Sorry about all of this. We are trying to get back to normal. We plan to change up the blog in the coming months. My little kitchen table blog has gotten more comments than is typically expected, so we have to “grow up.” This should not affect the blog. In my mind, it is still me sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by my pugs.
I’ll try to get a post up later today. I know we are missing a few recent posts, but we will do our best to get them back. Special thanks to GBTC.
Thxs GBTC. ( i really like that nickname)
Welcome back, Dee! And thank you, GBTC!
Good to know! I thought maybe I was blocked for making so many obnoxious comments about New Calvinists, bad boy Southern Baptists, and other assorted wackos in the Christian Industrial Complex. Most people get tired of an old man’s wit and wisdom after awhile.
Thanks GBTC for everything you do to keep TWW on the air!
Maybe that’s what happened to the blog!!!
Dee:
Do you think someone hacked the blog? Seems odd that it went down when the blog item was about Knott and also about Hunt?
My pulitzer worthy comment got lost when TWW crossed the event horizon. I’m sad that no one got to read it.
Lol
Glad you’re back! 🙂
You do a lot of good, Dee.
Burwell Stark,
I’m crushed!
The crashed happened shortly after I posted a comment about God telling Habakkuk to “Hold my beer…”
I guess I should not have posted that?
I noticed that all the comments after May 25 disappeared.
@Max:
Does one acquire “good karma” by making or by refraining from making obnoxious remarks about the NeoCals?
Welcome back, Dee, and thank you, GBTC. May God bless that contractor!
I’m glad that, as I infer, the problem was simply technological. One worries, in a news/commentary outlet like this, that something “actionable” might have happened and the outage might have been imposed from outside by some means.
Stay well, all!
Very briefly, there was a configuration hiccup in the WordPress data base structures that run the blog. The end result was a restore back to things as of the morning of May 24. There was a somewhat long series of events that resulted in the May 24 date.
I’ll pass on a debate about the gory details of the last 4 days.
“By your words you shall be justified, and by your words you shall be condemned” (Matthew 12:37). Karma or not, the word needs to get out about the NeoCals!
Whew! And I thought it was shortly following my comment “Everybody I know has a big ‘but'” in reference to those who continue a blog thread when it has already been settled.
Ah, get over it. You won that last year!
GuyBehindtheCurtain,
What’s really interesting is that the “reply to this comment” just worked for me when it hasn’t worked for the past four months or so.
“Reply and quote” also works now.
GBTC – thank you for your hard work!!
I’d wager that the new WordPress 6.0 release on that date could easily have been part of what transpired.
Actually no.
But I seriously don’t have time to go into any details. My paying job has me tied up 24/x for a day or few just now.
The commenting issue is a bug that got covered up by something else done in the restore. The bug is still there but doesn’t get invoked due to …..
GuyBehindtheCurtain,
Hope things calm down for you soon.
TWW is back up and running and the details don’t too much matter here anyway.
You’re keeping some of us geeks in suspense, lol. Thanks for getting things running, GBTC.
Thank you, Dee and GBTC!
In a very over simplified “how a WordPress” blog works.
There’s an operating system. Typically Linux.
On top of that is a web server and some other bits. Typically Apache, the PHP language interpreter, MySQL data base system and a few dozen other needed but not a big of a deal things.
On top of PHP you have WordPress.
Each of these things likely has a million or so lines of code. The OS likely has 10s of millions. (Container usage can reduce this but my point is valid.)
Now even after you get WordPress installed you can’t do anything without a Theme. This can run into a few 1000 (10,000?) lines of code. Now with a Theme you can actually bring up a site.
Themes come in all kinds and shapes. GoDaddy’s catalog of installable Themes is about 100,000. (I think.)
But Themes are mainly about look and feel. What if you want a feature that isn’t in basic WordPress? (I use the term “basic” with a bit of snark.) Let’s talk Plugins. That quote feature for quoting and referencing comments at TWW. That’s a plugin. Our anti SPAM system? That’s two plugins. The Twitter feed for Dee? That’s a plugin. As of this instant we are running 28 plugins. With a few more we turn on and off as needed/useful. And again, the supply of plugins numbers in the 10s of thousands for useful ones. The total pool of plugins is likely a million or so.
Now for each of the things above there are from 0 to 10,000 OR MORE options that can be set. Many are set to defaults or out of our control or our desire to modify. (OS settings, MySQL, etc…) But many reflect choices to make the blog work better. Colors, fonts, side bar sizes and content, and on and on and on.
Now each of the things mentioned above can get fixed or have new features added. On a regular basis. Plugins are the ones I deal with the most. 2 to 8 updates a week. I get to decide when to install them. I usually wait a day or so to make sure they aren’t pulled as having problems. A bug in a plugin can take down a site. And has taken down TWW or made a mess of it a few times.
Anyway, there are almost always things that are broken (a bug) but not noticed as the current setup may not cause the specific set of operations that expose the bug. At least not on TWW. But other sites may have major issues. So the updates flow. (In software development there is a rule: “All software has bugs.”)
Then there are things like ancient non supported plugins that do useful things but are abandoned and no longer updated. And no visible replacement seen. So we use them but realize that they may stop working at any point in time based on something else changing. Fingers crossed.
