User talk:Steelviper/Archive3

Block of 81.177.14.26[edit]

On another wiki I visit has a massive spam attack by this ip advertising comerical spam from wikipost.info. I searched for the url of the spam it was advertising and saw that it was crawling several other wikis posting large amounts of spam (2mb of text on each page). I felt that this preemptive block was neccesary on this occation. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 09:27, 10 January 2007 (CST)

In that case, it's fine. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 15:17, 10 January 2007 (CST)

Congratulations[edit]

^_^ --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 11:39, 19 January 2007 (CST)

Thanks. It is a nice rifle, isn't it? Oh. The baby? Yeah, well that'll be a whole new adventure. --Steelviper 11:47, 19 January 2007 (CST)

Congratulations! When can you get him or her on to do some editing? :) --Spencerian 12:05, 19 January 2007 (CST)

Possible record for youngest Battlestar Wiki member --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 12:13, 19 January 2007 (CST)

It'll be a race, no doubt. We're still at least a couple years from acceptable edits. Plus the mature nature of the content makes TOS and 1980 far more likely candidates for viewing of the editor-to-be than RDM, presently. --Steelviper 12:20, 19 January 2007 (CST)

The question is: Will you bring up your son/daughter to not know that Galactica 1980 exists and that TOS and RDM are the only episodes ever made? Perhaps they will be happier having never seen or heard of the travesty that is 1980? --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 12:22, 19 January 2007 (CST)

Galactica Squadrons[edit]

While re-watching Act of Contrition I noticed a few more Galactica squadrons shown on the walls in the pilots' ready room. In the beginning of the ep when Adama enters, he touches the "Lest We Forget" picture then passes a squadron crest labeled "Vampires". A minute or two later, when we see Sgt. Hadrian standing against the wall, we can clearly see 7th Squadron "Battleaxe" and 4th squadron "Demons" on the wall behind her. How could one go about adding this to the wiki?AnteaterFeeder 21:04, 20 January 2007 (CST)

You can just create an article. /wiki/Vampire squadron -- then just create it. :-) Check out BW:MARK Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 21:13, 20 January 2007 (CST)

I recall seeing some of these squadrons (and their associated patches) floating around in some of the signatures of folks at the scifi.com bulletin boards and elsewhere. There's not much info to be had, so rather than creating a tiny article for each of those, maybe we should consider Squadrons of Galactica or Squadrons of the Colonial Fleet that lists out all the squadron names and insignia that we can find, with possible redirects to that article from the individual unit names. Maybe we should bring this up at List of Pilots (RDM) or a similar article, to see if we can find some other hands? --Steelviper 21:25, 20 January 2007 (CST)

That sounds like a good idea-- the "Galactica Squadrons" page. I wouldn't know how to go about making that page. I'm still pretty new at this. I did however note that the Vampires are the 6th squadron as well as an 8th squadron (an 8 on a red spade), and a Viper Weapons School logo on the walls too. I will bring this up in the list of pilots page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by AnteaterFeeder (talk • contribs).

Agreed, one page for all squadrons is better. That can then incoporate the info found at Primus and Vigilantes now --Serenity 05:49, 21 January 2007 (CST)

I tried to post this last night (blasted internet), but something like Squadrons of Battlestar Galactica works. I've been collecting screenshots of the logos when I could trying to identify them, but unfortunately, most are too blurry to read with NTSC DVDs. There is also some good shots of crests during the debate scene in LDYB part I. Finally, there is also a crest for a "Viper Weapons School", presumably the colonial equivelant of the US Naval Fighter Weapons School, aka TOPGUN. This could be mentioned in the Colonial fleet article. --Talos 06:40, 21 January 2007 (CST)

I'll go ahead and create the article, by moving the Primus and Vigilante stuff there. Then someone else can add the others. EDIT: It can be found at Squadrons of Galactica, and maybe we should move further discussion there :) --Serenity 06:49, 21 January 2007 (CST)

Email[edit]

Umm... your's isn't a forward. :-) Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 14:54, 2 February 2007 (CST)

Troyian User Page[edit]

Thanks for the suggestion! I wasn't aware we could create subpages of our user pages. -- Troyian 09:33, 9 February 2007 (CST)

Podcast info[edit]

Info came from the extended podcast. There's no available normal podcast. --LifeStar 08:56, 21 February 2007 (CST)

Hopefully a "normal" one will be released later (at least that's the way it seemed from the post they put up at the Scifi forums). If that occurs it might help to distinguish which podcast that info came from. Nice find, by the way. That one was confusing us over here. --Steelviper 08:59, 21 February 2007 (CST)

Podcast transcripts[edit]

