If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from me explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

(Soon we'll fix the problem where you can't reply to your own posts. I hope to have that gone within a month.)

If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

Decius wrote:
This morning a few links popped up on MemeStreams that don't work if you click on them. You get an error message which says "I could not find the proper URL based on the OID. You may have reached this page due to an error."

We realize that this is a serious problem. Unfortunately, it is not a simple to fix and it is going to take time.

When we first started working on this project back in 2001 we were completely green at relational database design, and we made a poor decision, which was to use a feature of Postgresql called "OID" which at the time was defined as globally unique for an entire database. Unfortunately, the Postgres team later decided that this was impossible, and change the definition of OID. In newer versions of the database, which we are running due to numerous performance enhancements, OIDs aren't globally unique, or even unique to a table.

At this point, unfortunately, we had a hell of a lot of code invested in OIDs. We figured it would be a long, long time before OIDs would end up repeating in our database, and so we could wait to change all of that code. Unfortunately, today, OIDs appear to have started repeating in the blog table far in advance of when we thought this was likely, as this table only has 44,000 entries. There are about 500 references to OIDs in our code, and in order to fix this problem, we'll likely have to change them all.

This is going to require time from us, and hopefully patience from you.

HAHAHAHA! You didn't read that book I bought you, did you?!?! =)

flynn23 wrote:

HAHAHAHA! You didn't read that book I bought you, did you?!?! =)

Well, to be honest by then these mistakes had long since been made. We're not bad at this now, our new tables are well designed, but there are a few things from the first few weeks of this project that still bite us in the ass now and then.

Decius wrote:

flynn23 wrote:

HAHAHAHA! You didn't read that book I bought you, did you?!?! =)

Well, to be honest by then these mistakes had long since been made. We're not bad at this now, our new tables are well designed, but there are a few things from the first few weeks of this project that still bite us in the ass now and then.

That's why I recommend throwing away everything every other version. You will always have detritus floating around in projects otherwise. But bravo to you and Rattle for doing the re-engineering so quickly. I know that must've been tough given the fundamental nature of the change.

flynn23 wrote:
That's why I recommend throwing away everything every other version.

That was the plan. We even tried to basically do that. Unfortunately, that version never got off the ground. The real problem is trying to do this as a hobby when sites with similar complexity are developed by teams of people. No matter. If we accomplish what we want to accomplish over the next few months I think we'll be back to a place were the technology in the site is really competitive with other news aggregators again.

Decius wrote:

flynn23 wrote:
That's why I recommend throwing away everything every other version.

That was the plan. We even tried to basically do that. Unfortunately, that version never got off the ground. The real problem is trying to do this as a hobby when sites with similar complexity are developed by teams of people. No matter. If we accomplish what we want to accomplish over the next few months I think we'll be back to a place were the technology in the site is really competitive with other news aggregators again.

Well, I said that coming from the pov of an IT shop or formal IT project, where resources are not so scarce. In a startup environment, the opposite is true. Lever everything for as long as possible or until it just disintegrates. Then lever it some more.

Hey...just wanted to say thanks to Rattle and Decius. I personally know that they basically spent *ALL* day on Sunday (in to the wee hours of the morning) coding to fix this problem. I am very impressed at their determination to get this problem resolved before the monday morning "oh god I am at work, guess I will surf the web instead" rush hour. And thanks to Starbucks and Venti sized coffees, which I also saw had a hand in this tour-de-force.

Decius wrote:
This morning a few links popped up on MemeStreams that don't work if you click on them. You get an error message which says "I could not find the proper URL based on the OID. You may have reached this page due to an error."

We realize that this is a serious problem. Unfortunately, it is not a simple to fix and it is going to take time.

When we first started working on this project back in 2001 we were completely green at relational database design, and we made a poor decision, which was to use a feature of Postgresql called "OID" which at the time was defined as globally unique for an entire database. Unfortunately, the Postgres team later decided that this was impossible, and change the definition of OID. In newer versions of the database, which we are running due to numerous performance enhancements, OIDs aren't globally unique, or even unique to a table.

At this point, unfortunately, we had a hell of a lot of code invested in OIDs. We figured it would be a long, long time before OIDs would end up repeating in our database, and so we could wait to change all of that code. Unfortunately, today, OIDs appear to have started repeating in the blog table far in advance of when we thought this was likely, as this table only has 44,000 entries. There are about 500 references to OIDs in our code, and in order to fix this problem, we'll likely have to change them all.

This is going to require time from us, and hopefully patience from you.