Anyway, at times a bug will seem to go away / be fixed (quoting for some lately) because of a change to some other bit of the entire setup that causes the code to stop bumping into the bug. The bug is still there but may never be noticed again.
To be honest I’m impressed WordPress blogs work as smoothly as they do. And TWW is trivial compared to some WordPress site. I think ESPN, CNN, and similar are on WordPress. Abet with very customized in house written themes and plugins.
GuyBehindtheCurtain,
Looks like the domain is changed from thewartburgwatch.com to wartburgwatch.com. My old bookmarks do not work anymore.
GuyBehindtheCurtain,
I did a quick check on the http redirections from google search results.
http://thewartburgwatch.com urls redirect to http://wartburgwatch.com urls instead of https://wartburgwatch.com urls.
Also, the old https://thewartburgwatch.com is returning error, no redirections.
Hope this help with your debugging.
Sowre-Sweet Dayes,
I have a full day of back filling to deal with in a few days.
Thanks
Best wishes for happier techologies!
GuyBehindtheCurtain,
Some select Southern Baptists are studying your comment to see if they can replicate the problem on other sites…
Considering the awful stuff reported about “some select Southern Baptists”, hacking watchblogs wouldn’t be beyond the brethren.
Ken F (aka Tweed),
Max,
Talking of which you might want to get GBTC to check out this website, which (re-) posts in bad English some of the the comments you two comedians make here. I note that something I mentioned a few weeks ago also appears.about halfway down the page. As do some other TWW contributors .
There are similar sites doing the same thing.
(To explain. When I couldn’t get on to TWW last Friday, and the Wayback machine wasn’t listing recent results, I tried to find my comment and Ken’s response by googling it. And this is what I discovered.)
I’ve sent gbtc a screenshot
Now see this is why we need emojis. I want an LOL pic!
?
Scoffers are gonna scoff. Can you post the link?
I have been laughing all day.
Laughing anf laughing.
Lemme put my oar in.
Gone are the days when one of engineering’s prime directives was the KISS (keep it simple stupid) rule.
Permit me to defend my thesis:
When the wizards at Lockheed (under Kelly Johnson) designed the SR-71 blackbird, all they used was pencils, slide rules, and draft boards.
Blackbird is an enduring beauty, and she’s not been equaled.
Nowadays, the computer takes center stage, instead of the orchestra pit, where it belongs.
Let me dip my toe in the comment water here. I tend to avoid commenting on TWW main topics but this is way off the beaten path so here goes.
I’ve been a fanboy of the SR-71 since, well, my entire sentient life. I have a book or two on it. I read articles about it. I read essays from former pilots and ground personnel. So here goes …
Yes, it was done in the land of slide rules and computers that are crazy slow and simple compared to the one on my wrist. And lots of drafting boards on big tables.
But to take a turn of phase I’ve heard, “The F-4 Phantom is proof you can make a brick fly if you strap on a couple of wings and a big enough engine.
The SR-71 was a true marvel of it’s time. And in many ways it still is. But that simplicity came at a bit cost. Lots of things about it were over engineered or dealt with via operational headaches.
Since they were not based near most of their missions a typical mission required 4 or more (I have a memory of up to 9) refuelings per flight. (Not due to the leaking fuel while on the ground which was a separate thing.) At speed you only got 90 minutes or so on a full tank.
I have a memory of 3 hours of flight prep for the pilots. In their “space suits”.
And the fuel was JP-7 (which was not standard) and thus had to be pre-possitioned, stored, dealt with, etc.. at every possible refueling base. And there had to be multiple bases around the world as the tankers couldn’t fly from “home base” to their refueling points. And they couldn’t use what they were carrying in the “tanks” for their own use. One SR-71 was lost due to a mix up which resulted in it getting the wrong fuel (what all the other military jets used) during a re-fueling on a flight. So there was a dance of flying at lower speeds to get near where you were going (minimize fuel burn and re-fuelings) fill up in the air, do a mission, fill up immediately (or very soon there after) after you are out of danger then slow fly back home.
And it couldn’t start the engines like most jet engines. There was a special collection of triethylborane (TEB) injectors (ignites on contact with air) to fire them up. Thus each mission only had a limited number of engine restarts available. And they were used due to compressor stalls that would happen due to the speeds and where the plane flew.
When people talk about the price of the plane they tend to leave out details like the development costs. Things like titanium machining experience, setting up the fake companies to buy titanium from the USSR without them getting suspicious (a real thing), engine development (they “stole” from a lot of other government programs, NASA wind tunnel testing of how things work at Mach 3, etc…
The SR-71 was very very neat plane. But it would never be built today because, drum roll, it isn’t worth the cost. Even in 1950s $$$.
Oh, yeah. Those engineers who designed the air frame at the skunk works and all the other bits around the country made something like $2K to $4K (maybe) per year. Today a fresh out of college engineer going to work on such a thing would command $150K/yr. Government research isn’t the only game in town now for such engineers.
GuyBehindtheCurtain,
Note. I’m not saying we shouldn’t still be flying them. Just that their story isn’t as simple as some of their fans make it out to be.