Open mike 03/01/2024

18 comments on “Open mike 03/01/2024 ”

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1. Ad 1

   3 January 2024 at 9:27 am

   Peak bustling tourism season in Clyde right now, and walking down its main street 1 in 3, businesses is devoted to cycling.

   Organic smoothie shop, craft shop, cycling shop

   Boutique accommodation, craft shop, cycling shop

   Old stone building, old stone building selling craft, cycling shop

   Talking about niche!
   • alwyn 1.1

     3 January 2024 at 12:46 pm

     There are a whole bunch of the Great Rides cycle trails in the area aren't there. That was John Key's brainwave wasn't it? Something that seems to have been very successful from what I have heard.

     I wish they had stuck to those off road cycle touring routes rather than build cycle lanes on all the narrow Wellington streets for cycleways that seem to be hardly ever used.
     • Ad 1.1.1

       3 January 2024 at 2:07 pm

       If OPEC had reacted to the Gaza war the same way they did to the Six Day War, there would be zero sympathy for a handful of shopkeepers killing massive cycleways.

       But here we are with fate again.

       Even at 1% of household trips taken, cycleways are already more important to our society and our economy than rivers ever were.
2. lprent 2

   3 January 2024 at 10:28 am

   Now running on a nvme storage backed with lvm snapshots and hourly offsite backups. The old 1Tb SSDs will be repurposed.

   Should be only moderately faster in reality. It is about 5x at read random even on this older nvme. I'll do a trials after I drop caches late tonight to get an idea of actual speed improvements rather than theoretical.

   However it should help a lot with saving comments.

   I'll be upgrading the cheapish motherboard to PCIE4 and faster nvme, hopefully this weekend. Can't really afford all of the bits to go to the PCIE5 ecosystem, that may have to wait until I get won one in my home work station and start shedding bits.
   • Johnr 2.1

     3 January 2024 at 10:39 am

     I'm not too bad at English, crosswords are my thing. I'm sort of OK at reo. But tech speak is a totally foreign language.

     So, given your expertise, I'll assume you know what your doing, and thankyou very much. These days we'd be lost without you guys.
     • Patricia Bremner 2.1.1

       3 January 2024 at 11:11 am

       aint that the truth !!
     • roblogic 2.1.2

       3 January 2024 at 2:28 pm

       NVMe = the fastest ("hard drive"/SSD) storage around, so data is written and retrieved quicker

       PCIe5 = the latest interconnection architecture, so that the computer serving this site can run several SSDs at super speed

       Means that a chunky website with lots of pages will load faster.
       • Johnr 2.1.2.1

         3 January 2024 at 3:45 pm

         That's exactly what I mean, robo. Tech speak. You and lprent used a bunch of acronyms that is a foreign language. I'm not worried or offended but if you want to communicate with we peasantry you need to modify the vocabulary. Bit like me a mechanical engineer needing to modify my language when talking to customers.

         I have a techy son and a scientist daughter, I'm careful what work questions I ask them, don't want fry my pea brain.
         • lprent 2.1.2.1.1

           3 January 2024 at 5:46 pm

           Yeah languages are often profession specific. Each time I change jobs I have to learn a whole new set because I always jump to a largely different industry.

           My last four jobs over the past 25 years have been in massively multi-player online gaming full of graphic artists, marine navigation (EEs and sailors), military training software and hardware (many more EEs and soldiers), and now controlling massive data servers (measured in petabytes of storage and comp sci people who can calculate algorithms in their head). It really is a joy because I spend about 20-25% of my times merely trying to keep up in a field that expands expodentially.

           Just as bad in non-work life as well. The whole of the tech for the TS system is something that I last did professionally in about 2005 and even then it was tangential to being in a startup and having to spread widely in skills as it bootstrapped. Politics and the law that is so integral to it have their own quirky dialects.

           Of course the computing technology, libraries, languages, standards, and toolkits I use change all of the time. I started working on computers for work back in 1981 on minicomputers when I was still working in tech sales (Think Big) and then manufacturing management. The only thing that I still use regularly from that era is c and make. Don't do any cobol, fortran, or basic….

           Everyone needs to be good at language these days – that is why we have the internet after all.

           Anyway, what I was talking about was that I just improved the speed of data access for the site by roughly four-fold. By the weekend I hope to make that roughly increase by another two to four-fold increase with newer (but pretty inexpensive) hardware that is a generation behind on the motherboard and current on the storage. It will cost about $400 as replacement parts for the existing system.

