[Pan-users] Re: recurring annoyance

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 15 Oct 2007 02:48:33
+0000:

> On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 02:26:39 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
>>...I'm making
>> faster progress toward some personal financial goals than I had been...
> 
> Hmm.  Would one of those goals involve a new computer with a specsheet
> sprinkled liberally with 'giga' and maybe even 'tera'?  ;o)

Well... not a whole new computer, but one of those goals is the pair of 
dual-core Opteron 290s (top of the socket-940 heap) I've been talking 
about for awhile.  I've actually got the money now, and went online to 
get them the other day, but didn't like the privacy policy the place with 
the good price ($525 each, so $1050 for the pair, yes, that's /after/ the 
latest price reduction) had, so didn't get them.  Actually, it was more 
one of those "you agree to the privacy policy" checkbox on the shipping 
info registration, but try as I might, I could NOT find the policy 
actually linked ANYWHERE on the ENTIRE site!  I think I've become rather 
more sensitive to such things since I quit proprietaryware and don't see 
EULAs with ridiculous terms shoved in my face every day.  Anyway, I 
decided I couldn't do it.  I did fill out a feedback on it, but of course 
wasn't going to put in a valid email address since I couldn't find a 
privacy policy, so they can't get back to me -- I'll have to go back and 
check them, but the time...

My current machine is no slouch.  With 8 gigs memory, a dual Opteron, if 
only 242s at this point, and 4x300 gig drives (so 1.2 TB raw storage, 
there's your tera), it's still above average.  The video's not so good 
tho, a Radeon 9200, the last of the old freedomware driver supported r200 
chip series. Now that AMD/ATI is supporting libreware drivers again, I 
figure they'll have something worth looking at in terms of upgrade 
probably sometime next year.  I'm also still running CRTs, dual 21/22", 
1600x1200, but now that prices are coming down on reasonable resolution/
size LCDs, a couple WSXGAs (1600x1050) might do.  I'd /really/ like a 
minimum 2048 width, so I could view two 1024 width side by side per 
panel.  The 30" Apple Cinema style LCDs, 2560x1600, are nice, but still 
out of my price range at ~$1750, say $3500 for the pair.  Maybe in a 
couple years...

The big non-computer goal on the list is lasik.  I had worn contacts for 
years and was reasonably happy with them, but broke one a year or so ago, 
and switched to glasses.  I've stayed with glasses since they want you 
out of contacts for several months before they do lasik, but due to time 
constraints, I haven't even been in for an exam to see if I qualify.  I 
do know that at my extreme correction (-11 diopters or so each eye, about 
20/2000 best I've been able to estimate -- uncorrected, I see that big E 
on the eye chart, that people should see at 200 feet, at about 2 feet!), 
it's not going to be cheap, and I may not get perfect vision, but it 
should be good enough I can go without glasses anyway, and if I do end up 
wearing them for better vision, they'll be tiny and light, compared to 
the coke bottle bottom goggles I wear now.  Reasonably, that'll be a 
minimum of $800 an eye, possibly double that, so I'm looking at 
$1600-3200.  (IOW, if it wasn't for that, those Apple Cinema displays /
could/ be on my list.  Oh, well...)

> Seriously, I haven't paid much attention to whether my groups marked as
> read actually stay that way.  If any of you three could post a bone-head
> simple example including exact-bone-head-steps-to-reproduce, I'd like to
> take a look.

The problem here is that it's not something you can really duplicate.  
I'm not sure what triggers it, maybe a weird post that doesn't meet the 
official specs in a group, maybe some hopefully temporary server 
condition, maybe some weird mis-transmission of some sort, but once it 
happens, it seems to screw up something in the local configuration.  
That's why working with another instance (set to use the same server)
things worked -- the local config wasn't screwed.

So we sort of know how to fix it.  Erase pretty much the entire local 
config, including all read message tracking, etc.  That suggests it 
should be possible to narrow it down to a single file in that config/
database, and from there, possibly, to a single bad entry.  However, 
that's what I've not had time to do.  Once we know the specifics of the 
bad entry, it's likely we, or at least Charles, will be able to figure 
out what triggers it.  However, until someone who /has/ either the won't-
stay-read problem, or the won't-update problem, actually has time to try 
to trace down the specific file and entry, it's going to be difficult to 
do anything else with it.  Unfortunately, that also means we don't know 
enough about it to make it reproduceable, altho it /does/ appear to be 
happening to multiple people, which would suggest it's /not/ just a 
single guy's config and/or database that got corrupted, as I initially 
suspected when I first saw it here, and as the evidence would point to if 
it were /not/ multiple people experiencing it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman