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Funding Goal
For 6-month period:
2022-07-01 to 2022-12-31
(All amounts are estimated)
Base Goal:
$3500.00

Currently:
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2022-07-02 10:17:28 ..
2022-10-05 12:33:58 UTC
(SPIDs: [1838..1866])
Last Update:
2022-10-05 14:04:11 UTC --fnord666

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posted by martyb on Thursday May 23 2019, @12:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the insert-picure-of-big-haired-guy-saying-it-was-aliens.jpg dept.

We recently had reports of some 'wonkiness' on the site.

Reports started appearing in our #Soylent channel on IRC about 90 minutes ago. For example, the Main Page would load, but parts of the page (such as the slashboxes on the left-hand side) were missing.

I borked my first attempt, but on the second try successfully restarted apache and slashd on both of our front-end servers: hydrogen and fluorine.

All seems to be working correctly now. If this is not the case for you, you may need to clear the browser cache on your system and/or do a hard reload of the page (e.g. Ctrl+F5). If things are still not right, please reply in the comments and/or pop into channel #dev on IRC and let us know.

I'm not sure what precipitated the behavior; I'll leave that to TheMightyBuzzard or one of the sysadmin folk to investigate. I'm sure they'll fill us in on whatever root cause was found.

OTOH, one cannot entirely rule out a spurious gamma ray that flipped a key bit in memory that caused an avalanche of untrapped events.

You can now return to your usual, spirited discussions.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 23 2019, @03:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-then-there-were-some dept.

We had a minor site hiccup today. All seems to be working, now.

We have always been open and upfront about the site, so in the interests of full disclosure here is a summary of the problem and steps taken to fix it.

tl;dr Comment counts shown for each story on the main page seem to have stopped getting updated since about midnight this morning; appears to be working now. Please accept our apologies for any who were inconvenienced.

Read on past the fold for details.

Problem: Comment counts on the main page showed "0" comments on recent stories, but opening a story showed the correct number of comments for it.

Actions Taken:

1.) Try bouncing the front-end servers to restart apache (This is a low-risk step that seems to fix a surprising number of issues).

No joy.

2.) Ask for help on the #dev channel on IRC.

Ncommander replied asking if slashd (an over-seeing daemon for the site) was running.

Looked through my log files and on the site wiki; determined that slashd should be running on server: fluorine

ps -AF | grep slashd | wc showed 32 processes

Ncommander suggested: killall -9 slashd

Try: killall -9 slashd

"No process found."

Inspection of output of PS -AF suggested this one-liner should do it:
$(ps -AF | grep slashd | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' )

Got most of the processes, but there still seemed to be some stragglers.

/etc/init.d/./slash stop
/etc/init.d/./slash restart

Conclusion:

Looked like it might have worked... reloaded main page... see updated comment counts!

Looks like all is working again.

It's a credit to the staff here that the site has been running so smoothly and without crashing or hiccups for... I can't remember when we last had an outage. Given that in the early days of the site we had maybe a few hours of uptime between crashes, we have come a long ways!

I'm going to assume this is one of those "have you tried turning it off and back on again" kind of problems, and unless the problem re-occurs, assume it is solved.

Need to hurry to get to work, so I apologize for the brevity of this posting.

--martyb


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday April 01 2019, @03:55PM   Printer-friendly

Staffing: We are fortunate at SoylentNews to have some extremely talented and hard-working people on our staff. It bears mentioning that all work done on the site is by volunteers — nobody has ever received any payment for any of the work done here. That includes maintaining the code, wrangling IRC (Internet Relay Chat), maintaining our e-mail servers, the databases, web servers, etc. It also covers editing community story submissions and posting them to the site as stories for the community to read and comment on.

So, it pains me to report that one of our staff has been having health issues and was in the hospital in February. The initial "event" has been handled, but one of the tests conducted there revealed another matter which is requiring some ongoing intervention. There's other IRL (In Real Life) stuff happening, as well. As he put it: "All in all 2019 is starting out as a major suck of a year."

I have instructed him to take whatever time he needs to take care of things — first things first.

I am sure this attention is somewhat embarrassing to him, but if I have learned anything at all from MDC's passing, is the wisdom behind this saying

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Please join me in wishing a full, and speedy, recovery to Fnord666.

