Farewell, but not exactly goodbye

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Monday May 04, 2015 · 11:33 AM PDT

2015/05/04 · 11:33

I am sad, but also excited, to announce that after 11 years I am leaving Daily Kos and joining Raintank, where I will be working on monitoring software and doing devsy-opsy.

It's been a long and interesting ride at Daily Kos. I went through many election cycles, met lots of interesting people, learned a lot of things, had to solve a lot of difficult problems, and worked with some amazing people. It's the only job that my kids have ever known me to have. Hell, Daily Kos even once saved my life.

I'm sad to be moving on, but I'm very excited about what I'll be doing now. It doesn't have the glamour of politics, but monitoring is important. I'm looking forward to it.

Kossack friends, I'll still be on Twitter, reading the site, and hopefully poking my head up from time to time. Rest assured that my political opinions remain unchanged, and that I will not become a conservatist once I'm out the door. You're in good hands with the rest of the tech team; they do good work, and you won't have any problems with them. One nice thing about my moving on, actually, is that it provided the catalyst to address a lot of tech debt that had accumulated over the years, so it should be even smoother now in many ways.

Good luck, and farewell. See you on the Internets.

Don't mind me.

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Monday September 29, 2014 · 11:01 PM PDT

2014/09/29 · 23:01

Don't mind me at all.

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Wednesday July 30, 2014 · 11:45 AM PDT

2014/07/30 · 11:45

Don't mind me.

An australopithecine who wants to PARTY!

Testing something

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Tuesday November 06, 2012 · 12:21 AM PST

2012/11/06 · 00:21

Don't mind me.

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Monday August 29, 2011 · 11:49 PM PDT

2011/08/29 · 23:49

Some brief updates today. I had totally planned a longer, more informative update diary, but spent too long working on the upper tube assembly for a truss tube Dobsonian conversion this evening, and I need to get to bed. I don't think I've gotten to bed before 1am since Wednesday or so, with telescope time, setting up disaster recovery servers (a mirror of the image server to feed the CDN and an additional database slave server, so we could switch over and reconstitute new webheads if the worst had happened with Hurricane Irene, because our servers are in NYC), and playing Angry Birds.

User creation flow changed a bit to handle transient errors better.
Rescued and Rescued to Recommended autotagging.
When someone is unbanned, their mojo stuff gets recalculated right away.
Non-customized tip jars can no longer be replied to. First posts on FP stories and custom tip jars are unaffected.
Some Other Stuff™

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Thursday June 02, 2011 · 11:26 PM PDT

2011/06/02 · 23:26

Lo now, his strength [is] in his recommends, and his force [is] in the navel of his hide rates.

He rateth his comments like a cedar: the sinews of his diaries are wrapped together.

Small, subtle, (so not really like Behemoth at all) yet fairly important.

Comments that have had ratings removed no longer have incorrect point values assigned. This was an inadvertent side effect of preventing recycling hide rates.
No longer will you see comments with one rating where the rating counts, or comments with two ratings where the ratings don't count. This crept in as a side effect of a fix for a MySQL bug that would only manifest if a comment with two ratings had one taken away, then another rating applied. If a further rating was added or removed, it would go back to the way it should be.
A perm check on banned users that was a little too severe has been lessened in severity.

Small update

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Monday May 30, 2011 · 10:20 PM PDT

2011/05/30 · 22:20

This update's just a lot of Other Stuff™, but it does include one thing we'd overlooked for all this time - we forgot to actually make subscriptions expire when they were supposed to. Other than that, it's all terribly unglamorous stuff no one else would really care about.

I was off last week, per strong familial encouragement, so I was getting back into the swing of things today. Did quite a bit behind the scenes today, even, which is nice. Sadly, last week was pretty cloudy all over the great State of Washington, so no telescope time. (I totally knew that if I took the week off that that would happen, too.)

Anyway, I'm back now. Huzzah!

Update: The lifetime subscriptions have been fixed (phew). A small number got improper expiration dates, and they got cleared with the other expired subs. The only other folks that might be affected are some people with monthly recurring subscriptions. I've asked one person for info if they were actually billed over that time, but I think there were a few people whose renewals would have come during a time post-switch where that was broken.

Hey, an update diary

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Tuesday May 17, 2011 · 10:55 PM PDT

2011/05/17 · 22:55

This is a most unusual thing indeed - I'm writing two diaries in one day. Although I am suddenly reminded that I have to catch up on my Astro Log over at my personal site - I let it fall behind because of the terrible weather we've been having for the last many many months. Since the day after New Year's Day, I've been out once. Sometime I also need to write about the internals of DK4 - many people have griped about the changes, but there were technological reasons to switch. I need to explain those reasons sometime.