           We were getting a bottleneck on the data bus because the database was getting slow. Mostly it wasn't from human readers. But the site has a lot of robot crawlers looking over it all of the time.

           Some like google, national library, or the internet archive are welcome, but a lot of just malware looking for holds, and these days we also have all of those irritating generative AI reading everything. Humans mostly look at recent stuff. Bots read everything.

           • 29,012 Posts published ~252.7 MB data
           • 14 Pages published
           • 1,868,466 Comments published ~1.24 GB data

           It means that the site and its cache are usually shifting 5-6 terabytes of data to client requests per low month (like now) and up to double that when the site gets active around election time and there is a lot of interest.

           We don't spend money on much for the site. Hardware is basically my unused old gear, a few hardware upgrades for that to keep it reasonably current, and bandwidth that I have for my own use. Bandwidth competes with my partner (and occasionally me) watching TV streams and both of us working on our own hardware from home. Software is mostly open source.

           The nett additional cost is one to two thousand annually above what we use ourselves. Mainly power, some data, and UPS batteries plus some paid selected plugins for security, caching, a mobile theme, and some other useful bits of code. One caching site with a monthly charge of about $30.

           But I start getting superannuation next year, and I’m not that sure how long I can keep up with the learning curve or manage to avoid severe medical issues. So I’m concentrating on keeping costs down so if and when I stop making a lot of salary, it won’t be a strain to keep the site running.

           ---

           BTW (for non-engineers): EEs are electrical engineers. An odd breed.
   • adam 2.2

     3 January 2024 at 8:39 pm

     It's not the speed I love.

     It's the fact you keep it rolling along at a fair clip with bugger all errors.

     Massive ups for that.
     • lprent 2.2.1

       3 January 2024 at 11:47 pm

       There are some. There is are several ongoing issues with the mobile theme and focus in comments. It is reproducible but too transient to figure out what the actual issue is. It is also damn hard to add the debug code that could figure out the ordering issue that triggers it, as it doesn’t reproduce in debuggers.

       The new theme I am working on using the wordpress full site editor toolkit should get rid of it at source and be somewhat faster to load.

       But there is still quite a lot of the existing feature set that I have to port and/or refactor from the current code or plugins before that is ready for end-user testing.
3. Jilly Bee 3

   3 January 2024 at 12:05 pm

   Nothing to do with politics or the war in Gaza or similar – our youngest offspring turns 50 today. I'm feeling a bit more ancient and decrepit just thinking about it. Happy birthday to our beautiful girl, who has had a pretty rough deal at times with a couple of failed marriages and coping unsuccessfully with the Family Court, but she has now a lovely partner for her and her 6 year old twin daughters. Hopefully 2024 will be a good year for her.
   • Visubversa 3.1

     3 January 2024 at 12:37 pm

     Even those of us who did not breed see the generations tick over. Our siblings grow older with us, our nephews and nieces get educated, qualified and married, and then there is another generation. My great nephew is a toddler – but my partner's oldest great nephew has just left school and is training to be a professional fighter!

     I am now the oldest in my immediate family and at that happy stage in life where I am no longer running around at family gatherings – there are younger people more than prepared to do all the things I used to do.
   • Stephen D 3.2

     3 January 2024 at 12:55 pm

     6 year old twins eh. Snap.

     Busy little bees aren’t they 😎
   • mary_a 3.3

     3 January 2024 at 1:06 pm

     I wish you and your daughter a positive, healthy and peaceful 2024 Jilly Bee. Take good care.
   • Patricia Bremner 3.4

     3 January 2024 at 1:14 pm

     Here is hoping Jilly-Bee. Our youngest is 56, gay, has 3 health problems one being long covid. He lives in Varsity Lakes QLD.

     He is carer for two elderly, a sister and brother 70 and 82. He has never been happier being useful and loved.

     Life has many turns, my wish is for better weather in Queensland, as it has been unpredictable and dangerous. So far they are ok, but there is a further 10 days likely of heavy rain hail and a tornado so far, being repeated.
   • Johnr 3.5

     3 January 2024 at 3:48 pm

     I feel for you JillyBee.

     Doesn't matter how old ya kids are they're still ya kids

     Travel well
     • Jilly Bee 3.5.1

       3 January 2024 at 3:54 pm

       True dat

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