@causeisaidso
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CauseISaidSo
ParticipantCongrats again to Ranger Joe/cameraflage on the individual win and to Queen Mab on the combined win.
Was the early close this week an attempt to average out the late closes the previous weeks? Weird. I didn’t even get a chance to vote since I usually do that Saturday.
As for contests with the least votes, orionid‘s right – this is the lowest vote total since the rules were standardized at contest #7. There are actually 5 other “official” contests with lower vote totals than Pinhole, and unfortunately, they’re all somewhat recent. As a matter of fact, except for Pinhole, all of the top ten lowest vote count contests have been since 2012:
Contest # ContestDate Theme Votes
414 2013-04-10 Enter (or Exit) Here 170
392 2012-11-07 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 281
413 2013-04-03 Ghost Towns 299
357 2012-03-07 Instant Inspiration 302
407 2013-02-20 Office Space 331
187 2008-12-03 Pinhole Camera 333
400 2013-01-02 Lights, Camera, Caption 335
399 2012-12-26 Red Light, Green Light 351
412 2013-03-27 The Onion on Your Belt 364
368 2012-05-23 Sleeve-faced 385ParticipantTotal archive dive with not a whole lot to pick from this time around.
^ Ditto. Hopefully I didn’t take too liberal of an interpretation. I didn’t have much to go on but didn’t want to skip another week, either.
ParticipantOK, but under one condition: you’ve gotta name something equivalent I can do or get for you. A souvenir from Oklahoma (not sure what that’d be, but keep in mind I can’t ship you an Indian casino :))? Help with a website or app? Think about it and let me know.
I’ll take any Coke product, in preference order of Classic, Zero, or Diet, with a Canon mount.
My birthday is this Friday, but as Yugoboy stated, please don’t feel the need to rush. And thanks for the kind gesture!
ParticipantAh, so you’re saying it’s “Signs and (other objects that show us where to go)” whereas before you read it as “(Signs and other objects) that show us where to go.” Given the theme name, I’d assumed it was the latter also. So, is that correct and signs in general (not specifically directional) are OK?
ParticipantI totally misread this theme before seeing that photo and thought it was supposed to be signs that tell you where to go, this opens up a lot more possibilities.
OK, I think I’m missing something here. The theme description says it’s “Signs and other objects that show us where to go”, so what revelation am I missing that expands on this? Is it the “other objects” (i.e., it doesn’t necessarily have to be a sign)?
ParticipantNow that the contest’s finally closed (what’s up with closing Monday morning the past several weeks?), congrats to Ranger Joe/cameraflage for his sweep of both individual and combined!
… with me and my camera and my wife (she’s gotten to calling my camera my “girlfriend” and I’m ok with that.)
LOL! I did notice the listing order, though; if one was prone to Freudian analysis, one might draw some conclusions from that… 😉
I don’t think the 3rd place one is all that great so I was really pretty shocked. I wonder what it says about Colorado that the top three Ghost Town entries are from here.
One of the few certainties of farktography – never try to understand the voting public. And I think the appeal of the Colorado entries is that the background matches what one pictures when imagining a stereotypical ghost town (i.e., something from the Old West).
ParticipantDepends heavily on my current mood, time of day, and the weather. Don’t really do much beer unless it’s summer at the lake; when I do, I like a good IPA. My go-to is Maker’s and Coke Zero but I’ve been on a Manhattan kick for a while now, so that would be Knob Creek or Bullett rye, vermouth, bitters, and a teaspoon of maraschino cherry juice. But that’s not exactly “refreshing;” it’s more of a sip & contemplate drink. Finally, if the mood’s right and I want something a little heavier, you can’t beat a Zing Zang bloody mary with blue-cheese-stuffed olives.
Now, who’s getting the first round? 🙂
ParticipantI would totally be open to that ^^
As would I. My absence this week had nothing to do with the forums being offline or lack of interest in the theme. I’ve been tearing my hair out the past week dealing with one of life’s certainties (and I ain’t dead yet, so I think you know which one that leaves).
ParticipantIf you want a hand with the coding (it is C# with some sort of SQL backend right?) I’ll be happy to lend a hand. Who do you host with? I had to get a little creative with my ‘automated’ jobs at VeloBase.com since I host with GoDaddy and don’t have any way of scheduling jobs outside of my web application on their servers. Message me and I can give you details on a few of my solutions if you want.
Thanks for the offer, Barracuda. It is C# running against a couple of SQL Server DBs, and the site is hosted on GoDaddy.
