Search maintenance

Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:19 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

Sapporo status update

Apr. 20th, 2026 09:04 pm
mindstalk: (Default)
[personal profile] mindstalk

Falling behind on daily updates, oh well. Quick check-in:

I don't particularly like Sapporo as a city; it feels like the USA and USSR had an ugly baby. Wide streets, lots of parking lots, lots of blocky high buildings, not enough businesses and street life for the inferred density (possibly incorrect: high building + parking lot = not that dense.)

Read more... )

Sapporo

Apr. 17th, 2026 09:04 pm
mindstalk: (angry sky)
[personal profile] mindstalk

Skipping forward yet again in my travels... yesterday I flew from Osaka to Sapporo. Goal: to catch sakura (cherry blossom) season, since I missed most of Honshu's due to being in Taiwan for visa-waiting (though I did catch some blossoms in the past week of Osaka.) Impressions... eh. Read more... )

Flying without ID

Apr. 16th, 2026 11:51 am
mindstalk: (Default)
[personal profile] mindstalk

USA: flying needs increasingly onerous ID.

Japan and Australia: why would flying need ID at all? (Domestic flights.)

I'm not sure about other countries, chime in if you know.

mindstalk: (Default)
[personal profile] mindstalk

I finally rented a bicycle in Japan. It took some effort: paying for a Mobal eSIM, it being the only easy way of getting a phone number. Going to an office to show my passport and get the process started. Getting back home and finishing signup or something. Waiting for someone to actually activate the number the next morning. Then figuring out how install the new eSIM (actually confusingly easy), and panic because my Google Voice wasn't sending texts. (Turns out G Voice simply does not send SMS outside of the US or Canada.) Read more... )

mindstalk: (Default)
[personal profile] mindstalk

This morning I got up and out much earlier than usual -- particularly out, showering and getting dressed without stopping by my laptop. So by 8 AM I was wandering around, getting morning sun, and observing all the other people out, going to school or strolling or whatnot. The shopping street just north of me was still depressingly shuttered, but activity was high. Walking. Biking. Wheelchairs in the middle of the street.

On seeing the wheelchairs I realized: "no cars", and while these streets are usually low-traffic, this seemed to be no-traffic, and an expectation thereof. So I paid more attention to the signs, and found: Read more... )

The case of the missing notifications

Apr. 11th, 2026 11:58 pm
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

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