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Thursday Open Thread

By Jeralyn, Section Blog Related
Posted on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 12:17:30 PM EST
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Sorry everyone, I know there's a lot of news besides Jonbenet Ramsey, but I don't have time to cover it today or tonight. Here's a space for it.

The comments seem to be slower than ever today. It looks like I'm going to have to move TalkLeft to its own server. I'll do it over a weekend probably so there will be less downtime, but I'm as frustrated with the slowness as you are. I'm hesitant to double my hosting expenses but it seems there's no other solution. I was just told that one of the most popular blogs around with ten times TalkLeft's traffic but without comments has a database of 54 MG and TalkLeft's is 234MB -- and that's after I deleted the comments from 2002 through 2004. An alternative is to move to Drupal or something like that from Movable Type, but it would cost a fortune to have someone redesign and move the site and I don't have time to deal with that right now.

My schedule (all subject to change without notice, that's how it works and studio space is double-booked all over town today) : Tucker Carlson 4:30 ET, Catherine Crier (court tv) 5:30 pm, Paula Zahn, 8:00 ET, Hannity and Colmes.,9 pm. Then I'm done.

My Washington Post Chat transcript on the Ramseys (from the 9 News studio) is here.

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    Thursday Open Thread | 29 comments (29 topical)
    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#1)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 12:38:03 PM EST
    It is hard for me to donate cash -- I don't have a whole lot. But I do know about databases, and I bet many of your readers know lots of things about webapplications, servers, and databases. Before adding to your expenses with a new server, you might want to have a few threads in which you and readers discuss the technical aspects of your site and how you might improve performance. I do not know which db you are using, but 234MB is a very puny puny small tiny embarrassing needs 3 more inches sized database. You should be having no problems serving that up quickly. It is quite likely that you can find readers that can help you do so. (And here I am just teasing you) Unlike with lawyers, most of these readers will be eager to provide both free and valuable advice.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#2)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 12:39:31 PM EST
    Of course, you could also do the haloscam thing and offload your comments to their servers.... The upside would be gravatars! Woohoo!

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 12:51:20 PM EST
    If the situation gets really bad, are you going to start rationing syllables?

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#4)
    by Edger on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 01:02:35 PM EST
    It looks like I'm going to have to move TalkLeft to its own server....I'm hesitant to double my hosting expenses but it seems there's no other solution.
    Talkleft would, I think, be a fairly prestigious client for a small but ambitious and agressive web hosting outfit, and would help their marketing efforts tremendously just showing you on their client list. Why not think about inviting competitive proposals? Percentage of future revenue growth as payment perhaps? There are many kinds of deals that can be struck on this.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#5)
    by Che's Lounge on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 01:36:50 PM EST
    From "Cobra II, Before the battalion got moving again, a car driven by a hapless Iraqi brigadier general slammed into a Bradley. The officer was captured by the Americans and thrust into the back of a Bradley so he could be brought to the brigade's human intelligence teams. The general was later identified as one of the pricipal logistics officers for Baghdad. He had no idea the Americans were in Baghdad and had been on his way to work. Other drivers were not so lucky. The firefight was being conducted on one of Baghdad's main thoroughfares. Civilians were caught in the crossfire. The explosion and fire from one enemy vehicle that was targeted engulfed a nearby car. "As I drove by the destroyed enemy truck I saw the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life," Eric Olson, a tank platoon sergeant with Alpha Company, confided in his diary. "Behind the enemy truck was a blown up civilian car that had a family in it. The father was twitching on the ground with no skin on his body, I'm pretty sure he was dead. The mother was sitting on the ground rocking back and forth, her body was smoking, and in her arms she cradled an infant. The other casualty I believe was a boy about ten years old. He had no hair and very little skin left. His eyes were fused shut as he walked around aimlessly, with layers of skin hanging off his body. I wanted to help them, even if I could do something I wasn't allowed to. We had to keep pushing forward." Cobra II George Bush is a war criminal and should be indicted as such.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#6)
    by Sailor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 02:33:04 PM EST
    TL, you said "54 MG" and "234MB" Could you have meant GB (gigabytes) in both cases? 234MB (megabytes) isn't very large for a database and should sort very quickly. Perhaps a DB redesign would be more helpful than a new server.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#7)
    by Gabriel Malor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 03:28:59 PM EST
    I'm still not convinced the speed problems are not related to the number of scripts you have running. You've got 10 scripts that have to load on the main page and 7 on each individual post-to-comment page. That's a bit much. And, like the others said, I'm sure you meant GB and not MB. If it is 234 GB, you'll really need to pare that down.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#8)
    by jondee on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 03:29:46 PM EST
    Che - I'd settle for a big enough "enemy truck" for him, his cabinet and most of the PNAC signatories.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#9)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 03:41:34 PM EST
    234 MB is the size of the Movable Type database on TalkLeft. The other site has 54 MB (not MG). TalkLeft uses 1829.46 Megabytes total.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#10)
    by Sailor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 05:09:19 PM EST
    Hi TL, Well, this seems to be a case for Mike Ditto. 234 MB of DB shouldn't slow down the site that much due to a new post. Can you move to different host and still keep the same URL and blog protocol? I know you are reluctant to do so, but what percentage of their bandwidth are you taking up? If they don't have a big enough pipe that might be the bottleneck. I run several servers, web and file, and I have a DB of about 42 GB for the webserver and about a terrabyte for the file server. We only serve about 1,233 pages/day (1,721 'hits'), but I use Apache, MySQL and PHP to do so. Hope this helps. Sailor