"I finally caved and added this to my list. I always felt that my transcription was too slow, and preferred verifying, but I've been doing some transcription lately. " (User:Steelviper)

This screams UPDATE!, don't you think? ;) --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 14:30, 27 June 2007 (CDT)

Better? ;) --Steelviper 06:26, 28 June 2007 (CDT)

Still a little modest, but more up-to-date. I'll get to transcribing Podcast:Frak Party Q and A further. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 06:28, 28 June 2007 (CDT)

RSS[edit]

FYI, a new RSS extension is up. The syntax for it is presently here. --Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Sanctuary Wiki — New} 23:42, 12 September 2007 (CDT)

Thanks. I was able to guess it from its parameters. Unfortunately it's pretty useless on Lillian's page, as Google's RSS feed seems backward, and it doesn't display images. Oh well. If people really want to see they can go to the album or subscribe to the feed themselves. --Steelviper 23:50, 12 September 2007 (CDT)

That sucks. We'll see if we can get something else going. I believe I recall coming across some extension for Picasa in my travels. I'll have to dig around and see if it's usable. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Sanctuary Wiki — New} 00:01, 13 September 2007 (CDT)

Tour of Missouri[edit]

How many KMs/miles do they do? --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 11:39, 13 September 2007 (CDT)

http://www.tourofmissouri.com/stages --Steelviper 11:45, 13 September 2007 (CDT)

Server stuff[edit]

Hi, Matt. I got the message you left here and I'd be more than happy to lend some suggestions. I'll leave the entire discussion here, you can point any interested parties to your talk page. I have some questions for you guys for starters. If you don't want some of this info public for some reason, then my email address is on my Heroes Wiki user page:

You said you have two servers. Could you explain what pertinent services are running on each (i.e. are both webservers, or is one a db server and one a web server)? What are the memory and processor specs of each one?
How many hits are you seeing during your peak day (this can include images, pages, etc.)?
During your periods of high load, what metrics are you seeing? High load average, high cpu utilization, high IO utilization, or simply sluggish response time? If it's high cpu utilization can you pinpoint a single process or group of processes that are taking all the CPU time? Is this occurring on one server of both?
Do you have any PHP caching extensions installed?
Are you using any web-accelerators (Squid, etc.)?

--HeroesWiki 17:50, 5 December 2007 (CST)

Hi Brian! Our server specs are located here. "Apollo" is our apache server, while "Athena" is our database server. Also, I posted a blog entry on our numbers for 11/24, and I'll get you the following days numbers as soon as Webmin can generate them from the logfiles. As for the server lag, it happens on the "Apollo" server exclusively, and I highly supsect the culprit is apache.

At one time, we did have Squid installed, but it caused problems with the blog and, since we had upgraded to newer servers at the time, we haven't used it since. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Sanctuary Wiki — New} 23:10, 5 December 2007 (CST)

We're not using Squid :O ? We should be. It also seems we don't have memcached, which we really should be running. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 08:34, 6 December 2007 (CST)

It doesn't sound like you need Squid too much at this point. If your read activitiy started causing problems then Squid would be a good idea. It looks like you're running into a similar problem that I did back in May with my old server (which is comparable to the web server you're using). I strongly recommend looking into APC. PHP is an interpreted language and when you have a lot of people hitting the site and editing articles then PHP can consume a lot of resources. APC will allow PHP to cache the MediaWiki PHP opcode. Before APC the server was very sluggish under load. During the season one finale the load average was between 13-26 constantly. By simply dropping APC in the average dropped down to about 1-2 and the site responded so well. Once you see how the site performs with APC then it'll be easier to determine if any changes in hardware are required. For reference Heroes Wiki is using dual quad-core 1.6ghz processors and never even breaks a sweat (though I purposely over-speced it to allow for significant growth). --HeroesWiki 08:34, 7 December 2007 (CST)

Interesting. I wonder how that will work with the dynamic PHP of the forums and the blog. :o Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 13:27, 7 December 2007 (CST)

Let's find out! Maybe try to work it into a Tuesday/maintenance day? It sounds like it may be just the ticket... --Steelviper 14:56, 7 December 2007 (CST)

PHP itself is typically rather static while content it's used to display is very dynamic. Where Squid may cause issues with stale dynamic content, APC is only caching the php opcode itself and not the content that it's returning so it won't affect it. APC is also a generic PHP opcode cache so it's not tied to MediaWiki for instance. It will accelerate any heavily used PHP application. In fact if the application has hooks for APC built in it can further take advantage of it by using shared memory for holding global variables (MediaWiki does include specific hooks for APC to take advantage of this as well, but your biggest improvement will be the opcode caching alone). FYI I use apc.shm_size=512 to allocate 512MB of RAM for the opcode cache. If you try out APC you may need to tweak this value to reach the right balance of performance vs memory utilization for your particular sites. --HeroesWiki 15:01, 7 December 2007 (CST)

