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What's new at the halfbakery?

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Chance of Power Outage
Mon
April 6,
2009



   There may or may not be a planned power outage tonight for some maintenance thing or other; and even if machines reboot automatically, various parts of the infrastructure may not, and may instead be dependent on people being awake, reading their email, being able to physically enter a machine room, and so on. Ah, the joys of virtual ownership. Anyway, if you can't connect, that's not because of anything you said, and it's not a sign of the halfbakery's demise. The halfbakery is not dead. It's merely pining for the fjords.


 
MX
Mon
May 12,
2008



   A MX record tells an e-mail client which host accepts mail for a site. In keeping with the site's theme, ours was half-broken, giving correspondents about a 50% chance of reaching a server that would actually accept mail for the halfbakery. Sorry for the chaos; I guess I didn't understand the new domain host's user-interface quite as well as I thought.


 
Domain Name Salad
Sat
May 3,
2008



   The "registrar" of a domain name (like "halfbakery.com") tells a toplevel domain server (like the one responsible for everything in ".com") who to turn to when resolving DNS names below that domain. The halfbakery just changed registars and name servers. These registries can charge money on a yearly basis for doing almost nothing, so an old registrar is about as happy to lose business as phone companies are - but eventually, they have to let you go. It's about a week-long process.

Naive as I am, I expected my old registrar and domain name service provider, Network Solutions, to keep serving the DNS entries even while the registrar change was in progress; after all, I'd paid them to do that until the beginning of June.

Ha. As soon as their responsiblity for the halfbakery.com registration ended, Network Solution's DNS stopped resolving www.halfbakery.com to 158.130.4.33. Instead of the old halfbakery IP address, their name server started to publish the IP address of an ad-hosting boilerplate site completely unrelated to the halfbakery and out of my control as "halfbakery.com". So, that's what people saw instead of the site, for about 24 hours.

By now, the new name server, and the old IP address, should be slowly making it back into local DNS caches.


 
Chomp
Thu
May 31,
2007



   The halfbakery was down for about a day and a half, while I was trying to extract the database's tail from its jaws.

That was mildly successful, but killed one idea and two annotations, likely recent ones or recently edited ones. Sorry, and nothing personal, really.


 
DNS wonkiness
Thu
Apr 19,
2007



   We've moved our address records to a commercial DNS hosting service, in anticipation of problems with our old provider. Those updates can take a while to propagate; if somewhere in between you can't reach the halfbakery, well, you'll know that the move wasn't for naught.


 
bristolz
Wed
Aug 9,
2006



   An update on bristolz' personal site confirms what her friends had suspected:
"Early June saw the end of Beez's struggle with illness. She spent her last weeks, happily surrounded by family and close friends, in the warmth of the Gulf of Mexico."

Bristolz' portrait from the very, very halfbaked calendar, rotated, slightly desaturated, and cropped

   bristolz's personal site

halfbakery inventions

memorial
She was bright and funny and sane, and I still miss her every day.



 
outage
Wed
Apr 26,
2006



   Later today, this machine will probably be turned off for about a day. Or not.


 
more outages
Tue
Apr 18,
2006



   In the next couple of weeks, there going to be lots of small outages, followed by one big one. (I probably won't know in advance when the big one happens.)

If it looks like someone pulled the plug on the halfbakery, assume that it was someone other than me, and that service will eventually return.


 
interruption of service
Sat
Feb 25,
2006



   We had a brief Domain Name Service outage - not a problem with the halfbakery itself but with the server that gets to tell the rest of the world where to find the halfbakery. I'm not sure whether it's over yet, but have been promised that everything will be back to normal by Monday.


 
move
Fri
Jun 3,
2005



   Partially in order to cut down on the chaos for our gracious hosts, the halfbakery has moved again, this time into a machine that is, I am being assured, faster than the bigger one right next to it.

