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posted by martyb on Monday November 02 2020, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-the-Things-made-by-VW dept.

It has been a while since I've written a site summary, and I've been meaning to do so for a while now. So, I'm just going to get started and hope that will motivate my getting it done.

As always, if this kind of story is not of interest to you, another story will be along before long.

Otherwise, read on below the fold for what's been happening.

  • Daylight Saving Time
  • Things are Difficult for Everyone
  • Digging out of my System Crash
  • System Outages
  • Staffing
  • Story Cadence
  • Statistics
  • Fundraising
  • Site Updates/Enhancements

Daylight Saving Time:
If you live in the USA, there's a very good chance that Daylight Saving Time ended over the weekend for you and you were supposed to set your clocks back. Consider this a friendly Public Service Announcement just in case you forgot. Please be aware that, historically, people tend to struggle with the time shift for a week or so.

Things are Difficult for Everyone:
Times are tough for many people right now. COVID-19 and lockdowns. Businesses closed or under limited attendance and hours. Many schools are closed, under restricted attendance, or a hybrid combination of online and in-person attendance. Parents are trying to juggle work-from-home, often while trying to watch over their kids.

Please be mindful that people you meet — on-line or in-person — may be struggling, just like you. Please take a moment to reflect on where they are coming from and not lash out at people, just as you might wish for others to be patient with you. Maybe even call up a friend and ask how the are doing. We can all do something to help make it a little easier on those we meet.

Also, Election day is Tuesday, November 3 in the US. You may have heard about the Presidential election, but there are a host of other races, as well. To cap things off, election results in many cases may not be known for several days after election day. I found this provided a nice summary.

Digging out of my System Crash:
I blew up my windows install and decided to use that as an incentive to switch over to Linux — Ubuntu Mate, still in progress. For those who want more details:

So, I tried to restore a file from a duplicate of my C: drive a couple weeks ago. I had an SSD which had an older, bit-for-bit copy of C: my drive. I mounted it in in an external USB enclosure, but Windows did not recognize the drive. So, I hibernated and awakened the laptop. Nope, still did not recognize there was a drive attached. Grrr. How about a hard restart? Nope, no joy. In fact, less than joy. Now I had a message from Windows that my copy was potentially invalid and that I needed to reauthorize it! A couple other tries at rebooting resulted in a BSOD. (I later realized my boot order was CD/DVD, external USB, then internal disk. Ooops!

I'd been meaning to move over to Linux for a long time, but had held off due to the 1,000+ batch and AWK scripts and some other programs I'd written over the years. Rather than trying to resurrect my Windows install, I decided to bite the bullet and force myself to make the switch. I am conversant with userland tools like grep, sed, gawk, du, df, diff, and the like. But, installing and configuring packages like email (Thunderbird), HexChat, ssh (replacing PuTTY), browser (Firefox after using Pale Moon) has been slow going.

It's still a work-in-progress, but I've made a lot of headway. Huge thanks to "The Mighty Buzzard", "janrinok", "Fnord666", "chromas", "Azuma Hazuki", "Runaway1956", and others who have been exceedingly patient with me as they've tried to help me get things working again! This is what got me into programming all those years ago: the selfless willingness to help others "learn the ropes". I can't thank you all enough!

System Outages:
Did I mention things were difficult for everyone? Only a few days after my system went sideways and now currently booted from an external Live Edition of Ubuntu, SoylentNews had a system outage. I had happened to wake very early and noticed the site was down with a 500 error. Was able to get onto IRC (Internet Relay Chat) through my browser. Discovered others were already aware. I offered a couple suggestions, but had no luck. I sent a text to "The Might Buzzard" (aka "TMB" and "Buzz") and settled in to wait for him to wake. Fortunately, TMB was able to quickly identify and rectify the (database) problem. In short order we were back up and running again. Thanks Buzz!

So, the next morning I woke up early (again), checked the site, and found we were down (again). This time it was because our certificate had expired. (Since I was without email at this time, I missed the reminders send out by Let's Encrypt.) Thanks go to TMB (again!) for making quick work of getting certs re-issued and deployed!

