binaryslate

Seems slashdot is all commented out

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We’re awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement… but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3 hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we’re disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.

Had this happen before, only on an 16bit integer though, sadly not as impressive as 16 million…

Slashdot

I’ve just popped over to Slashdot and noticed that they’ve moved over to the new css format that resulted from their restyling competition.

I have to say that I really like it. Yes I know, it is exactly the same as the old style but hey why change something if it’s established, heck it’s almost a trademark for slashdot. We could all describe the style and layout to anyone without a seconds thought.

The fact that slashdot is still going strong is something that pleases me a lot, especially when it is up against the digg’s and newsvines and all their high tech wizardry. With Slashdot’s hand picked, quality assured posts you at least know you’re not going to have to wade through a page of manure before finding something interesting/intellectual and fascinating to read.