On Wednesday, another boards site will be launched: boards.geek.nz If you’re a fan of all things New Zealand, be it rugby or Watties, this may be the site for you! Why Wednesday? Well, for a number of reasons: it was on 2nd February 2001 that boards.jp (as Manga to Anime) was launched; and it also happens to be my Dad’s birthday! Here’s a preview screenshot - as you can see I’ve gone for the yellow and black “Cloud” colours so far.
Just to fill you in the current status at boards.ie: sometime on Monday we started having problems with our vBulletin database (currently over 2 GB in size) where the server process kept dying. After a few attempts to restart this, ecksor ran a repair and managed to get things running on Monday night. This was okay until Tuesday afternoon when the database returned to its bad behaviour. Again, regi tried a database repair, which didn’t solve the problem. He then started an advanced database repair which took ages (due to the huge size of the database). regi and ecksor identified a potential SQL problem with a vBulletin modification we installed for RSS feeds.
This has been a bad week for boards.ie; it was just at the end of last week that we had to replace our web server hardware after it “fell over”. However, if this article from Slashdot is to believed (Monday, January 24th to be Worst Day of the Year), then things were meant to go wrong on Monday!
I liked this film preview of Danny Boyle’s new film “Millions” by Michael Dwyer in the Irish Times:
MILLIONS The new Danny Boyle movie deals with two young boys who find a stash of stolen bank money but - and here’s the implausible bit - it’s only seven days before Britain replaces sterling with the euro. March
I was reading Dilbert: The Way of the Weasel recently and Scott Adams has a funny section on how the six degrees of separation theory can be used by weasels to get other people to do things for them… Will get an actual quote from it soon. In the meantime, here’s a related comic strip:
Ratbert: “Name me a famous celebrity.”
Dilbert: “Sandra Bullock.”
Ratbert: “…Sandra Bullock was in a movie with Kevin Spacey, and Kevin Spacey eats bacon. See? Everyone on Earth is only one degree from a person named Kevin who eats bacon!”
Dilbert: “That is so close to being interesting…”
The phpBB development team have announced that their next major phpBB release will be 3.0, codenamed “Olympus”, but that they will continue to develop 2.x as well:
Did that cause you to miss a heart beat? Good, it did its job then. So what’s this all about? Well the next release will not be version 2.2. Instead it’s taking the codename “Olympus” and will, upon release have the version number 3.0.0. Each new release, at least each new minor revision update will take a codename.
Continue reading ‘phpBB 2.2 Dropped, Next Release 3.0 (Olympus)’
Bh? m? ag lorg eolas ar an Ollscoil c?pla l? ? shin, agus bhuail m? ar an Vicip?id. T? n?os m? na c?ig c?ad alt ansin, ?n Iaraic go Tutankhamen! Ceapaim go mbeidh an su?omh seo an ?s?ideach do fomhlaimeoir
Tom Murphy (DeVore) has written an article on the future of boards.ie:
Ok, just to put you guys in the picture.
The admins meet over the xmas for our annual (or biannual!) meal and chat about the future of Boards.
There is a HUGE amount in the pipeline right now. Quite a bit of fundamental change and the splitting of Hosted forums from Category forums is just the tip of that. We are restructuring a few things and some fair serious changes will come out of that. The creation of Category Mods as additional eyes and ears for the mods is another part of that.
The admins decided a few broad things but the details will come once we have talked our plans through with the Mods to see what they think. We generally dont do much without running it passed their collective eyes (ok, cloud does but like, he doesnt usually even inform the other admins )
Some basic decisions were made which are:
1. We are broadly happy with how Boards works. The changes will be to ensure it continues to work this way in the future.
2. We cannot withstand the growth we had last year again this year. If our level of growth even just repeated itself this year we’d have the busiest site in the country. Twice as busy as Ryanair.com. We havent a chance of surviving that as we are, we can hear the creaks already and by 2006 we’ll collapse under our own weight.
3. We dont want to change the basics, we need to find money from somewhere but we will not charge for the services we provide (and have provided historically). IE: we refute the Pay-To-Talk model (ala somethingawful) as being anathema to Boards history and culture. (that said dont be surprised if the Legal Highs forum is created as a subscriber only forum to protect us legally, thats a special case though).
4. The admins are not able to keep up with the demands on our time, we’ve literally reached the limits of what 5 guys can do in our spare time. This is leading to longer and longer response times to Mod requests and user support. Also its leading to requests being handled on the basis of “I have time to do A right now but not time to do B so while B is a higher priority, I’ll do A now to get it out of the way”. Hence the odd order of things getting sorted as Muck pointed out (at least I *think* it was Muck!)
5. We need to decide what we want Boards to be in the future or it will drift aimlessly. Thats going to bug a few people because any direction we take, some people will object to it. Thats life unfortunately
So, in the next 6-8 weeks some fairly serious changes will occur and I’ll keep you abreast of them here. Hopefully it will make Boards *more* like the place we all love but it needs careful handling and some trust on all sides that change will be for the better.
I know this post says lots but tells you very little but honestly I want to be able to adopt any ideas the Mods come up with and theres little point requesting their input if I’ve already announced a plan now is there!
I think you’ll find the new admin changes to be good and our cash generation plans are all non-invasive and voluntary. We are still just as opposed to popups, mail address selling and commercial sponsorship as ever and I *can* tell you now that you wont see any of that sort of nonsense. “The Broadband Forum , brought to you by Eircom” isnt an option
DeV.
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten
ar,pw,res = (sys.argv,lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(),re.search)
pxy,xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy,SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer)
def ls(p=”"):return filter(lambda n:(p==”")or res(p,n),os.listdir(os.getcwd()))
if ar[2]!=”client”: # license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
myU,prs,srv = (”http://”+ar[3]+”:”+ar[4], ar[5:],lambda x:x.serve_forever())
def pr(x=[]): return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs
def c(n): return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0]
f=lambda p,n,a:(p==pw(myU))and(((n==0)and pr(a))or((n==1)and [ls(a)])or c(a))
def aug(u): return ((u==myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u),0,pr([myU])))
pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
(lambda sv:sv.register_function(f,”f”) or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]):
for fn in filter(lambda n:not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url),1,ar[4]))[0]):
(lambda fi:fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url),2,fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn,”wc”))
TinyP2P
The World’s Smallest P2P Application
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html
Written by Ed Felten, with help from Alex Halderman.
TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.
(Each line has 80 characters or fewer. The first line doesn’t count — it’s a label for human readers and is ignored by the computer.)
My goal in creating this program is not to facilitate copyright infringement. I do not condone copyright infringement. Nothing about the program’s design is optimized for the sharing of infringing files. The program is useful mainly as a proof of concept. A more practical program would be faster, more secure, and more resilient against failure. But that would require a few more lines of code!
The TinyP2P code is available for download at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.py.
Happy New Year!
I’ve downloaded the latest image from the Hydra team, and what a sweet release it is. With an internet connected DB, you can download the latest Hydra control panel which allows you to select what CAMs, addons, languages etc. you want to install. There’s an uninstall manager too, a USB stick manager, latest Hydra news screen and lots more. So of the fun addons I’ve tried so far, I’ve been liking the RSS reader, DreamNetCast (streaming radio via SHOUTcast, including Chillout stations and WNYC NPR), the weather forecaster, Lemmings and chess games, and the Links web browser. You can download the latest version from the DreamBox Net Australia firmware page or find out more at sat-industry.net.
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