10 June 2007

The All New RiotACT

| Kramer
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Welcome to the all new RiotACT! It may look pretty much the same to all of you, but under the covers it is now all different (at least that’s what I tell the ladies). If any of you were on the site during the day, you may have noticed a few short outages as we swapped between two servers during the upgrade (hopefully I didn’t lose anyone’s comments).

There are a few small bugs which I am currently sorting out:
If you are currently posting as Anonymous, then if you logout and back in again it should be fixed (don’t worry you are not really anonymous, as I can tell who you all are in the server logs 🙂

As for the trackback spam in some of the comments… It’s a “feature” in the new codebase we are running now. I’ll get it sorted ASAP.

If you find any other bugs, please post a comment detailing any issues.

Meanwhile, for you computer nerds, here’s what you want to know…
We upgraded from Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) to Ubuntu Server 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), which includes a new (broken) LAMP install with Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.38, and PHP 5.2.1, and then upgraded our code from WordPress 1.5.x to WordPress 2.2.

So hopefully the site is now stable and secure. Thanks for sticking with us through that rough patch, and we should have some new features (NOT the Stanhope ensuite-cam) coming soon.

Thanks
Kramer – RiotACT System Administrator Orangutan

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Yes, we were waaay behind on Ubuntu – I had been spending too much time on the mountain bikes.

The LAMP install issue was that even though I selected the option, it was missing the php apache module. Easily fixed after a couple of minutes head scratching.

The biggest time waster during the upgrade was setting up the Linux software RAID. The previous setup worked fine, but I could not get it working on the new build after a few hours of banging my head on the desk. I suspect both drives needed the good old DOS fdisk, but alas I did not have this with me in the RiotACT bunker.

VYBerlinaV8 now_with_added grunt10:43 am 12 Jun 07

Well down on getting RiotACT sorted, but I would be careful publishing all that detail about the versions being used. Makes hacking much easier for those so inclined. Obviously you guys won’t be toooooo worried about that (because there’s not much at stake here, compared with, say, a major bank or government dept), but just bear in mind that some script kiddies like easy targets, and knowing what runs a site makes it that bit easier.

A lot faster here thank you Kramer and co.
Found myself relying a lot more on RSS feeds to monitor content rather than actually logging on because it used to be so slow.
Had to reload the RSS feeds on the IE6 at work, but all is sweet now.

You were two versions of Ubuntu behind? Really Kramer, shocking!

Did you get that stumble with doing a LAMP install where you have to select LAMP -and- press the space bar to actually make the selection jump? I had five failed installs before I uncovered that nugget.

Sorry folks, another hiccup this morning just after 09:00. I’ll eventually get this puppy sorted!

Dunno what these speed issues are – it only took about 5 seconds at work and about 2 seconds at home to load up riotact….

Cheers for th eupgrades anyway – good to see it working “better” for the other readers – me – never had a problem to begin with.

It is loading fast. This was the slowest site I went to, both here and in the US. It would grovel around for ages before showing me some words.

Until you put up the “new RiotACT” yesterday, RiotACT would take forever to load on Mac OS 10 using Safari. Firefox was a little better, but not much. The site also appeared distorted.

Now however, no problems using Mac to access RiotACT. Just as fast and error free as with Windows.

also: safari in 10.4.9 no dramas here.. if you’re having font issues have a look at your core system fonts and remove any fonts called DFONT (helvetica nue DFONT etc..) and also try Font Finagler.. fixes your font cache in osx.

300% faster, I never used to post on the old site because to be honest it was a bit frustrating (impatient person) thanks for the effort!

Thanks and all you other geeks staying-up late at late spanking the monkey (or was it beating?) to get the site back online..

Soulman – what problems were you having with the site under MacOS?

Yep, the strange characters appeared in place of colons and apostrophes when I reloaded the database on the new site. I’ll fix them up when the site is a bit quiter (as I’ll dump and reload the database).

Where are the Web 2.0 features????

Fonts all fixed now, thanks! Either I am a freakin’ genius because I apparently fixed it overnight while asleep, or you banged the side of the blinkenlites cabinet to remind the hamster of its duty. Doesn’t matter, either way, success!

Great work! Thanks for your efforts.
I’m on a 1.5mps connection and was puzzled by why the riot would take up to a minute to load. Now it takes a split second!

And it works great in IE 7 and Firefox on Vista, IE and Firefox on XP Pro, and Safari and Firefox on Mac OS 10 (intel). I always had problems with about half of those in the past, especially on Macs.

I’m seeing the same strange characters. The story is also full of:
” – ” characters. This is with Firefox 2.0.0.4 and Safari 2.0.4 under OS 10.4.9.

Just to add, the strange chars only showed up recently, I’m pretty sure the story viewed ok when I looked at it when it was first posted.

Thanks for the date format change.

Am I missing a font? Both Firefox and Opera show the “A Diver In Canberra Playing With Seals and Sharks” story with the ‘a with a circumflex over it’ char, followed by the Euro symbol, followed by a ‘”‘ in between the words Canberra and Playing. This happens whether I set Page Encoding to automatic or to UTF-8 (which is your server-specified encoding). Since it’s happening in both browsers, I’m guessing it’s not a browser problem but a system problem either at my or your end.

Nice work Kramer. Much quicker, was certainly interesting watching comments and all the Categories dissappearing and reappearing a few hours back.

Hey CFC, how’s that? Hit shift+F5 (hard refresh) if it doesn’t appear at first.

So now there is hope for humanity. Any more requests or problems before my beer runs out for the evening?

BTW – as a computer nerd I think we should go with Japan, who have the right idea with the date format YYYY.MM.DD – as it sorts nicely.

CraigFromCurtin11:25 pm 10 Jun 07

Hello there. Thanks for all of the effort you and the others have put in upgrading the system. Now if you would indulge me for a moment so that I may return to my old bugbear, which I and others have moaned about for quite some time now (grrrr). Is there any way *humanly* *possible* that you can ditch those American date formats of mm/dd/yy and pretty pretty please go to the normal format of dd/mm/yy? It’s not TOO bad when you see a date like 10/19/07, because there is obviously no 10th of the 19th, but when you see something like 06/02/07, well – is that the 6th of the 2nd or the 2nd of the 6th? PLEASE! It is so confusing and annoying.

I can’t believe that we can achieve so much as a human species with technology, equality, peace in our time, changes of governments at elections etc., but we “can’t” fix a lil’ ol’ crappy date format! Come on now! Sheesh!

Its a heck of a lot faster now, never seen it load so fast.

Works OK for me, thanks for your efforts K!

Hey Sammy, Thanks for the feedback. It has been pretty fast for me all day, but I’ve been sitting infront of the server in the RiotACT bunker.

Shite-loads snappier actually

It certainly seems snappier

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