” blog — you’ll get a rash just looking at the cute-shoes-to-wear-now pics, but those guys are also very good on stuff like sexual politics, birth control, domestic violence, and other issues of key importantce to young women. (They were first ‘mainstream’ blog I saw covering Wendy Davis, for instance.) Something for every mood!

  150. 150.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Karmus:

    Don’t let Rand Paul know. He’ll ‘write’ at least six more books with that.

    Shit, he could do six by plagiarizing a handful of mclaren’s comments.

  151. 151.

    handsmile

    @tc:

    I’m pleased it was helpful. And I’d second Suffern ACE’s recommendation above (#131) of Harper’s Magazine, though its stingy on-line format is unfortunate. (at the same time, I appreciate its commitment to Luddite resistance.)

    Often interesting, off-beat, longish feature articles and a fine roster of regular contributors, e.g., Scott Horton, Jeff Madrick, Jane Smiley. The Harper’s Index is legendary. And the subscription price is little more than a dollar per issue.

    (Though it occurs to me that your niece will not be lacking for (a staggering amount of) reading material in the near future.)

  154. 154.

    Anne Laurie

    @Little Boots:

    financial times is supposed to be one of the best, but very expensive?

    Yes, and yes — but it’s really too specialized for someone who’s not reading it for professional purposes. Their Weekend print edition, on the other hand, is the kind of smart globalist general-purpose publication that the New Yorker used to be, back in the day. If only they’d sell subs to * just* the Weekender, I’d pay cover price plus a premium, but I can’t afford to pay for the five issues I week I’d never read (and tragically the local Barnes & Noble no longer gets copies, dammit).

  158. 158.

    hitchhiker

    @handsmile:

    Best thing about a Harper’s subscription is that you get access to all their archived magazines, going back to the civil war period.

    Astonishing collection of American history, that.

    The mag today is okay . . . I like the index & I think almost anybody can read the story it tells, month after month.

  160. 160.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @hitchhiker:

    Best thing about a Harper’s subscription is that you get access to all their archived magazines, going back to the civil war period.

    No shit? That is worth the price alone.

  163. 163.

    PurpleGirl

    Little Boots: in answer to your comment to me upthread — I am happy I finally got through to read comments and write a few too. When I BJ is being wonky I miss it and the people who comment here. (I often read comments while having dinner.) Now I’m off to bed.

  170. 170.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Little Boots: Back in the early 80s, a woman put an ad in a paper saying “Blues singer seeking band.” A guy who had just left the band Depeche Mode contacted her and this was the result. But so was this, and this is sublime.

  178. 178.

    Amir Khalid

    @efgoldman:
    Oh yes. I remember this one. Basically that company HQ’d in S’pore is owned and operated by the American defence profiteer named in the story. I don’t remember the coverage at the time mentioning any local partners, so the Asian connection is limited to that.

  185. 185.

    Anne Laurie

    @Amir Khalid: That is very generous of you, considering. Or am I wrong in recollecting that Singaporeans tend to regard Malaysia the way New Yorkers regard Jacksonville, Mississippi?

  187. 187.

    Adam Lang

    On the off chance that it’s helpful, I have run a wordpress blog for four years, and, more importantly, interact vigorously (that’s a euphemism, in case you can’t tell) on a daily basis with one of the largest mysql databases in the world. You can trust me when I say that it has rather a lot more than three million comments’ worth of data in it. (Indeed, several tables have well over 4,294,967,295 entries in them. Bonus points if you know why that’s significant. There will be a quiz.) I’m not the DBA but I’ve learned quite a lot from him.

    Feel free to drop me a line if you think I can be of service. No charge. Balloon Juice comments have provided me with thousands of hours of bleak, dark entertainment (‘haha god us liberals are totally fucked’) over the past nine or so years, I really feel like I should give something back. (“‘;”)

    Edit: Hmm, on second thought, putting funny sql into comments when you guys are having database issues is probably not such a great idea, is it?

  192. 192.

    Amir Khalid

    @Amir Khalid:
    Whoops. Spoke too soon. This here story mentions that the company owner is not an American but a Malaysian, who bribed top US Navy intel officers with cash, free luxury travel and Lady Gaga concert tix (USN admirals seeing Lady Gaga? Verily, the mind doth boggle). He just wanted to have US Navy ships sent to ports where he was around to get the maintenance and resupply jobs. This dude is definitely well-known in the local shipping industry, especially port cities like Port Klang and Penang, but he wouldn’t be a big player in KL.

  194. 194.

    fuckwit

    @Adam Lang:

    well over 4,294,967,295 entries

    LOL 32-bit rollover.

    Also LOL at embedded SQL http://xkcd.com/327/

    Still think the best comment was from whomever pointed out that what Cole is trying to do here (or what we have essentially done here against his will) is run a forum on FYWP, which was not designed to be a forum, and why that’s a recipe for trouble.

    It’d sure be nice if this was a forum with threaded comments, history or even ratings for users/comments, etc.

  195. 195.

    max

    @Adam Lang: You can trust me when I say that it has rather a lot more than three million comments’ worth of data in it.

    One would think. But ‘Cannot Establish Connection With Database’ is a recurring problem of some years.

    (Indeed, several tables have well over 4,294,967,295 entries in them. Bonus points if you know why that’s significant. There will be a quiz.)

    NO CLUE 11111111111111111111111111111111 !!