There will be the usual flurry of misconfigurations and bugs. If it isn't fixed by tomorrow, send e-mail.


 
night
Thu
Jun 2,
2005



   The halfbakery was down all night. The following things are all going on in parallel: we're moving to a shiny new machine; the server room around the old and the new machine is being renovated (dust, people with sledgehammers, etc.); our gracious hosts are trying to get a grip on a partially mysterious server- and system-configuration; and, just to keep life interesting, there's a flakey KVM switch in front of the halfbakery that occasionally doesn't connect you with the machine you think you should be connected to.

So, it's not the ultra-reliable 24/7 service that you'd like - but in return, everybody gets to keep their day jobs, and you don't have to pay or look at advertisements.


 
general
flakiness
Mon
May 23,
2005



   There's some sort of reconfiguration going on in the lab surrounding the halfbakery, causing the network connection to occasionally drop and come back a few seconds or minutes later. Sorry about that; I don't get advance warning either, and don't know if thi


 
circuit breaker
Thu
Apr 28,
2005



   Yesterday's outage, in case you noticed, was caused by a circuit breaker tripping in the rack around the halfbakery. Not our fault, and the disk is still holding up; thanks to everybody who reported it.


 
midnight reboot
Thu
Jan 20,
2005



   At precisely midnight between Wednesday and Thursday, the machine rebooted (leading me to think that it was scheduled, but I didn't know about it in advance). Because of a typo in the reboot configuration file that had gone unnoticed at the last reboot, httpd failed to restart until someone did notice and told me about it about an hour later. But the disk is fine, it really is.


 
access keys
Tue
Dec 7,
2004



   Don't you just hate it when you invent something that turns out to already exists? There's a little-used accesskey parameter to <a> and <input> HTML elements that lets a user follow links and and trigger button presses with a keyboard - like a "shortcut" or "accelerator", only for webpages. Quick reference table for the halfbakery:
a annotate
l link
g vote aGainst
f vote For
n vote Neutral
o ok (submit)
Except for the submit button, those letters are highlighted in bold. [Update: ... which prompted more than two people to ask, "what's with the broken layout?" So now, they're no longer bold, but they still work.]

What you have to figure out yourself is how your particular browser deals with those letters. Firefox, for example, likes them with a control- prefix and immediately follows the tagged link.


 
shorts
Mon
Nov 1,
2004



   Two new short editorial items: a report about the rebuild in the aftermath of October's disk crash; and a gallery of past logos.


 
images
Sun
Oct 24,
2004



   There is some very, very conservative support for inline illustrations hosted on the halfbakery webserver. Posting illustrations is limited to people who are accredited as illustrators with the site. I'm trying to limit this group to people with talent, style or, at the very least, pizzazz. Or pizza.

If you would like to be an illustrator, talk to the site maintainers.

If you don't like images on your ideas or on your webpages, there are two new options in your user profile you can turn off - one turns off image display to you, while you're browsing; the second one means that illustrators are asked to leave your ideas alone.


 
trials
Sun
Oct 17,
2004



   Yay, I finally managed to insert another column into the database. .. and then installed a version of the halfbakery that used the old database schema on the new data, corrupting some of the ideas that were voted on after the install, and showing annotations on ideas that had nothing to do with them and were not, in fact, posted on those ideas.

Oh well. At least we no longer have ideas that don't know where their categories are at all.


 
stash II
Sat
Oct 16,
2004



   Another couple of ideas from my google cache that weren't in the first batch made it in. Not many of them were really new since 2004, but we got at least futurebird's "Dont forget your dreams" alarm clock back and "not only but also"'s "Sushi train art".


 
sweet!
Tue
Oct 5,
2004



   We received another donation of 900 ideas that someone had cached with only minor changes to the URLs in them.

The first injections had sometimes created duplicate annotations, typically at the end of the list, all from the same day. I wrote, and ran, a tool that may have removed those dupes.

Search works again, ideas have their names in the titles again, and the user-page automatic URL markup no longer eats the surrounding punctuation.