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#11)
    by Dadler on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 06:30:15 PM EST
    Haley Joel Osment: "I see dead people...but they're very blurry and there's two two of all of them them. Hey, what was that I thing just ran over?"

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#12)
    by ras on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 06:55:17 PM EST
    TL, 234 MB? That'd fit onto a $15 memory stick. Something's not adding up here; even 234GB is still just a cheap disk drive (or two if you want redundancy). Sailor, Sure she can switch servers, but as for "blog protocol" I dunno, Depends on how customized her s/w is, and who owns the rights. BTW, a terabyte of data and only 1k-2k hits/day? All, And for something completely different to discuss, here's a q: if you were running Airport Security and knew that you had to torture a suspected terrorist to prevent 10-20 planes from being bombed outta the sky, would you? [In the interests of preserving TL's bandwidth, a simple yes or no will suffice]

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#13)
    by Aaron on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 07:41:22 PM EST
    I'm running 1.25 TB, and I've only got a laptop. I will begin to summarize heavily, until I hear that you've got a terabyte to spare. :)

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#14)
    by Sailor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 07:44:37 PM EST
    ras, do you still beat your wife;-) I suggest you start paying attention to how every imminent terrerist threat fizzles into an overblown hype. AQ note, 3 people, matches & vaseline = a lady that couldn't stand to be in close places; AQ type planning, imminent threat, raise the terror level to red = a bunch a guys with no tickets, few passports, no chemical explosives and no contact with AQ (if they thought it was a credible threat then why did they have every potential terrorist empty his/her possibly binary explosive into the same container!?) Supporting terrorism, terrorist surveilance, selling cell phones to cell leaders = a bunch of college kids making $$ for college by traveling around the country and using a loss leader in one area to profit on in another. The saddest thing is if george has to cry wolf for real? ... no one will believe him.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#15)
    by Ernesto Del Mundo on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 10:25:28 PM EST
    Sailor you forgot to include the Liberty City Black Mooslems that had been recruited by an FBI agent to blow up the Sears Tower.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#16)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 11:00:20 PM EST
    troy gentry, half of the country singing duo montgomery gentry, is alleged by the federal government to have killed a tame bear in its cage at a wild life center, and then with the help of the center's owner, tag the bear as killed in the wild, which is against federal game laws. his lawyer released a statement today saying that gentry did not knowingly break any laws. however, he didn't address whether the singer knowingly killed a tame bear in its cage. . .

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#17)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 17, 2006 at 11:35:08 PM EST
    The problem is not JavaScripts, but something in the Perl. I'm not convinced that moving to a standalone server is going to fix anything. It's just a hunch, but I think our hosting company upgraded a Perl module or restricted the number of processes or something that isn't happy. It's a problem that came on rather suddenly, which doesn't really point to growing too large.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#18)
    by Andreas on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 12:26:36 AM EST
    Maybe the hosting company does not know what it is doing?

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#19)
    by desertswine on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 07:53:51 AM EST
    Aug 14, 2006 (AP)-- As of Monday, Aug. 14, 2006, at least 2,600 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.


    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#20)
    by Che's Lounge on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 07:54:38 AM EST
    Ras, Your question is irrelevant and not based on reality. Fear not. The new season of "24" is just around the corner.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#21)
    by desertswine on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 08:04:03 AM EST
    From the Guardian: Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases. Scores of Kurds have fled their homes in the northern frontier region after four days of shelling by the Iranian army. Local officials said Turkey had also fired a number of shells into Iraqi territory.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#22)
    by oldtree on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 08:11:07 AM EST
    tl; i build computer systems, host your own site on a linux or OSX based machine, go for about triple of the storage size that you imagine needing, as you will use much more. the pipeline for bandwidth, your local service at server sitewill all offer similar features, they will all be on the same pipeline. an IT person for Mac or LInux won't need but about 1/10th the time of a Windows based server, and is less likely to cause issues. Since there are no virus, you have another level of coverage

