Um.... I typed the previous post on the old forum, and for some reason it posted when I wasn't finished (I think when I hit the preview button), and when I actually hit post. I didn't notice it until coming to the new forums. I check the old forum, and it did it too... Weird. I can't even imagine how it would happen. Oh well... I think I'm going to find something to do now.

(Edit)

Actually I think something glitched out... When I noticed a grammatical error in my large post, I went back to fix it, and then hit update reply and then it didn't take me to the post, it just went back to the update reply screen. But not for this post.... Just weird...

(Edit 2)
Fixed.

[ Edited Jul 13, 2010 ]

I'm a little confused with the USA/UK images. Either I'm not seeing it, or there isn't a difference at the moment. Gah, I think I'm done for now... I feel the need to work on my RP system.

13x31 I'm a little confused with the USA/UK images. Either I'm not seeing it, or there isn't a difference at the moment. Gah, I think I'm done for now... I feel the need to work on my RP system.

If you right click on any thumbnail, it'll have a prefex:

USA
img146.animecharactersdatabase.com
img147.animecharactersdatabase.com
img148.animecharactersdatabase.com
img149.animecharactersdatabase.com
img150.animecharactersdatabase.com

UK
uk.animecharactersdstabase.com

The UK server has a 1Gbit uplink to the net, and is based in London.
The USA server has a 100Mbit uplink to the net, and is based in Denver.

In order for there to be no difference, you must be getting at least 100KB/sec+ from either location. :-P
http://img150.animecharactersdatabase.com:81/10MB.zip
http://uk.animecharactersdatabase.com:9000/10MB.zip

I also recently learned HTTP suggests downloading in parallel 2 files from each host name... been thinking of changing my image load distribution algorithm to take advantage of that.


[ Edited Jul 13, 2010 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Ah okay. Denver huh? *Runs a very long network cable to the server* lol. I live on the outskirts of Denver... Gah... Burnt out from work... And time to work on the RP system some more, though I'm not quite in the mood....

-- FONTS --
Tiny fonts again... well, to hell with the [url=www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size]WC3 Care With Font Size[/url] guide then.

13x31 what is your browser's default font size? I'll do some testing, and try to get the fonts right once and for all. ;-)

-- IMAGE UPLOADER --
I'll rewrite the code soon. It works now, and should work better when rewritten. I'll be making a major change to it in the future though, while might break it utterly. We'll see.

-- SEARCH ARROWS --


Most, maybe. But sadly, not all. I swear I recently had one person complain about no next page button... after I coded them in on the side, top, and bottom... they finally noticed the ones on the side.

-- SEARCH PAGER --
What should I do again? lol
Suppose I could add a few random page numbers when there are a lot of results. That'd be easy to code, and wouldn't add too much to the byte weight of the page.

-- ADS --
At the bottom of the page, there's always been (and hopefully always will be) an Ads Toggle. Click that, and ALL 3rd party content is disabled. Just don't tell anyone. Shhh.

-- SIDE MENU --
When ads are toggled off, I decided not to even render it. Eventually tho, I plan to put a Chatbox, Recent Forum Posts, PM notification and whatnot in there.

-- ODD FORUM RE-DIRECTS --
I'll take a closer look at the code... there's a lot of nested function calls using similar arguments and variables... if I called them in the wrong order, that could easily cause some really werid stuff to happen.

-- DENVER --
Next time we have an outage, can you run over and shake your fist at the hosting company for me? hehe.

-- OT --
Building PC's is fun, right! If I could disable the speakers, that would be good. The audio out line from them, honestly, was better than this sound blaster USB card. But the BIOS option has been all or nothing. No external speakers, no audio out line... :(

Hahaha, that mod eh... I tried it recently. Very... yeah. Midas Magic, Natural Enviornments, better UI, Money Ring, Dragon Mount... are some of my must-haves. That's too bad about the motion sickness. :(



[ Edited Jul 15, 2010 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Gah! The theme is dark and it was hard for me to read the black text against dark gray background (I had to get closer to the screen before I gave up and went to the old forums.

--Fonts--
Hmm... Firebug says 12, but it looks like it's either 8 or 10 (I made a screenshot and tried to compare it with a text editor. As far as default fonts go, Firefox is set up to use whatever the site specifies, so I suppose I don't have a default font size.

--Search Pager--
Just standardize at the top and bottom whether it's the drop-down menu or the direct page linking (I'm liking the drop down better).

--Ads--
I think I saw the button before once, and completely disregarded it (and then I forgot about it as a whole lol). Maybe you could turn it into a secret keystroke? Or just make the button really teeny off to the side somewhere lol

--Denver--
Sure :P and perhaps I should leave a DOMO doll at the front door every time it happens just to confuse them.

--OT--
Yeah, I hate motion sickness. I can't ride in a car longer than 30 or so minutes straight without feeling so crappy. I have no problems when I'm driving for more than an hour which is weird. But I think it might have to have something to do with the first person stuff, since I don't have many problems playing Unreal Tournament 2004. Maybe it's the realism in the graphics and I'm subconsciously thinking I'm moving when I'm not. Gah stupid brain!!!