Anyway, I had some updates that I went ahead and sent up. In today's batch:

Made doubly sure you get a warning if you manage to trigger the post lock timeout. As I've stated numerous times today, this is really hard to do, so this should affect basically no one. Still, it removes the element of mystery from it in case it does come up.
Some deep internal blog changes. The only stuff any of you would care about right now is that certain official blogs' stories won't get tip jars or show up on the rec list anymore.
One thing I did not change was how the post lockout thing works (beyond the warning stuff). That actually worked the way it was intended.

Looking at it in list form like that, it doesn't sound like a whole lot, but I assure you that it's more substantial than it sounds.

Possibly unnecessary explanation of an earlier banning

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Tuesday May 17, 2011 · 4:00 PM PDT

2011/05/17 · 16:00

So it seems that around the time I went to go sit down with my son to try to get him to take his nap (didn't work, by the way), there was a bit of a kerfuffle over triciawyse getting banned for no apparent reason. I didn't have my mail program open on the laptop, so I didn't hear about any of this until Markos called me (which is a Big Fucking Deal™, believe me).

Anyway, what happened: she managed to post so many comments in a short period of time, she triggered the posting timeout. When this happens, if you keep trying to post comments it'll double the timeout, until such time that you exceed the maximum timeout and you get autobanned.

Nothing nefarious, here, and it's very hard for a human to trigger the timeout. It only looks at the number of comments in a very short time, not how many you've posted overall. Those of you who have managed to post 40,000+ comments are safe (unless you tried to post them all in five minutes).

I am, however, checking to make sure that you actually get notified of the timeout. It's so hard to do that it's never really come up, and subsequent changes to how things work may have blocked the commenter from actually getting the notification. There was also a bit of a delay in getting the problem cleared up because I was accidentally working on fixing it on the database server, which wasn't the right place. Ooops.

DK4 Update-o-rama

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Wednesday April 27, 2011 · 9:34 PM PDT

2011/04/27 · 21:34

Although calling it an update-o-rama would be a bit much. Here's what we have tonight:

Some further mojo adjustments, including one to make it a little less difficult to get TU (it got a little too hard with the last update).
Fix resending activation keys for older accounts.
Some Other Stuff™

Not a huge update (although it's bigger than it sounds), but while other stuff is coming down the assembly line, it's not ready yet. Otherwise, I could tell you about the new wheels I got for this telescope (a Meade DS-16) I'm babysitting, but that's admittedly kind of lame. I replaced the inadequate 4" casters rated for 120 lbs. with much beefier 6" casters rated for 400 lbs. Since this telescope all together weighs at least 250-300 pounds it's made it a lot easier to get out of the garage.

Still, with these wheels and figuring out on Friday how to keep it from shooting around randomly while trying to look through it, it's now like wrestling around a live elephant rather than wrestling around a dead elephant. This is quite an improvement. Assuming another clear night comes along any time soon, I can take it out with my 6" and see how the two compare.

DK4 Fixins

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Friday April 01, 2011 · 12:23 AM PDT

2011/04/01 · 00:23

Got some fixes for everyone today.

Autoban tweak.
Expanding comments when logged out should work consistently.
The dread IE format button bug should be fixed.
Friendlier error message when trying to create a group with a name that already exists.
Fix arrow keys accidentally triggering expand/shrink/hide in certain browsers.
Some under the hood stuff.

I got back to the IE button thing today after putting OAuth aside in frustration for a while. I figured out that the reason it was working for me before was that the buttons worked in IE if you had text highlighted, but went to the beginning of the text area if you didn't. Since I tested the first way, it kept working fine for me. It took quite a while of beating things around to make it work (because IE can really make easy things difficult), but I finally fixed it by adding this line:

el.focus();

Fucking Internet Explorer, I tell you.

DK4 Updates on a Saturday Night

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Saturday March 19, 2011 · 10:39 PM PDT

2011/03/19 · 22:39

Got some updates for you all. There's more waiting in the wings, but they depend on some other things getting cleared up and no one feels up to babysitting them right now.

Reading messages clears the "X New Messages" thing properly, as does marking them read or unread. The "Aethelred Unraed¹" option is still unimplemented.
Tag RSS is behaving properly.
TOC links are no longer funky.
Mitigate a race condition that could let published stories get stuck in the cache as being unpublished.
Fix JS error for subscribers using IE.
Bring the hidden comment list's caching down to 5 minutes. This should reduce some anxiety.
Address a regular expression issue in the autoformatter with tags with more than one URL in them getting needlessly auto-linkified. This should fix issues found with a number of embeds.
Some behind the scenes goodies.

Among other things waiting in the wings, squished blockquotes and squished centered divs are waiting to go. Unfortunately there's other changes holding them back still.

¹Incidentally, Aethelred Unraed's name makes an amusing pun in Old English.

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Farewell, but not exactly goodbye

Don't mind me.

Testing something

Testing something

Daily Kos Updates: Tip Jars, Miscellaneous

Behold now update, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.

Small update

Hey, an update diary

Possibly unnecessary explanation of an earlier banning

DK4 Update-o-rama

DK4 Fixins

DK4 Updates on a Saturday Night