Yeah, I'm back. I see I missed the whole visions vs. everybody fight. I'm really disappointed that I leave for a few days and everybody starts bitching at each other. Tim has made more contributions than just the windows client ... he didn't deserve all the crap he got. On the other hand, he was being as immature as everybody else was. He really wants us to snail-mail him a package with a floppy and self-addressed stamped envelope to get the LJ client source? If that's what it takes, I'll do it, but that was the final straw as far as I was concerned.
The only way for a big group of volunteers to be able to work together is to be polite and respect each other. I noticed a few people being particularly rational (like foobar), but seriously ... in the future don't bitch out people that are trying to help, no matter how much you might not like them personally. All input should be welcome at any time.
Also, I noticed a number of times where people tried to say I'd said one thing or another in the past. If you're going to say I took a certain position in the past on something, try and cite it (I know that's difficult with the lack of searching tools that LJ provides now...). I just got kinda frustrated by people who were saying I'd said something when I had no memory of even hearing the issue, much less taking a position on it. But maybe I just have a bad memory too... not a big deal.
Stan's Back
Got stan back from ASL with a new sexy-lookin' serverworks motherboard, since the old one was defective. They're also going to replace kyle for free. (but we have to pay the $50 shipping again probably?) They told me they were just going to replace the motherboard and explicitly told me they'd leave the OS on there, but they lied ---- the disk was wiped clean and Linux Mandrake is on there in place of FreeBSD. So, I'm in the middle of a FTP FreeBSD install. (Note to self: this is getting tedious... burn a CD) I kept a document on how I built the servers last time, so it'll be easy this time around. (.... but no less tedious and boring.)
LJ::SpellCheck
Apparently while I was gone a number of aspell processes locked up and ate all the CPU on the two webservers, killing the site. We can do a little hack to kill them every minute, or set an alarm in the parent to kill it if it doesn't return, but those are hacks. The real solution is what I want to find.... is it aspell? Does an aspell upgrade fix it? Is there anything in the changelog hinting at the bug we were seeing? I tried running a few thousand recent journal entries through LJ::SpellCheck, but none locked up. So I'm guessing the lockups are rare, and the people trying to post the entry containing the bad data that confuses aspell are never making it through, and are never turning off the spell checker. Still, I'm not sure of anything yet.... this remains a problem, and I think I'll do something hacky like the alarm, but also log to a text file the text trying to be spellchecked should the alarm go off, so we can fix it in the future. Actually, I don't want to do this---- anybody else up for it? appending to /home/lj/var/ljspellcheck.err.log would be a good location to dump info.
Source release
I'm going to try and get the source out today, along with a lot more documentation in it, and the INSTALL file that ender's been working on.
Poll updates
I want to add a new widget type in the LJ::Poll code .... "scale". Right now if you want to ask, "On a scale from 1-10, how good is LJ at answering your questions?", you'd have to do a radio or a dropdown and have 10 different options. I think this would be easier: <lj-pq type="scale">1-10</lj-pq> That way we don't need 10 rows in the database for each question in a survey. If we had a survey with 20 of these type of questions, that'd not only be a pain in the ass, but a waste of space in the database. Also, this lets us show the mean/median/stddev since we know all the answers will be numbers.