Yes. I think building PC's is one of my favorite (although a bit expensive) pastimes. I've got a wishlist on newegg to upgrade my current desktop to a hex-core AMD processor (that's 6 cores!). Unfortunately, the only thing that's not getting upgraded is the hard drives (wonder if that even would qualify as an upgrade?), so basically everything but the hard drives would be new. It would cost me about $1400 to do so D: , and smartly I'm holding off on it since I don't use that desktop that much as is (I've got a 750 watt power supply in it).

Just noticed new forums needs a set of iconic smilies.

*ahem* new forum needs a set of iconic smilies.

I've been making a lot of grammatical mistakes lately for some weird reason...

[ Edited Jul 18, 2010 ]

smilies eh. that'll take a lot of BBCode, but it'll be worth it.

# RANT LIKE CONTENT
So for the time being... let's use this thread to fix problems resulting from the server move. I've been stressed all Spring cause of a bad decision to move ACDB to a cheap Denver server. 3 months later, Summer, that has been corrected today with a move to Philadelphia.

Seince the beginning, ACDB has been hosted on OpenBSD. Now that we're in Philadelphia, I was given only two options: Linux or FreeBSD.

Old Server dmesg
http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/hosted/dmsg-co.txt

New Server dmesg
http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/hosted/dmsg.txt

So, we're on FreeBSD. Configuring this to be like a paranoid OpenBSD was sooooo hard. Took me 3 years to get OpenBSD so obfuscated only I could work with it. I'm kinda amazed I pulled off the same level of obfuscation on FreeBSD in a mere 5 days 20 hours. Actually, even more obfuscated than ever!

First off, I must have a chroot Apache.Apache 1.3. NEVER 2.x I tried everything.

* Manually starting Apache with chroot -u www -g www /var/www /usr/local/sbin/httpd
* Grabbing a cvs snapshot of the openbsd source, manually compiling their version of Apache
* Finally, I found mod_chroot, and it matched our version of FreeBSD and Apache.. so went binary with that.

Next up, PHP. The binary PHP package did not match up with the other software, so that was out. The cource version in ports was too new, so no forking way I'm using that. That left one option - fetch the source code of the PHP version I wanted, compile that with gd and mysql built in, disabled pear and other worthless extensions, and rsynced the "dot so" into libexec of Apache.

Too bad apache wouldn't start.

ServerRoot is appended to most locations at startup, then chroot is appended to that after startup. So what you type does not exist. What server root is appended to exists at startup but does not exist after startup. And... ugh, still drives me nuts. I just put every file I had in 3 locations, and yeah.. Apache runs, but we still have issues.

Oh and the virtual hosts... so annyoing. Remind me never to change that I copy and paste. It worked before, no sense messing with it and breaking it. Bad idea.

Finally MySQL. Well FreeBSD puts it in /var/db/mysql ... OK ... different from OpenBSD, but at least it is on /var. Made a tone of mods to my.cnf and MySQL should be running better than ever.

Thankfully FreeBSD uses an older version of OpenBSD'd packet filter. Too bad I had just finshed updating my pf.conf rules to use the new standard, and didn't have a copy of the old rule set. Ah well. Few tweaks, and it's doing the ports right.

Lighttpd I am very proud of.


server.modules = (
"mod_status",
"mod_access",
"mod_magnet"
)

server.document-root = "/var/www/htdocs"

server.errorlog = "/home/rei/web.log"

status.status-url = REDACTED

mimetype.assign = (
".gif" => "image/gif",
".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
".jpeg" => "image/jpeg",
".png" => "image/png",
".xbm" => "image/x-xbitmap",
".xpm" => "image/x-xpixmap",
".xwd" => "image/x-xwindowdump",
)

url.access-deny = ( "~", ".inc", ".php", ".txt", ".html" )

server.port = 81
server.bind = "199.187.122.186"

# server.chroot = "/var/www"

server.username = "www"
server.groupname = "www"
server.max-connections = 1024
server.max-fds = 2048

server.max-keep-alive-requests = 4
server.max-keep-alive-idle = 4
server.event-handler = "freebsd-kqueue"
server.network-backend = "freebsd-sendfile"
server.stat-cache-engine = "simple"

magnet.attract-physical-path-to = ( "/home/rei/mirror.lua" )

Mmmm, is that beautiful or what.


# END RANT

So onto known issues....
1. A lot of old code is very broken. If you see a one line error message in place of a page you requested, trust me I know about it, but if you want it fixed, reply here and I'll make it a high priority.
2. Image uploads are broken. I'm not sure why. But I'll try to fix that by tomorrow as I resume work on the new character upload system.
3. Some numbers tables were wiped clean. Such as character of the month votes for this month. And stats for this month. Not sure why either.

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Hmm... So far everything seems fine. (I decided to stop since I forgot I was killing my own bandwidth with anime downloads) BTW, when I nominate a character for COTM, did you want the "Thanks for voting!" message to appear at the very top of the page, above everything else? I just thought it was a tad weird.

That's a good question... I have been wondering what standard I should follow?

It rather breaks the HTML layout appearing at the top like that... but at least it is highly visible. ;-) Maybe in the center of the page, below the Quick Search, but above the page content?

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？