Finances: As alluded to above, it does take real money to run this site (paying for servers, domain registration, and filing taxes are the major expenses). Having just finished the first quarter of the year, I'm pleased to announce that subscriptions to the site have so far been on a trajectory to meet our funding goal for the first half of the year. As of this writing, we have raised $1143 towards a goal of $2000. Most people make ad hoc, one-time contributions. The amounts presented for the different durations are suggested minimums. The majority of contributions received are at the minimum suggested amount, but so far this year we have some generous contributions above that. We had 2 people at $200 (each), one at $100, one at $80, and a couple more at $25. We accept both PayPal and Stripe for payment processing. We do provide an option, should you so wish, to contribute a gift subscription. By default, we use UID #6 as the recipient, though you are free to choose any user on the site. If you run into any problems or have any questions, please post a comment here, post something on IRC, or send an e-mail to admin (at) soylentnews.org and someone will get back to you presently.

What it gets you is a shiny star next to your name whenever you post a comment (which you can toggle on/off in your preferences), some relaxed restrictions on the site, and knowledge that you are helping us continue to provide a unique venue for discussion with a primary focus on science and technology. And, need I say it? Buck Feta! I find it hard to believe it has been over five years since this site forked off from Slashdot, and we have remained advertising-free the whole time!

Thanks: Many, many thanks to all who have subscribed!

If you would like to subscribe or to check your subscription status, please click to go to our subscription page.

Again, please accept my deep and genuine thanks to all who have contributed to this site in any way. Above all, please keep those story submissions coming, moderate comments, and (of course) post new comments, too!

--martyb


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday April 01 2019, @09:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-a-joke dept.

As mentioned here on March 26, Michael David Crawford has passed away. One person in the SoylentNews community was concerned that MDC might, instead, be incapacitated and in a hospital somewhere. He spent a few hours calling around and reported back to me:

Just got off the phone with the Clark County medical examiner
"I can confirm that a Michael Crawford died on March 24th"

Further, we received news that there is an obituary page up for him.

Separately, takyon suggested in a comment to that story:

Maybe we can put a quote or two of his in the quotations thing.

"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"I Am Eternally In Your Debt."
"The Mind Simply Reels."
"Thank You For Your Submission. Our customer service personnel will respond to your request in the order it was received."
etc.

Both TheMightyBuzzard and I ran with the idea and independently posted journal stories asking to gather up MDC sayings.

I am happy to inform the community that, as of 2019-03-31 04:20:00 UTC this morning, SoylentNews now has 31 fortunes attributed to MDC in our fortune rotation. Note: fortunes are chosen at random from all of the fortunes we have, so this represents a very small fraction of those available. Point being that it could be quite a while before you actually see one pop up.

Now that I know how to create and update fortune files, it should be simple to add any additional quotes people suggest. Continue to post any sayings of his to either of those journal articles (with a link to the source for verification, please!) In another week or so, I'll take another look through and update the fortune file as needed.

[Updated 2019-04-02 18:29:28 UTC. MDC quotations can be provided us posting a comment to my journal entry or to TMB's Journal entry. Please provide a link to the source so we can validate it is genuine. Thanks. --martyb]


Original Submission

posted by takyon on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the News dept.

Mike Crawford Is Dead, Contributed to Mac System 7.5.X and Activist

Some of you might know him on the west coast. He worked for Apple fixing/debugging System 7.5.X and attended Cal Tech. He was an activist for the mentally ill and homeless. He was openly bisexual and open about his schizoaffective disorder. His Facebook page.

I had helped him with his project Soggy Jobs which is unfinished. It was his project he needed a business model for.

He was on CNN about the taking away of tax credit from software engineers.

His website is here.

He was a member here at Hacker News.

He had serious physical illnesses that made him suffer and he took his own life.

I was an online friend of his, and I too suffer from schizoaffective disorder.

His wish was not to be forgotten to be remembered through his works. To at least have a Wikipedia article written on him or some other Wiki. Wikipedia named him non-notable about ten years ago. But if you met him, he'd always show you respect and even if he disagreed with you he was nice about it.

takyon: Here is MDC's last post on Warp Life, and Last Will And Testament. User page. Twitter.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the certs-are-not-just-a-breath-mint dept.

With many thanks to The Mighty Buzzard riding shotgun and helping me through some misunderstandings, I updated the certificates (certs) for all of SoylentNews' domains. Our certs are now good through: Wednesday, June 12, 2019.

Everything seemed to go as expected. If you experience any issues, please mention them here, or pop onto our IRC channel using your favorite client or the web interface and speak up in the #dev or #Soylent channel.


Original Submission

Today's News | May 24 | May 22  >