Let me give you an idea of the current process and future plan and then you can see if any of the issues you’ve already solved might apply here.
First, there are two components that run on my desktop. Right now, they’re both just WPF applications; the future plan is to make them Windows services so that they’re always running and auto-start on reboot. But since they’re just apps now, I start them manually sometime on Wed.
The first component is the Statistics Librarian, or scraper. Its UI looks like this. I manually enter the Active Contest information and then click either Create or Watch. “Create” is used when I know the link ID (i.e., if I’m starting the scraper after the link’s been posted here). “Watch” is used otherwise and polls Fark’s topic/farktography page looking for a new contest; when it finds one, it uses the link ID from that. Note that I don’t parse the contest number, theme or description; that’s manually entered.
Once a link ID is known and the contest opens (midnight EST), the scraper wakes up every 15 minutes and scrapes both the contest and voting result pages. It downloads any new entries found, creates & saves thumbnails locally, and saves all of this info to the local FarkStats database. Every 15 minutes is a new snapshot and a new set of records.
The second component is called DataPush and it’s responsible for summarizing the detailed info in FarkStats, calculating entrant statistics, and combining it all in such a way as to be efficiently displayed on the website. It reads from FarkStats, writes the condensed data to a local BiblioStats database which has a schema created just to support the website, and uploads the changed records and thumbnails to the website through a web service. The website also has a BiblioStats database with an identical schema, so this is my version of SQL replication. DataPush uses Entity Framework so it can detect only those records that have changed.
I created two components for this because I didn’t want problems pushing the data to the web to interfere with the process of scraping and capturing the data. DataPush waits on a system event which is triggered by the scraper after each successful scrape cycle just before sleeping.
The website itself uses read-only access to the web BiblioStats database and caches almost all displayed data using backing SQL dependencies to invalidate the cache when the web service receives new data.
The future plan is to 1) enhance the FarkStats schema so that I can enter multiple future contests in advance; and 2) move the non-visual logic in DataPush and the Librarian to Windows services which run non-stop in the background and are timed to wakeup and grab the next contest every Wed night. That will take care of any forgetfulness on my part, as long as there are sufficient future contests lined up. (I know I could have the scraper read the contest info from the page, but for now, I prefer formatting it myself. If I ever get time to enhance it to support PS contests, I’ll have to move to that method for sure.)
ParticipantBut weird on the login thing. Zeke’s been out of town, but is back, though catching up on some scout stuff tonight. I’ll mention it to him. Nothing under the hood has changed recently, though….when did this start? Any info is good, so header traces, whatever, thanks 🙂
I’m not sure when it actually started. For me, I noticed it right after I recently cleared my cookie cache. That leads me to think that maybe something to do with cookie expirations changed at some point; everyone who got a cookie when it was working (like I had for quite a while) was auto-logged on, but once you clear that cookie, the new cookie either isn’t being set or isn’t set to exist across sessions.
Anyway, I captured an extensive set of traces for Zeke that show this and a couple of other login issues that occur when different login access points are used. Since it contains credential cookies, I’m going to PM you the link (it’s a PDF file).
ParticipantWorks fine:
Chrome X.X (?)
Windows 7I’ll bet you’d find that it stops working if you clear the cookie cache. I’m running a similar setup and all was well for many moons until I did that recently.
ParticipantThanks for the heads up, bender16v. Used your discount code and grabbed a copy. Now if you can refer me to a link where I can buy some time to play with it, that’d be awesome. 😉
ParticipantHard to believe it’s been two years, caradoc. Savor them, they start going by much quicker. I pulled something up just the other day from 2004 (which seems to me like just a couple of years ago); it had all 3 of my kids in it and they really looked like kids. Now, my oldest just graduated college and started his first real job this year, my middle one’s off in Chicago going to school, and my youngest is almost a year into driving.
ParticipantMine is just one of the standard wallpapers so I won’t bother posting it. I used to make my own wallpapers using my photos, but in practice, I hardly ever see my desktop as I’ve always got a maximized window of some sort on both monitors. On my laptop (which only sees use when I travel), I’ve got my lunar eclipse entry from Hootenanny 2 as the desktop background.
ParticipantThanks for the links, ennui. My uncle was an artilleryman in Nam in and around the DMZ and saw some pretty nasty stuff. What little he talks about it is just unimaginable. He’s got pretty severe hearing loss from it and still suffers from the effects of Agent Orange.
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