...more recent posts
Another outage today. Worse this time, as all sites on the server were inaccessible. I'm sure my few customers are very pleased they hosted with me!
I don't know exactly what was wrong. But I strongly suspect this was the same MySQL problem. Somewhere there is a script that is (or scripts that are) connecting the MySQL, but then not releasing the connection when they are done. And with enough requests this eventually results in too many connections to the database.
Probably those requests would time out eventually and everything would start working on it's own, but rebooting the server made this happen right away.
Hopefully no one was mid post when this happened.
I am going to try to get to the bottom of this. I will keep you all posted.
Quick database outage. Looks like the same thing that happened a week or so ago. Not a big deal (just have to restart the mysql demon,) but obviously annoying. I'm trying to figure out if there is something more fundamental that is breaking down. I'm thinking possibly this has to do with running low on disk space.
The site was down for a while today. I'm not sure exactly how long. The server was fine, but the database was returning a "too many connections" error which was almost certainly not the result of actually having too many connections. Sorry for the outage.
I can't figure out what is going on. /sync works, but it doesn't seem like it does. I mean, when you use it to sync files that have been FTP'd it actually does it's job, but the script just hangs, apparently not doing what it should. I am trying to fix this but haven't had much luck yet.
But until I do it is still useable. Just /sync like you would expect, wait for a few moments just to be safe, and then you can stop the page from loading. Then go to either /music or /image and you should see the files in their correct place.
The front end of the [image] system is now updated. I have rushed this just slightly (what else is new) because I've spent way too much time on it and I have to get going on several other things. So once again I am leaving it up to you guys to find bugs.
Some good news: the URLs have been slightly changed, but a redirection system is in place this time, so all links from the previous image system will work flawlessly (what could go wrong?) in the new system. It still might be the case that there are image links (to albums, or to thumbnail pages) from 2 rewrites ago (from more than a few months ago) that might be broken. If anyone can find such a link please point it out and then I can easily add it to the redirection function. I just honestly can't remember how those URLs were created.
Down the home stretch.
The music system now defaults to sorting by album (then artist, track number, track name.) You can click the column headings to get it to sort by 'track name' or by 'album'.
And the search engine was not constraining it's results properly in some cases, most notably when searching while in a 'by artist' view. Now you should only get results from the restricted collection of music defined by whatever view you are in. (If I am looking at /music/jim/artist/beatles and I do a search, I will only get results back from hits on just the set comprised of my beatles songs.)
Assuming everything is working correctly now, the only thing left is to add the ability to order the tracks inside a user created playlist (this will happen when you click through 'edit this playlist'.)
So my idea is to use the new /music scripts as the basis for all the media management on the site. Right now that means updating /image to the new format, and also creating /video. Basically all the heavy work is done, I just have to tweak the script to look in different tables in the database (say, the image table instead of music) and then change how the output is displayed.
First, does anybody see any big problems I am missing?
And next, what information do people want displayed in /image? Obviously the description of the picture (this will be like trackname is in /music.) Do we want the filename displayed to, or just link the description to the filename like /music does it? Of course the size of the image file. Maybe the upload date? Do we need to see the image owner listed?
I'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Additional information for each picture could be displayed (as it is now) on the image edit screen. But what info can't be left off the main /image lists?
Not sure if anyone other than Tom and Dave have looked at the new /music stuff yet. If you already have, here are some changes from today:
You can now (in most situations) click on the artist and album column headings to sort alphabetically by artist or album instead of track name.
Search now works better.
If you /sync/, and all the files you sync are music files, you are automatically redirected to /music/yourname/recent where the new files will be right at the top.
The checkboxes let you edit (click 'edit' at the bottom - although you can only edit your own songs of course.) Note that you can edit multiple songs at once. This is especially useful if you are adding album and artist info (yeah, sorry, I can't read the id3 tags from the mp3 files yet.) On the edit page you can fill in the artist and album info one time, and have it apply to all the tracks you have selected for a multiple track edit.
So I'm imagining: FTP a whole album worth of songs. Go to /sync and they will be sucked into the database and you will be taken right to /music/username/recent where what you just uploaded will be at the top of the page. Click to select them all and on the edit page add the artist and album info in one place to assign them to all the tracks.
Also note that there is a checkbox at the very bottom that will select all the checkboxes above it (or unselect them if any are selected.)
Also to note, 'trackname' is distinct from the actual filename. So trackname can have any special characters or spaces or whatever you want. When you /sync the system just uses the filename as the trackname (probably I can make it smarter about this), but you're going to have to do a little editing no matter what. I leave the filename as whatever it was when uploaded, say, 01_ella_and_louis-I_wont_dance.mp3 and change the trackname to the more readable 'I won't dance', while making the artist 'Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald' and the album 'Louis and Ella Again'.
Since the system sorts by album and artist it would be nice if we could be careful with spelling. When entering artist names (again on the edit page) I also supply a pull down menu of artists already in the system. Take a look in there first, since using that for repeat artists will assure that all spellings are consistent.
I've been building something for the site, and for the first time ever I didn't put it up live well before it was done. I've actually been, like, testing it. And shit.
It's really hard not to let it loose (not that it is so cool or anything, but I get attached to these things.) I think maybe tomorrow. So yes, this post basically amounts to nothing but I had to at least let out a squeak.
My stupidity really pays off in the sense that I end up working for a long time on simple problems, and then when I finally solve them it feels like I am some kind of genius because, well, the problem must really have been hard for me to work on it for so long!
Follow that?
Anyway, I believe I have the OS X client ftp uploading script now working. At least I slightly impressed Dave with it. The script is an icon that sits on my desktop. Any file (or files) I drag onto the icon are FTP'd to the dmtmusic upload server (which can now handle all media types, not just music.) No connecting. No signing in. No hassles. Just drop 'em and they upload.
I think I could just email this script to other OS X users if anybody wants it. I'll be curious to see if that works. So let me know.
I ended up doing it completely in Applescript so it should be very portable across OS X machines (doesn't rely on Apache and PHP like my first attempt.)