Staffing:
As you may have surmised, we are a bit short staffed. I do what I can to help on the systems side of things, but my skills are very limited in that realm. I'm better at writing tests, Templates, and Perl (in decreasing order of knowledge/expertise). Just over two years ago, "janrinok" stepped down and I took over the role of Editor-in-Chief (EiC). I count it a privilege to serve the community and do my best to: try and keep the stories coming, act as a liason for site issues, and offer guidance where needed to the other editors.

Please join me in thanking "Fnord666", our Alternate Editor-in-chief (AEiC), for his able efforts in getting stories out. Nearly half of the stories you see on SoylentNews are thanks to his efforts. Thanks Fnord666! Thanks, too, to "chromas" who occasionally pushes out stories (and often seconds stories before they make it to the main page). Not to stay entirely away, "janrinok" can often be seen seconding stories and occasionally pushing out a story or two. He's also an able mentor as I try and fill his shoes as EiC. Behind the scenes I've seen "takyon", "CoolHand", "Mrpg", and others occasionally pop in and lend a hand. (We had a surprise visit from mrpg on IRC on Saturday!) Thanks to ALL of you!

Opportunity:
Ever wonder how this site runs? What happens behind the scenes? We can always use a helping hand. If you are interested, please reply to this story and/or send an email to admin (at) soylentnews (dot) org and/or pop onto IRC and let someone know. Every little bit helps! When I started off, I had never used IRC before, never edited a story, and was unfamiliar with our code base. Though nobody has ever been paid even one cent for their work here, I consider the things I've learned to be priceless. Especially the friendships I've made along the way. Highly recommended!

One thing that would be a HUGE help is having the community submit stories. Yes, we have bots that are a big help, but that means each story takes a bunch of work to get the gist of the material, extract a subset, look up any journal references, check links, and so on. OTOH, when I see a sub from "takyon" it's usually just a quick skim, schedule a time slot, and then on to the next one. See the difference? We only have so much spare time. It may not sound like much, but the time required for each story adds up! Just take a look at the number of stories pushed out so far. Yes, "fnord666" is fast approaching 5,800 stories! [and martyb is rapidly approaching 9500 stories, but he is too modest to say so --JR] Thanks and Congratulations!

Story Cadence:
We strive to keep a continuous stream of stories queued up for the community. We average just under a dozen stories a day on weekdays and about 10 or so on weekends (UTC). From the preceding section, you may have surmised we have a thin "bench" on the editorial staff and could use some help.

Quite simply, this rate of stories is not maintainable at current staffing and activity. "Fnord666" and I have been pushing out 4-6 stories a day for the past few months. Unless we get some additional help, we will need to cut back on the number of stories posted each day.

I took a look around and noticed that The Register (aka El Reg) stopped posting stories on the weekend last May. Ars Technica posts primarily during the day (USA hours). On weekends, Ars Technica cuts back to 3-4 stories per day, frequently reposts from other sources (primarily WIRED and Financial Times). Those publications pay their writers. We are unpaid volunteers.

I am not claiming we are on the same level as those publications, but I am finding it hard to justify our putting out 10 stories per day on weekends when they publish far fewer (or none at all). In short, I see no option but to cut back on our weekday cadence by a story or two per day, and cut back *significantly* on weekends. Unless we get some more help, that is. SoylentNews is People. We need your help — please volunteer!

Statistics:

  • Folding@Home just recently passed 2^31 points! Yes, well over 2 billion points! Way to go team SoylentNews!
  • We have reached about 1,072,000 comments.
  • Story submissions have now exceeded 45,130.
  • Posted stories are now past: 33,823

Fundraising:
I am pleased to report we have a good start on fundraising for the second half of this calendar year. So far, we have collected approximately $1094.14 towards our goal of $3,500.00 (~31.3%). Thanks to everyone who has Subscribed!

Site Updates/Enhancements:
Barring any critical needs, site updates are restricted to minor template changes until "TMB" can finish his house remodeling work. There is a chunk of code he wrote waiting on my getting to test it, but see earlier and my system snafus. (Will 2020 ever end?)