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#23)
    by Sumner on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 08:24:06 AM EST
    Server problems? Apache or IIS? MS SQL Server, MS Access, MySQL, Oracle, IB, DB2 or PostgreSQL data base? ODBC/ADO problems? Maybe go to an ASP.net or PHP environment? BLIB provides a nice DBD::mysql, ie., a MySQL driver for the Perl5 Database Interface. But from the looks of things, the server now is mostly serving up html pages in a simple CSS environment. On other topics, to bad for drug suspect FĂ©lix that physically attractive people tend to fare better with juries than those who are not. Does Karr wear eye-liner? Do they allow him to apply it in custody? I suspected something was up when C-SPAN launched into its old repeat sham Kids 'n' Predators programming, and then as if right on cue, MSNBC broke the Karr arrest story and kept hammering that until the other MSM picked it up. The timing seemed quite deliberate and orchestrated. Commentators have managed to introduce that there were two sets of footprints. Perhaps the next stage of this theatre will have Karr implicating another suspect. Perhaps he has been told by prosecutors to not answer the specific detail questions. But the timing of this still appears to be of a managed news event to distract from something else - say that Bush did a reverse Robin Hood and also to keep vilifying the topic of the choice he should have made? And/or to distract from his domestic spying? The problem with total information sharing and "tearing down the wall" between Intelligence and Operations is that the "hidden hands that make bad things happen" tend to ruin innocent people's lives. They already said that where people of interest aren't clearly enough guilty of terrorist acts, at least they can be held for some lessor transgression. Mass spying helps develop such lessor offense prosecutions. That is a big part of the constitutional conflict.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#24)
    by Sumner on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 11:03:09 AM EST
    Geez, I forgot to mention Ajax and also Ruby on Rails. Maybe TL will have some magicians around that understand those, off sometime in the future... RobotWisdom has provided a just swell link about media on kids, as well as a most influential artist poll. It includes Nabokov, who is such a big deal for Lolita, that there is a museum devoted to him. Oh, and yes, I've been reading the FISA Court opinions for years.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#26)
    by soccerdad on Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 03:33:17 PM EST
    dont miss Sub-iraqian Homesick Blues

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#27)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 05:12:24 AM EST
    The Israeli defeat will, without a doubt, prove to be a disaster in our occupation of an Iraq where American military units are being mortared in their green zone on a daily basis (not reported domestically, of course) and a terrible civil war is now in full swing.
    From the Voice of the Whitehouse at "The Truth Seeker." I don't know what to say about this site, a touched biased perhaps, but it has redemption, being the only site I have witnessed that has both John Pilger and Robert Fisk as regular contributers. And if nothing else the "Voice From The Whitehouse" can sometimes be a real gas.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#28)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 11:41:21 AM EST
    Is This The New America?
    I went to call my brother from the house when the three men tackled me from behind and shocked me with a Taser gun while they sat on top of me. After forcefully subduing me, one officer kneeled on my head while the others handcuffed me.
    My wife consoled our daughter, but since the Bollyn children have seen much of the world, and witnessed major political events, she allowed our daughter to watch it, saying, "This is our new America."
    And all the while I thought Patrick was in Ireland.

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#29)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 11:49:06 AM EST
    PPJ, in response to your comment to before the NSA thread sunsetted, I agree with anyone, conservative, liberal, Green, etc., when they make sense.
    so his present ones demonstrate only that he feels that he is losing his place on the Washington A list.
    Channelling or mind-reading, PPJ? As for his comment re FISA and 1978, I would say that 99.9999999999999% of the world never knew when it was signed into law. I would further posit that the terrorists can't believe that we would be stupid enough to stop using our technology as weapons. Which is Wills' point, that they didn't need a story in the NYT to tell them that they were subject to governmental monitoring, they would assume that unless they were on the operational level of the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges. As for your quote from the WT, we now see how far-seeing some folks are:
    Republicans warned that allowing the current provisions to expire could have devastating consequences and said Democrats would be punished in next year's elections for letting it lapse.
    Of course, let's' get a little more up to date:
    Congress on Tuesday renewed controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the 2001 law passed weeks after the September 11 attacks to help the government investigate and capture possible terrorists. The approval in the House of Representatives, by a vote of 280-138, sent the measure to President Bush for his signature. The Senate last week voted 89-10 to approve the compromise package, which covers 16 provisions in the act that are set to expire on March 10.
    Link You really need to be up to date about these things, PPJ As for your claim to be a social liberal, you can call yourself the King of Barvaria, but it doesn't mean you have a castle on the Rhine :>)

    Re: Thursday Open Thread (none / 0) (#25)
    by Sumner on Sun Aug 27, 2006 at 10:47:56 PM EST
    Hey, maybe you are all for Abstinence Only, and/or you completely embrace the Intelligence Community and you would like to indoctrinate your kids for an early start. Well, there's always: www.nsa.gov/kids www.cia.gov/cia/ciakids NRO Junior www.atf.gov/kids DOJ's kids

    Thursday Open Thread | 29 comments (29 topical)