As [krelnik] points out, the id numbers for newer users and ideas have changed, and views that depended on them may do weird things.

Thanks to everybody who complained.


 
stash
Mon
Oct 4,
2004



   With a second ad-hoc parser, we've now added about 8000 low-resolution copies of halfbakery ideas to the restored set of 15000 cached copies. There was a lot of overlap, but if something of yours was gone yesterday, and is there now, it might have been restored from this set. Either that, or the withdrawal has made you see things.

A lot of people have trouble logging in with old cookies. With sartep's help, we've finally tracked down that bug and fixed it.

Some of the older accounts had no permission flags and were treated by the halfbakery as if they were search engines. All users now have normal human permissions.

The search page no longer forgets that a user is logged in. The search database will be out of date for a little while, while the restorations are going on.

I've removed the blocking robots.txt file to let the waybackmachine (www.archive.org) back in, which means that the archives there are accessible again. If you see an idea there that you are missing from the halfbakery, please send me the URL (or list of URLs). Do *not* send me the HTML; I'll get it myself. Just the URLs. One per line. In a text document.


 
crash
Sun
Oct 3,
2004



   The halfbakery was out for about a month after its disk self-destructed irrecoverably. What you see here is stitched together from a copy of the source code from 2003, a copy of the data from 2002, and various google-cached ideas.

What a mess.

This system is still barely limping along (it still has the bugs I fixed in 2004, for one), so please be a little patient with bugs. I try to fix what I can, but it'll obviously take a while until things are back to normal.

If you had an account created after 2002, and you want access to it, please send a short, informal request to <bakesperson@halfbakery.com>. Include your password, if you remember it.

I owe a huge debt to Fishrat, who set up a temporary replacement forum, the "fakebakery", in almost no time; to egnor, whose google scraping I'm trusting just a little more than my own, and to all of you who offered your time help and are patient both with the recovery and the loss. Thanks. It's nice to have you all back.


 
snow
job
Tue
Feb 18,
2003



   The hardware location surrounding the halfbakery was hit by a double-whammy of planned outage (it was just that nobody had told us about it) and snow storm. The good news is that nothing is wrong with the halfbakery machine itself; it's just the surrounding facility that needed first maintenance, then a bit of shoveling.


 
run
Thu
Feb 13,
2003



   Memories of halfbakery regular runforrestrun, who was killed by a drunk driver, are collected here.


 
fix
Sun
Oct 27,
2002



   Thanks for all the complaints! It turns out that a search index that had been regenerated smaller than before the move hadn't been physically truncated, leaving nonsensical data at the end that the new system sometimes tried to use when updating its search database. That meant that, after first executing the changes a user had requested, the halfbakery crashed for some people but not for others, depending on who the users were and what they had written.

Sorry for the additional downtime, and thank you for your patience; it should be better now.


 
move III
Fri
Oct 25,
2002



   Hear that echo when you post an idea? That's ten gigs of empty space, baby. We finally managed to move the halfbakery to a different platform and a different disk. I've tried not to otherwise move the furniture, but something always gets broken - so complain if you notice something out of place.


 
move II
Thu
Aug 29,
2002



   We tried to move again, but did get even less far than last time. Instead, an unrelated bug caused the halfbakery root page to break down the day after; that's now fixed.


 
in memoriam
Mon
Jul 15,
2002



   Last night, one of the moderators and halfbakery regulars, Michael "Miles" Thorne aka mighty_cheese, lost the fight with depression he had been leading for the last years, and killed himself.



Sorry to see you go, Miles. We miss you.



 
move
Fri
June 21,
2002



   We'll tried moving to a new platform, but were thwarted by a recalcitrant router. Sorry for the inconvenince - we'll try again.


 
moderators
Mon
February 18
2002



   The halfbakery now has five fresh co-moderators with the same rather wide-ranging permissions as the site's owner. (They can't see who votes for what, but they can throw people out and delete ideas.) Cut them some slack; they're new to this, and they're giving away a lot of their time for a rather thankless task.

