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I'm referring to the fans who bought copies of Nobots. It's finally listed at Barnes & Noble here, and somehow it's cheaper there by three or four dollars. Again, my apologies. If you're thinking of getting a copy of The Paxil Diaries you may want to wait a couple of months until it's at Barnes as well.

Barnes is far superior to Amazon. Why? The bitches at Amazon still haven't listed it. However, Google's spiders haven't found it at B&N yet, either; I found it through B&N's search facility.

I was amused that B&N suggested that you nag me to make a nook version out of it, when you can read it or download it (actually, both books) free on my web site on your nook. I'm making e-pub versions, but haven't quite figured out all the nuances of the conversion software. It will be free as well.

Wooo, that nearly killed me to finish it. It's going living at 20:00 UTC (4PM EST), which is the start of our peak hours. We'll be revising it based on community feedback and if other important points come up as time goes on.

Of course, words means only as much as the actions taken behind them, but I think we've been relatively consistent in meeting the goals I outlined. Here's a small sneak preview for those who read my journal til the whole thing goes live

Statement of Purpose

Our aim is to stand in stalwart opposition to these trends. We will be the best site for independent, not-for-profit journalism on the internet, where ideas and free discussion can take place without external needs overshadowing the community.

The Paxil Diaries is finally available. I hesitated releasing it, because it's still not perfect. There is at least one grammar error ("whom" should be "who") and at least two formatting errors. But to tell the truth, I'm really tired of working on this thing and it seems no matter how many times I proofread, fixing one mistake seems to cause another.

You can read it, download it for free, or buy a hardcover copy here. I hope you enjoy it, some of you have been waiting ten years for it.

This is a generic journal entry posted entirely so that you can tell me I'm awesome, call me a dick, or impart useful information since SN lacks a messaging feature and I'm not giving out my email address.

I've been working harder since I retired than I did working. Maybe it's because it's something I want. I've spent the last week proofreading. I found that typos and other errors are far easier for me to find in a printed book than on a screen.

I finished yesterday, updated and uploaded the file and ordered a new copy. Still having writer's block with Mars, Ho! (which is only 20% done) I checked Amazon and Barnes to see if they had Nobots available. Not yet.

Fifteen years ago when I had the Springfield Fragfest I had a terrible plagiarism problem. Folks weren't just infringing my copyright, they were posting my own work under their name. Not a week would go by that I didn't have to issue a DMCA takedown notice to someone, usually a university (a different one each time) where a student was plagiarizing my work. So I googled for pages using Nobots in an infringing way.

I publish under the noncommercial GPL license. All I demand is that it's non-commercial and I get credit.

I ran across this German site. I was taken aback at first... DMCA doesn't apply to Germans. Then I realized they were displaying mcgrewbooks.com in a frame!

I don't see how it could harm me and do see how it might actually sell a book or two so I'm not going to hassle them.

I wish I'd learned German rather than Spanish.

So ... I've recently gotten back into minecraft, and figured that perhaps there are other MC players here at SN, so I wanted to know if there was enough interest to setup a MC server in general. I'd probably use CraftBukkit, and I'm open to running mods if others are interesting. Leave a message below if you'd be interested.

Mods I'd like to run:
  * Traincraft
  * Railcraft
  * Mystcraft (useful for getting new ores without having to reset maps; age creation would be restricted to admins though; mystcraft is a server hog).

Leave your thoughts below.

Since we've got a fair number of complaints about us running too many site news articles, I'm going to condemn this to my journal, then link it next time we *do* post something about the site. For a large portion of today (4/16), SoylentNews users had issues with commenting, and moderation was completely hosed. This was due to a backend change; we shifted the site behind a loadbalancer in preparation of bringing up a new frontend and give us considerably more redundancy and latitude with working with the backend.

This change had been setup on dev for the last week with us testing it to see what (if anything) broken, and it was discussed and signed off by all of the staff. Last night, I flipped the nodebalancer to connect to production instead of dev, then changed the DNS A record for the site to point at the loadbalancer.

I stayed up for several hours at this point to ensure nothing odd was going on, and satisfied that the world would keep spinning, I went to bed. What I found though was I broke the formkeys system. Slash knows about the X-Forwarded-By header, a mechanism for when a site is behind a proxy on how to relay client IP information (this mechanism was already used by both varnish and nginx), however, for security reasons, we strip out the XFF header from inbound connections unless its on a specific whitelist. On both dev and production, we had whitelisted the nodebalancer to pass this header in properly.

Or so we thought. Linode's documentation doesn't mention, but the IP address listed in the admin interface is *not* the IP used to connect to the site; instead it uses a special internal IP address which isn't listed or documented anywhere. Our security precautions stripped out the X-Forwarded-By header, and made it appear that all inbound users were coming from the same IP. This wasn't noticed on dev as slash ignores the formkeys system for admins, and the few of us beating on it with non-admin accounts weren't able to do enough abuse to trigger the formkey limiters.

