Free Republic

This weekend the Swiss population was called upon to make a historic decision, when Switzerland became the first country worldwide to put the idea of free money for everyone, technically known as Unconditional Basic Income (of CHF2,500 per month for every adult man and woman, and CHF625 for every child, for doing absolutely nothing) to a vote. As reported previously, the outcome of this referendum would set a strong precedent and establish a landmark in the evolution of the debate of handing out free money in a centrally-planned world. And as predicted, based on early vote projections it has been...

Helping my girlfriend clean out her grandparent's home, we found a couple long guns (a Winchester Model 840 IIRC, and some hunting rifle, I assume, because it has a scope—I didn't catch the branding) and there should be a few handguns as well (haven't found them yet.) I don't know the first thing about guns, except to assume they're loaded. Is there any generic instruction to be given for these types of guns to ensure they're properly unloaded and safe for transport and [temporary] storage? I'll try to compile more detail later this evening. The plan is to sell them...

We were experiencing a database issue today that effectively froze the site content. It has been defrosted. We've experienced numerous technical issues this past month. In an effort to handle increasing traffic, we've made upgrades to our internal structure that have rendered the site far more brittle than it ever was, coupled with general growing pains, coincidental hardware failures and a little foul play (at least one nasty denial of service attack) has seen the site down far too many hours this month. It's been frustrating for everybody involved and I apologize.

<p>Well, the good news first. After installing three very sweet machines and new networking equipment, FR is geared up for the onslaught of traffic we anticipate during this election cycle. All that is left is some tuning and bringing online another database server.</p>

One of the database servers suffered a minor malfunction and fell behind. It's catching up now, and will be current within the next few minutes (5 or 10 minutes at latest.)

<p>I fixed the page-too-wide/horizontal-scrollbar problem many were experiencing. This typically happened when either a long URL or string of characters found its way into the article summary, or when somebody posted a very wide image and you're viewing pings or comments using the brevity setting of "Text" (so that you see the comment text.) I'm embarrassed to admit the fix was a lot simpler than I expected, just a few lines crucial CSS statements seem to have corrected the issue.</p>

Updated the beta site today. I've added the following new features to the mail system: Favorites folder-- you can mark messages as favorites. Favorites are saved into a folder that can be accessed through the "Favorites" tab on the mail interface.Search! You can search for messages from people, and you can search for text within messages sent to you.and a few miscellaneous changes. I'm also experimenting with format changes on the index pages.

<p>Will be installing an update tonight that fixes a number of issues. The version that will be installed is currently available on the beta site.</p> <p>Fixed time zone issues, using JavaScript to ask your browser to format the time stamp. If you don't have JavaScript enabled, you'll see the default Pacific time.</p>

<p>Just installed a quick change to the pings page. It brings it more in line with what it is expected to look like. One particular change is the "greening" of comments from you, to more easily differentiate something you've posted vs. something posted to you. Not so sure about the way that looks, so please give me feedback.</p>

<p>Next up on the menu: I've been upgrading the system software on all our servers. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the spell checker broke and the new version of that software depends on software that I haven't yet been able to upgrade (because that software depends on a kernel feature that isn't available using the ancient kernel I have installed.) What this all means is that I will be taking a drive up to San Jose in the very near future (Monday night) to perform delicate surgery with a very large hammer. Once that is done, the spell checker will work.</p>

Added the ability to make a sidebar on the left of the page, as well as place boxes at the top and bottom of the page. You'll also be able to add your bookmarks using the Manage Blocks page.

What do you think? Suggestions, comments, complaints?

We technicians here in the Free Republic server room experimented with real mice attached to our computers. Unfortunately, not one mouse survived being plugged-in for more than a few minutes. We've reverted back to the hamsters, they're more durable and they know how to dance to the electronic pop music we enjoy.You should notice a significant improvement in response time.Go go hamsters.

<p>Thread URLs will change.</p> <p>Old links will be redirected to maintain bookmark compatibility. The new links will be more descriptive, offering the date of the article and perhaps a meaningful filename.</p> <p>The timestamps on threads will change to your computer's local time zone, but only if you have JavaScript enabled. Otherwise they will be in US/Eastern. Your FR preference will be ignored (and will be phased out in favor of browser-side time zone handling.) The beauty of this arrangement is that as long as your computer displays the time in your time zone, FR will "Do The Right Thing"(tm).</p>

<p>We use two databases in a master/slave relationship. The master receives all the posts and other changes we make to the forum. The slave copies all these posts and changes from the master, allowing either database to be queried in order to satisfy requests.</p> <p>When it is working correctly.</p>

The Free Republic Controversy Money is often the center-point or at least the lead-pipe of any good controversy. This is perfectly illustrated in the battle of (or against) Free Republic. A number of the site's detractors have repeatedly "demonstrated" that Free Republic is bilking thousands from little old ladies in a Jimmy Bakker-esque scam. I will offer a counterpoint for thought.In this article I will attempt to justify some of that cost. Some? Despite popular conception, I am only an ancillary participant in the internal operations of the site, and therefore I simply do not know where every dollar is...

I've installed new polling software. Please let me know if you find bugs or have questions. Thank you.

It's always something new with a complex system. We have frontends, backends and databases, not to mention ancillary services like DNS, mail, and internal gadgets. Something is bound to goober up. A few months ago we were hitting the limits of our database environment. I added hardware and all was good... well, too good. The backends couldn't keep up, so I added hardware (just this weekend!), and all was good... until tonight, when things were once again too good. This time the frontend went on strike, overwhelmed. A few years ago, when last looking at the scalability of our site,...