If you ever feel they're abusing their powers, complain to bakesperson@halfbakery.com. I may not end up agreeing with you, but I'll at keep the complaint confidential, so if I don't, there's not much harm done.


 
yoyo
mode
Fri
January 11
2002



   We may or may not be down for a sorely needed OS upgrade later today. Sorry for the short notice.


 
beta
Mon
November 26
2001



   Well, I'm not sure about the "fast" part, but at least some parts of the system are a little bit faster than before.

Tread gently. This is very, very beta. Since the database is now binary, it may break in more interesting ways than the text-based database we used so far; if we still have an intact halfbakery tomorrow, I'll consider myself a very lucky programmer indeed.


 
3.0
Sun
November 25
2001



   If everything goes as planned, the halfbakery will be down for most of the day but emerge with a fast new database layer and the ability for users to modify the search and filtering parameters of their views.


 
bad
disk
blues
Mon
September 24,
2001



   There was another crash this morning; we still don't know what it is, and data was lost between Sunday evening and the Monday morning crash. (Both log files and database were affected, so there's no way of restoring lost submissions - sorry.) We've switched back to the previous, smaller, disk, but this would still be a bad time to post the only copy of your first novel to the halfbakery.


 
disk
-ism
Wed
September 19,
2001



   We're having hardware trouble again. Maybe it's the disk, maybe it's the controller. If the halfbakery host appears to be down, that's probably the reason. Either that, or an attempt to fix it by exchanging some part of the equipment.


 
disk
eat
disk
Sun
July 29,
2001



   The halfbakery root file system ate itself during a power outage in the early morning hours of Sunday, taking out the site completely. No halfbakery data was lost; it just took a while to get the person who could detect a boot block version error into sufficient proximity to the boot block version error in question. Everything should be back to normal now. Thanks to everybody who let me know about the failure.

[Update: No, everthing wasn't back to normal - the user table was trashed. I hope that was connected to the crash; if not, we have a problem. As always, thanks for complaining.]

In the wake of this crash, we may change disks and/or processors, and there will be some, hopefully shorter, downtime connected to that.


 
virus
Sun
July 22,
2001



   The trickle of "sircam" e-mail virus messages that the bakesperson account has been getting has now swollen to more than a dozen a day and had me worried about my account's disk quota, so I'm using a few procmail rules to throw them out. (More information about the virus itself: McAffee, Symantec, F-Secure.)

[Update: Oh, and also - if someone sends you a story about Snowwhite and the seven dwars with an attached .exe (that one might think contains the punchline) - don't open that. It'll only end up infecting your computer and sending me email in a feeble attempt to spread itself.
(More information about that virus: Symantec.)]



 
search bug
Fri
June 1,
2001



   For the last few months, a combination of bad design and small coding errors had led to small blemishes in the site's search cache. Searches missed a few notes and links, but rarely ideas, and I had ignored the bug as both difficult and minor.

On Thursday, that changed to difficult and major. Rather than just skipping a few entries, a linked chain of entries pointed back into itself, causing traversals of that chain to loop forever. That was behind the time-outs users experienced when adding annotations and ideas. (When new text is added, the search data structures are updated, and those updates got caught in an endless loop.)

This is now fixed, search is back online, and additions and edits should proceed at their normal pace. Thanks to everyone who sent email about it.


 
more disk
Fri
May 25,
2001



   In order to install more diskspace, the halfbakery went offline for a few hours late in the afternoon.


 
mfd
Wed
April 11,
2001



   The help text has a new section on the [marked-for-deletion] tag.


 
no news is
good news
Sat
April 7,
2001



   Editing or deleting a note or idea now no longer updates the idea's modified date (i.e., the idea no longer pops to the front page).


 
crÄsh
Wed
April 4
2001



   The halfbakery crashed whenever someone used an upper-case iso-8859-1 special character such as Á, È, Ü, Ý. Apparently, nobody had ever tried that and lived to tell about the failure.


 
cookies
Sat
March 24
2001



   The halfbakery stores user account information in cookies restricted to the domain "www.halfbakery.com". But there are at least 68 different ways of actually addressing the halfbakery host in a browser.