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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday November 03 2020, @08:27AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday November 03 2020, @08:27AM (#1072388) Homepage

    I've gone to hotswap bays and a stack of HDs myself. Windows no longer gracefully multiboots (it'll do it, but loves to rewrite the boot sector all the damn time, which IMO is trouble waiting to happen, plus it's annoying when they all insist on being C: -- no, I want this Windows on C:, that one on F:, and the third on I:, you ninnies! and I want the drive letters to stay put!!) and using Grub outside of its own species is a recipe for disaster. Swapping HDs in the handy bay is no more difficult than previous methods, and a lot safer. (I use iStarUSA bays, simple and reliable. A dozen in service and have got to where if I don't have 5 or 6 in the parts pile, I think I'm out.) Data goes on the fixed drive or somewhere on the local network, which everyone can share. Well, almost everyone...

    Yeah, that's what forced me to move up to a newer PC... there's not a damn thing wrong with the old ones (in fact I'm using one this instant, because I'm not finished moving house) but browsers and websites have become such CPU hogs that a mere top-end quad-core can no longer do the job... frex, Google Maps frequently pegs the hapless CPU at 100%.

    But Windows after XP annoy me too much to use 'em for very long (tho 10 sure made 7 look better) so I think the eventual solution, at least for when I can't be arsed to switch to another PC, will be to run PCLOS in a VM full-time (gotta use that 32GB RAM somehow) and use it for those newer browsers, and since it'll be pretty much set in stone, I won't care if I have to use an old VBox. Not practical to do it the other way around, because one of the continual annoyances with linux is that I can't readily access my open shares, and when there are about 20 of 'em, having to set each one up individually is a PITA (and so far I've had small success; only one works reliably, and apps like Chrome and LO can't see it). With XP, I can just click Network and there they are. It's enough of a nuisance that when I need to schlep files from the main PCLOS box, I use XP in the VM instead, cuz it sees the whole network in the expected way with zero hassle. I'm sure there must be some simple fix for linux, but so far I haven't found it. (Installing Samba made things worse. To be fair, Win7/10 also sometimes is stupid about it, that adaptive crap needs to die in a fire.)

    Yeah, DLL-hell has nothing on Dependency-hell.... PCLinuxOS uses Synaptic for package management. It's ugly to look at (what is it with Gtk apps?), but very thorough and straightforward, and in the 3+ years I've been using it, I've only seen a broken package a couple times, and Synaptic can painlessly fix it. Once in a long while something doesn't drag along all its dependencies, but then I'll get a whine about what it wants and can find it easily enough. On the Fedora setup (which only exists as a possible fallback, since PCLOS is a one-man-band plus a few folks doing spins) I have Discover cuz that's what came with it; Discover is much prettier, and probably easier for the computer novice, but having become used to Synaptic and being able to see everything, I find Discover too limiting. Synaptic will show you all-at-once, search, or categories (both fine-grained and chunks), plus detailed info.

    Fedora because it offered the next-best implementation of KDE, by my lights. Tho I'd prefer another rolling distro; that's spoiled me. Reinstalling is against my religion. One of our guys did an experimental update from the oldest PCLOS he could get to run, and managed to bring it all the way up from 2012 with only a couple excursions to the command line. -- PCLOS is stable enough that if new kernels didn't regularly come down the pipe, I'd never need to reboot. Right up there with XP64, which will run pretty much forever.

    I don't care one way or the other about systemd (I'm to where I just want the durn OS to work without annoying me, and without noticeable lag), but PCLOS doesn't use it. At least not yet, but I suppose the day will come when those resisting will be in a linux ghetto; I gather there's already major stuff that needs it.

    Long long ago I actually suggested to Microsoft that they should make the OS modular -- guts that we never see (unless we wish to), and the desktop of our choice; that way they could improve the guts without pissing off the users who don't want their workflow fucked up. And reportedly they did some work in that direction, but it never got anywhere. Of course now they're back to the OS-in-the-cloud bullshit that they first floated back at the Win2k launch event, where the audience of some 1000 IT pros all developed identical angry frowns.

    Yeah, there was an update to NTFS in some prior era, which I too had totally forgotten about as normally you never notice. But that's all I can figure for how that drive got zeroed out during the five minutes that Win10 was up on that machine. Either that or it just nuked the partition table, but it shows as an empty partition. I haven't gotten around to trying to recover it, at which point I'll probably be able to tell what happened. The drive acts perfectly functional otherwise, and no change in SMART, so it didn't just die. But Win10 never again touches a machine with a USB drive attached.

    People griped about Win8, but I have 8.1 Enterprise that came on a laptop, and it's somehow less annoying than 10.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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