Search found 281 matches

by JoeStrout
Sun Oct 13, 2013 9:10 am
Forum: Administration
Topic: Web site becoming unresponsive more often
Replies: 35
Views: 45802

Re: Web site becoming unresponsive more often

Thanks, I've noticed some seriously poor performance in recent weeks as well. On the other hand, this week it seems to be fine. I contacted our host (Dreamhost) last week about the most recent slowdown, but they were unable to find anything wrong. One of these days I should probably update to the la...
by JoeStrout
Sun Oct 13, 2013 8:57 am
Forum: General
Topic: Reality Spaceflight
Replies: 1
Views: 1298

Re: Reality Spaceflight

I'm all for anything that drives commercial development of (and public interest in) human space flight.

Hopefully the episodes of the new shows, when they finally air, will be available on iTunes or Amazon streaming... I haven't had an actual TV signal coming into my house for years.
by JoeStrout
Sun Oct 13, 2013 8:48 am
Forum: General
Topic: Climate II
Replies: 129
Views: 22166

Re: Climate II

First, "global warming" has several meanings. The first and foremost is shown by the difference in the average surface temperatures of the Earth and the Moon. Both are at the same distance from the Sun; therefore both get the same amount of energy per unit area. So why is Earth 33°C warmer? Answer:...
by JoeStrout
Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:13 am
Forum: General
Topic: At this point kicking me off looks like a cowardly move.
Replies: 130
Views: 23555

Re: At this point kicking me off looks like a cowardly move.

This thread also seems to have seriously outlasted its usefulness. If anybody wants to discuss climate change, Southern law, gun control, drugs (both legal and non), or any other off-topic matter, and really can't find some other more appropriate board on which to discuss them, then please start a s...
by JoeStrout
Sat Oct 12, 2013 5:44 am
Forum: General
Topic: Climate
Replies: 30
Views: 5779

Re: Climate

Everybody, please settle down. I know this is the "general" forum — which I frequently regret creating in the first place (but suspect that if it were not here, the off-topic threads would just end up elsewhere on the board) — but even so, we need to keep it civility. No ad hominem attacks. If you d...
by JoeStrout
Sat Aug 24, 2013 8:38 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Recent forum downtime
Replies: 1
Views: 8854

Recent forum downtime

I apologize for this forum's downtime the last several days. To put it bluntly, our ISP (Dreamhost) screwed up, and created "an issue with the apache service that handles [this] site, causing it to not spawn new PHP cgi processes correctly." The problem has been corrected, and we should be back to n...
by JoeStrout
Sat Feb 16, 2013 11:14 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Re: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon

Just took a look at what kind of question you're using. Without giving away the question I see a few problems: - Definite cultural context. Difficult problem to avoid. Non-native English speakers would be discouraged. - Do I enter the answer as one word or 2? I agree, it's not a perfect solution. B...
by JoeStrout
Wed Feb 13, 2013 1:42 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Re: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon

I did my best to make the questions easy for a human. No particular expertise is required; I don't think anyone here would struggle with them. But, if a real newcomer can't figure them out, they can always write to me for help.
by JoeStrout
Tue Feb 12, 2013 5:37 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Re: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon

Character recognition captchas have been broken for several years. The captchas that remain effective are those sufficiently uncommon that spammers haven't put the effort into them yet. My gut is that multiple choice Q&A tests will be the next to fall, and will fall hard once they become common. A ...
by JoeStrout
Tue Feb 12, 2013 2:19 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Re: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon

You're welcome. And here's an interesting tidbit about the flood of spammers. About 10 minutes after I got the new forum set back up, I started getting spammer registrations again, several per minute. This was with the board configured to use a standard visual captcha (pick the letters out from the ...
by JoeStrout
Tue Feb 12, 2013 3:18 am
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Re: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon

Well, here we are, on phpBB3. That took all day. I apologize for the downtime.

I also apologize for the missing theme, Polywell icon, etc. All that will be made right in the next day or two. But it should be safe to start using the board again now.

Cheers,
- Joe
by JoeStrout
Mon Feb 11, 2013 4:10 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Trying again

OK, Dreamhost's "one-click" upgrader is hopelessly FUBAR. I am about to attempt a manual upgrade. This will mean exporting the data from the current DB, and re-importing it into the new DB. Any messages posted after this one, and before the new system is ready, may be lost. Please be patient and bea...
by JoeStrout
Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:03 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

The email-me-for-manual-account-activation step stops almost all the spammers. So, there's no real harm done by all those spam accounts, except that the new-account notifications clog up my email, and of course the "Memberlist" link is utterly useless.
by JoeStrout
Fri Feb 01, 2013 11:13 pm
Forum: Administration
Topic: Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon
Replies: 32
Views: 43884

Upgrading the forum to phpBB 3 pretty soon

Hi all, I attempted today to do a simple upgrade of this forum through DreamHost's provided script. It failed horribly. So, I've restored everything back the way it was. I'm giving them a chance to fix their script, but if they don't have it working within a week, I'll try a manual upgrade. So, if y...
by JoeStrout
Fri Aug 31, 2012 4:20 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a post-modern cult
Replies: 117
Views: 41061

I'm closing this thread. It's not news, nor does it have much of anything to do with polywell fusion. If you want to continue discussing the pros and cons of various religions (or non-religion), I'd prefer you find another forum entirely. This sort of thing can be pure poison to a community such as ...