Since the sending of cookies to a site is controlled by simple case-insensitive string matches, this means that people going to, say, "half-bakery.com" see a site, but don't get their cookie sent by their browser.

The latest change tries to fix that by automatically redirecting anyone not using the canonical hostname to the canonical hostname.


 
more space
Fri
March 9
2001



   "Other: Halfbakery" has finally been broken up into its own "Halfbakery:" major category (completing the 3x4 grid). I had been resisting that in order to signal "Enough with the suggestions, already!", but it really wasn't pretty anymore.

XXL and XXXL people can now order t-shirts that fit them.

To summarize, more space for everybody.


 
lost for words
Fri
March 2
2001



   The Halfbakery categories "Other: Words", "Other: Words Wanted", and "Other: Phrases" will be closed and their contents deleted about a week from now.

They were (or, will have been) a disconnected part of the halfbakery that doesn't lend itself to structuring other than alphabetically, and there is already a site on the web that does that. If you have ideas in these categories that you want to preserve for posterity, please move them over to the nice folks at www.pseudodictionary.com. I think you'll find them hospitable, now that they have message boards and an "all your words are belong to us" motto on their t-shirt.

There may be some sort archival effort, and there's always old logfiles, so if you feel you've lost a valuable annotation or idea in the deletion, send email.


 
overflow
Wed
February 28
2001



   Early morning Wednesday, no annotations and links could be posted because the halfbakery disk had run over. Logfiles have been shuffled around and compressed to get some space in the short term, and more disk will eventually be added to the system. Thanks to everybody who complained!


 
lower power hour
Sun
February 18
2001



   The halfbakery will shut down for about an hour to fix something in the power distribution Thurman unit.


 
poorly planned outage
Tue
December 19
2000



   (And poorly announced outage; the date was wrong until after the event.) Some time in the next couple of days, the halfbakery's OS platform will be upgraded to a new version. This will take down the site for a short while. If accesses fail or time out, please stay calm and retry a few hours later.


 
paper fame
Wed
December 6
2000



   The December 2000 issue of Ziff-Davis's "Yahoo Internet Life" had a brief writeup on the halfbakery in its "Pretty Strange" section, which isn't our first mention on paper (I believe the UK Independent was first), but it's the first one I've actually looked at with mine own eyes.

"RON POPEIL WANNA-BES TAKE NOTE: You'll find more infomercial fodder than you can shake a Poket Fisherman at in the Halfbakery. Whether you'd like to market pockets for nudists, fat-eating bacteria, vanity postage stamps, edible Post-it Notes, frozen toast, or Carni-Food (meat that's shaped to look like vegetables), you're sure to find "the only product you'll ever need" -- several of them, in fact. Why live any longer without chocolate lard?"

Congratulations! Now, about that WiReD cover...


 
search
Sun
December 3
2000



   Visitors can now search ideas, annotations, and users.

The vote display has changed from linear to logarithmic. Please, no Florida recount jokes.


 
<br>
Fri
July 14
2000



   In annotations, user descriptions, and idea descriptions, <br> now translates into a line break, as it would in HTML.


 
redundancy department of redundancy
Thu
July 13
2000



   The halfbakery is being more strongly moderated; in particular, redundant ideas are thrown out as they are noticed. Read before you post.

There is a top 10-ish list. There will not be a bottom 10-ish list.

Ideas can now be renamed.


 
2.0
Wed
July 5
2000



   A much-needed makeover introduces two major features: voting and stronger support for categories. (It also introduces lots and lots of bugs; thanks for your patience.)

All ideas have been regrouped, and will probably move around more in the next days.