Did you get a chance to try out APC yet? If so, has it been helping? --HeroesWiki 13:35, 19 December 2007 (CST)

Not yet. I been busy with work. I will have to find a "day" that I can work on it. Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 13:39, 19 December 2007 (CST)

Still a nogo? I was hoping we'd be able to get this up and tested prior to the march premiere. --Steelviper 13:16, 15 January 2008 (CST)

We looked into it and couldn't see a preformence "increase" with our setup of one instance of the mediawiki files for all the wikis. Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 13:20, 15 January 2008 (CST)

1.12 should also improve performance, as 1.11 auto-purges all pages containing magic words (like {{CURRENTTIME}} or {{PAGENAME}}) every hour. 1.12 only autopurges pages containing magic words whose output actually changes, so pages containing {{PAGENAME}} or {{SUBPAGENAME}} (we have quite a few of both in the Battlestar Wiki namespace) don't get autopurged anymore. I don't know when 1.12 will be released, but I hope it'll happen before April 4 (I'll ask). --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 13:22, 15 January 2008 (CST)

We (/you... I don't REALLY do much of anything) didn't even try it? Would it it pay off if we had a separate instance for the EN site vs the rest of the sites? I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I still wouldn't consider us "there" yet on performance. I'm glad we actually stayed up through the "Razor" premiere, but we still had to lock down pages and performance was rather draggy. Ideally we'd be able to eliminate both of those issues, though it may just be a matter of not enough horsepower (and we really can't justify much more price wise for the servers). --Steelviper 13:48, 15 January 2008 (CST)

A belated happy birthday![edit]

Happy Birthday man! It's nice to see that you've aged at some point by a year. :D -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 10:19, 18 February 2008 (CST)

Happy birthday! Did you know you can also set born_year, born_month and born_day, and {{User Data}} will automatically calculate and update your age? --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 10:41, 18 February 2008 (CST)

Thanks guys! Yeah, I've seen that template doo-hickey, but I prefer that my exact dob remain a quasi-mystery. With my name already out there I don't want to leave the identity thieves with no challenge at all... it might spoil their day. (If you really dig through my contribs you'll find that I vary the day that I update the age, but it's usually somewhere in the mid-February range.) --Steelviper 13:10, 18 February 2008 (CST)

Ah, so the vagueness about your DOB was intentional. I don't really think about that identity theft stuff much: there can hardly be anything to gain from impersonating a 17-year-old high school student who lives in the middle of nowhere and has no serious money xD --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 13:39, 18 February 2008 (CST)

Fan Art[edit]

Mr. Viper,

As I have told you, I have been getting permission from loads of Deviants to use their art on BSP. I've uploaded the images. but they have not been appearing in the Fan Art section. What am I doing wrong?

-Forestbender

You're doing everything right (as far as getting content is concerned). However, once the content is uploaded, it needs to be organized and presented, which is done in the actual wiki pages. For example, I added your first upload as the featured pic, by editing the fan art portal and putting a link to the image there. In the case of having multiple images, now is when we ought to consider setting up galleries for the respective artists. That's something that I can help do when the spare cycles arise, though at the moment my baby wrangling duties are occupying me. If you're interested in helping to set up the galleries, I'd be happy to help show you some examples of the gallery code here at Battlestar Wiki, and I'm sure Joe (or any other admin) would also be willing to help in my absence.

Ideally, I think the vision would be to have the Deviants join BSP as well so that they could help manage their galleries, participate in featured content selection, help find and bring more art and artists in, and generally do the whole community thing. Keeping with general wiki paradigm, I think the "more the merrier" and "power to the people" principles definitely apply at BSP. -Steelviper 22:13, 8 March 2008 (CST)

BSP[edit]

Mr. Viper,

I have a good idea. Really good idea.

You know how on the character pages in BSW, they give all this info on the colony, the job, the birth name, etc. of the character. What if we used that same format for the users of BSP? See my user page to get the idea of what I'm talking about.

If you like it, submit your own. I can't wait to see what colony you're from.

-Forestbender

While we could add "Colony" to the User Data template, I'm not sure how frequently it'd get filled out. I'm not terribly proud of my birth colony (based on my birthdate) of Aquaria, seeing as how badly our team got stomped by the Picon Panthers last season. Though if people did want to fill in that kind of information, using the Character Data template like you did is the perfect way to do it, in my opinion. --Steelviper 15:36, 22 March 2008 (CDT)