    Hmm, on second thought, putting funny sql into comments when you guys are having database issues is probably not such a great idea, is it?

    Connect to server, server runs the WP script which goes out to the database and gets… nothing. Given that this is likely the most active site on the hosting server, that suggests that the DB is… what? Niced at 25? The DB isn’t hosted on the server box so anything (ether cables, bad config, script bug, host network misconfiguration) causes a network timeout such that the DB never gets the REQ or the ACK from the DB box never arrives?

    Dying fan? DDOS (intentional or otherwise?) on the hosting service, such that the incoming packet stream is clogged up, suppressing box to box internal host communication? Problem seems to vanish once the incoming connection traffic drops to very low numbers. Had a bum TP cable that worked just well enough to confuse the problem for days.

    Logs are the only way to tell.

    XMH – State of Mind (2010) – Cryogenic Fire

    max
    [‘”Fire in cryogenic compartment”‘]

  196. 196.

    MikeJ

    Two things that might have a minor effect on the database:

    Delete comments from wp-comments where comment-approved is trash, post-trash, or spam. We rarely see spam, but if you’ve got a ton in the database there’s not really any reason to keep it around.

    optimize table on wp-comments (probably others too, but comments is going to be the biggest.)

    A few million records really shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s the reason databases exist. Of course as max says, you can’t really tell anything without looking at the logs. I seem to recall that mix knows databases, so he should know how to do an explain on the queries that take the most time.

  197. 197.

    matt

    If it’s being used right, a mysql database on proper production hardware shouldn’t have a problem with 3 million rows. There are a lot of little details involved in getting that right though, you have to be sure to only get the rows you need when you render individual pages and you have to have proper indexes on the columns you’re using to select out subsets of the rows you’re using. You should avoid using the DB to give you counts on that set or on subsets of it, instead possibly adding some computation at commit time (calculate the count and store it directly instead of using the DB to generate counts on each page view). Mysql also lets you log slow queries and attack performance problems from the other side.

  198. 198.

    matt

    Digging a little more it looks like wordpress does do stupid counts all over the place in its queries. Once you scale up those counts will kill you. If it was my code I’d create a new table to store the counts for comments on a given post and I’d either make the create comment code update the count (you’ll get inaccurate counts at times because there’s a race condition with multiple comments being made at the same time but it would be pretty good), or a back end process that crawls the records and updates the counts on like a 1 minute frequency.

  199. 199.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    No shit? That is worth the price alone.

    Yeah, Paul Ford (one of the savviest web people you’ve probably never heard of) worked for them for a while and was in charge of sorting out the archives and creating a taxonomy for them.

  200. 200.

    Anonymous Coward

    @jl: besides mentioned WordPress/MySQL hacks, (1) switch to the MariaDB fork of MySQL. (2) If you have $30k, get a Dell R820 or other manufacturer equivalent, 4 Intel processors, 768 GB of memory, solid state disks. We use them at work for scientific computing. Lots of memory helps paper over software issues. What’s your database machine OS and hardware?

  201. 201.

    tom

    @MikeJ: Delete comments from wp-comments where comment-approved is trash, post-trash, or spam.

    Trashed comments and old post revisions are two huge factors in WP db sizes. Delete old post revisions and limit how many can be stored and as you noted, clear out the trash can reduce the size of a db significantly.

  202. 202.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @tc: Probably dead-thread, but …

    I get too much paper stuff to read in my work, so I don’t subscribe to newspapers or magazines any more.

    TheWeek is a good magazine for a very quick summary of a lot of news, but the paper version was always a week or so behind. (I don’t read it myself.)

    GoogleNews can be good if you customize it, but stuff can lag there.

    TheEconomist is good for in-depth stories and for coverage of important things around the world. I subscribed for a while a few years ago. They have/had a bit of a libertarian bent on some things (e.g. drug laws) and generally are right-of-center on economic issues, but usually aren’t insane. (They were for the Iraq war, so keep that in mind.) It’s expensive unless you qualify for a discount. (I only rarely glance at the web version.)

    Brad DeLong’s blog is a good resource for eclectic economics and historical articles.

    CalculatedRisk is the go-to location for up-to-the-minute US economics facts and figures, especially about housing.

    Memeorandum is a neat idea – it keeps track of hot stories – but it often seems to be tilted to right-wing noise. Maybe that is what’s hot, but it doesn’t usually interest me. (I don’t check there very often.)

    RawStory seems to be improving as a less-sensational HuffPo.

    McClatchyDC can be very good.

    I don’t know how valuable paper subscriptions are these days (unless she’s a coupon-cutter ;-). Even if you don’t subscribe to the FT and similar walled-gardens, you can usually read their content by doing a Google/Twitter/Facebook search of some of the verbatim text of the article of interest and find a working link that way.

    My daily “news” stops include those mentioned above, as well as the NYTimes, Krugman’s blog, WashingtonMonthly, Eschaton, BlueVirginia (Virginia political news),

    HTH a little.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  203. 203.

    Ruckus

    @Steeplejack:
    I learned this when I was about 12
    And that was in the early 60s. And I sure wasn’t the first person. The guys that taught it to me all had known it for some time. I seem to recall that one guy told me he heard it in the military in WWII.
    Anne
    Yes it can pertain to animals, of which we of course are but that was never the context that I learned.

Comments are closed.