The alphabetization has been fixed to skip punctuation (like double quote marks).

Double clicks on the submit button while adding an idea no longer result in two ideas.


 
horror vacui
Wed
June 28
2000



   Setting a password from empty to non-empty corrupted the stored record of the user who attempted it. It then became impossible to log out, edit, or delete that account. Apologies to anyone who just silently gave up; thanks to the two who, almost a year apart, complained and helped me find out what was going on.

On a similar token, netscape's system had trouble downloading a RSS file with empty description tags, leading to occasional out-of date databases on my.netscape.com; that's fixed, too.


 
persistent cookies
Thu
June 15
2000



   Cookies from this site used to be sent without expiry date, meaning that users had to log in after each browser restart. They're now sent with an expiry date some 10 years into the future.


 
editorial control
Sun
April 23
2000



   This site doesn't place technical restrictions on what people can post, but I do reserve (and occasionally exercise) the right to throw out obviously bogus or abusive submissions, or to fix stale links.


 
/
Tue
March 7,
2000



   To accomodate literal /-es in idea names, their encoding had to be changed. Please report any broken links or odd-looking titles, or problems with other special characters.


 
whoa!
Fri
March 3,
2000



   On Thursday, www.memepool.com becomes the first larger resource to link to us, and Halfbakery clocks a quarter of its total traffic in that day. Not quite like being slashdotted, but .. dotted maybe .. Suddenly, the redesigns and extensions I wanted to do "once this catches on" are a lot more urgent than before.


 
change of hardware
Tue
November 2,
1999



   The halfbakery moved to a different kind of hardware, a new version of the same OS, a slightly different apache configuration file. If you feel like you lost data due to the move, send email to bakesperson@halfbakery.com, and we'll try to find it on the old system.


 
logging in
Sun
September 19,
1999



   When one logged in mid-way through entering an idea, the text and summary were erased; that no longer happens, and the page also no longer shows an error message complaining about not enough data being entered.


 
logs
Tue
September 1,
1999



   Netscape users under Unix didn't get their textareas filled-in when editing annotations and ideas. Sorry 'bout that.

The halfbakery also crashed with an error message when displaying the page for a user, but I don't think anyone who didn't look at the logs noticed anything strange.


 
identity
crisis
Tue
August 17
1999



   The halfbakery sent its "set-cookie" commands with bad syntax; some browsers stomached that, some didn't. After that bad syntax has been fixed, users of Internet Explorer 3.0 should have a much easier time.

When one selects "Create an account" without fililng in the "User" and Pass" fields, all one got back was a "500 internal server error"; that's fixed now, too.

Kudos to my gracious and smart beta-testers.


 
fonts
Sat
August 14
1999



   HTML is font hell. I'm trying to look good, consistent, and not like everyody else, but in an unpredictable environment where new operating system and browser releases battle user configurations through bad interfaces for a chance to screw things up, I don't have a prayer.

If the halfbakery looks bad on your platform, and you want to spend some time trying to make it look better (and paticularly if you have ideas on how to do that from the server end!), send me email and we'll hack our way around things.

In other news, there's now an "are you sure?" screen after the delete-idea menu option, and a new overview screen that mixes recent modifications with an alphabetical index.

Some people have had trouble changing their passwords with IE 3.0. On my side, it looks as if the string sent by the browser starts with a newline, but I haven't yet figured out why.


 
buttonism
Wed
August 11
1999



   Buttons, buttons, the world needs more buttons. "Restore" buttons next to "Update" buttons where appropriate; little redundant "annotate" and "link" buttons around an idea.

There's a new welcome message for new accounts encouraging users to edit their description; no leading white space in the by-date ideas list; no trailing white space in the links list; editing an annotation now HTML-quotes the annotation's text correctly.

Thanks to everybody who complained!


 
open
Tue
August 10
1999



   Everything is new.


 
testing
Thu
Jul 29
1999



   Working on the "What's New" page.