Our peak hours are generally evenings EDT, which means the low traffic at night wasn't enough to trip it either (or at least no one on IRC poked me about it, nor were there any bugs on it on our github page. However, once traffic started picking up, users began to clobber each other, commenting broke, and the site went to straight to hell. When I got up, debugging efforts were underway, but it took considerable time to understand the cause of the breakage; simply reverting LBing wasn't an easy fix since we'd still have to wait for DNS to propagate and we needed the load balancer anyway. After a eureka moment, we were able to locate the correct internal IPs, and whitelist them, which got the site partially functional again. (we have informed Linode about this, and they said our comments are on its way to the appropriate teams; hopefully no other site will ever have this same problem).

The last remaining item was SSL; we had originally opted out of terminating SSL on the loadbalancer, prefering to do it on the nginx instance, so Port 443 was set to TCP loadbalancing. This had the same effect as there is no way for us to see the inbound IP (I had assumed it would do something like NAT to make connections appear like they were coming from the same place). The fix was utlimately installing the SSL certificate on the load balancer, then modifying varnish to look for the X-Forwarded-Proto header to know if a connection was SSL or not. I'm not hugely happy about this as it means wiretapping would be possible between the load balancer and the node, but until we have a better system for handling SSL, there isn't a lot we can do about it.

As always, leave comments below, and I'll leave my two cents.

I've hardly logged on to the internet at all this past week, too busy correcting a mistake software houses frequently do: Trying to rush a project out the door. The fact is, I'm tired of The Paxil Diaries, but I don't want to ship a flawed piece of crap.

The first copy had a messed up cover; my printer's "cover generation wizard" has an interface almost as bad as GIMP. I fixed it and ordered a corrected copy, and a day later as I was converting the .odt to .html I discovered that some of the chapter numbers were wrong and there were no page numbers. I fixed it, resubmitted it and thought "This time it'll be right."

Number three showed up bright and early Thursday morning. I started going over it with a fine toothed comb. Almost halfway through and I started to think I'd be able to release it. The weather got really nice so I decided to read it in Felber's beer garden.

I discovered I was far better at proofreading when I've had a few beers than sober. When I'm sober what the words are saying distracts me from the words themselves, and I read too fast and miss errors.

It was full of errors, many of them whoppers. I marked them drinking, and finished correcting this morning while sober and sent for copy #4. It may be available in a couple of weeks depending on if I find more errors when it comes. I'll upload the book's HTML and PDF versions as soon as I decide I can release it.

Meanwhile, I can get back to Mars, Ho! this week.

A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.

AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.

From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.

For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.

(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.

Now that I've had some time to clear my head, I want to expand on my original feelings. I'm pissed off about this, and my temper flared through on the original post. I'm leaving it as is because I'm not going to edit it to make myself look better, and because it sums up my feelings pretty succinctly. How would you feel if something you worked on under the promise of building the best site for a community was regularly and routinely causing corporate firewalls and IDS systems to go off like crazy?

You'd be pissed. Had we known about this behaviour in advance, it would have been disabled at golive or in a point release, and a minor note would have gone up about it. Instead, I found out because we were tripping a user's firewall causing the site to get autoblocked. I realize some people feel this is acceptable behaviour, but a website should *never* trigger IDS or appear malicious in any way. Given the current state of NSA/GCHQ wiretapping and such, it means that anything tripping these types of systems is going to be looked at suspiciously to say the least. I'm not inherently against such a feature (IRC networks check for proxying for instance), but its clearly detailed in the MOTD of basically every network that does it.

There wasn't a single thing in the FAQ that suggested it, and a Google search against the other site didn't pop something up that dedicated what was being done; just a small note that some proxies were being blocked. Had the stock FAQ file, or documentation, or anything detailed this behaviour, while I might still have thought it wrong, at least I wouldn't have gotten upset about it. I knew that there was proxy scanning code in slashcode, but all the vars in the database were set to off; as I discovered, they're ignored leading me to write a master off switch in the underlying scanning function.

Perhaps in total, this isn't a big deal, but it felt like a slap in the face. I know I have a temper, and I've been working to keep it under wraps (something easier said than done, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy). CmdrTaco himself commented on this on hackernews and I've written a reply to him about it. Slashdot did what they felt was necessary to stop spam on their site, and by 2008, slashcode only really existed for slashdot itself; other slash sites run on their own branches of older code. Right or wrong, such behaviour should be clearly documented, as its not something you expect, and can (and has) caused issues to users and concerns due to lack of communication. Transparency isn't easy, but I have found its the only way to have a truly healthy community. Perhaps you disagree. I'll respond to any comments or criticisms left below.