It's a real drag losing the IRTC into the void again, but thanks for that
explanation, David. I, for one, completely understand where you're coming from.

Hats off to you for all the hard work you put into it!

-------------------------------------------------
www.McGregorFineArt.com

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On 05/03/2011 6:30 PM, Robert McGregor wrote:
> It's a real drag losing the IRTC into the void again, but thanks for that
> explanation, David. I, for one, completely understand where you're coming from.
>
> Hats off to you for all the hard work you put into it!
>
Hear, hear.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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> I understand your frustration.  Here's my perspective:

Thank you so much for these insights.

My message was intentionally rude, and I sincerely apologise
if I hurted you. I understand well that finding time to do such
work is hard, that's also why I've been quiet these years.

Edouard, in a reply to me, said that maybe he could do something
for the existing software. Let's try.

As a backup hypothesis, I volunteer to build a new site, with
the help of other volunteers. Here's the plan :
- right now (or ASAP), display a page announcing that something
is being done, and launch a new round, ending May 31 (that's
almost 3 months, might help get more competitors),
topic is "How will I explain this to Dad ?".
- before the end of March, set up the ability to browse old rounds
- before the end of April, set up the ability to submit an entry
   (so sumbissions can start 1 month before deadline)
- before the end of May, set up a voting system, test-driven by voting
   for the last round that hasn't been voted
- once all is okay, vote for the new round

All this using plain MySQL-PHP structure (no framework). This requires
working knowledge of MySQL, PHP, HTML, CSS. But someone just familiar
with HTML and CSS could provide great help.

If 3 people are joining, that's perfectly doable, IMO.

Anyone wanting to jump in ?

Fabien.

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David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:

First off, thank-you for the effort you put in - you recreated the site when
there was nothing, and it sparked a new round of artwork from the community.

> I volunteered my time for a period of about a year to re-develop the
> IRTC site since nobody else was stepping up to the plate.  If I was
> going to rewrite the site software, it would at least be in a language
> which I like and understand well.  That's why I chose Smalltalk.  If
> anyone else volunteers to take over the project and rewrite the code,
> you can use any language you wish.
>
> The project became more complicated when Chris Cason expressed the
> desire to make the pages bookmarkable and google-indexable. The site was
> developed in Seaside which normally puts session keys into the URLS.
> Making the pages bookmarkable changed this policy and made the coding
> harder.  It also meant that users browsing the site without logging in
> used a new session for every page hit.

Seaside code is a thing of beauty, but, honestly, I've never bought into the URL
scheme (or the "breaks the back button" justification). I was looking at
AIDA/Web recently, and I like it's model and URL scheme much better, but you
lose the html abstraction and mature jquery etc libraries that Seaside
provides...

> After finally making the site live and struggling to correct problems
> amidst much complaining from the community, we got the software stable
> except for one nagging problem. The web sessions are always set to
> time-out.  In order to give people enough time to submit images without
> timing out, we had to increase the timeout to 30 minutes.  But, to allow
> the site to be navigable without logging in and to be bookmarkable,
> every page view created a new session.  The combination of these two
> factors meant that lots of hits by users who weren't logged in would
> create lots of sessions and eat up lots of memory.  The application was
> chewing up too much memory and was causing problems with the server.

So that's the place to concentrate on - I can take a look at that at least.

> I'm now super busy with several contracts at once and have no time to
> volunteer any more to the IRTC.

I completely understand. I've got some spare time right now, but it won't
necessarily last!

> Now, if anyone out there wants to take it over, be my guest.  I can make
> all of the Smalltalk code available to you if you wish.

Can you mail me a fileout or Monticello snapshot? I'm using Pharo here.

> I tried, folks, but the rewards were too small, the effort was too high,
> and the complaints from people not satisfied with the efforts we put in
> were too annoying.

That's OK - I have a high tolerance for complaints, and if I am going to put the
time in, I'll post with progress, and be as upfront as I can about when I have
no time on it.

> David Buck

Cheers,
Edouard.

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On Sat, 05 Mar 2011 18:42:37 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> On 05/03/2011 6:30 PM, Robert McGregor wrote:
>> It's a real drag losing the IRTC into the void again, but thanks for
>> that explanation, David. I, for one, completely understand where you're
>> coming from.
>>
>> Hats off to you for all the hard work you put into it!
>>
> Hear, hear.

Yes, indeed!

Jim

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On Sat, 05 Mar 2011 19:47:17 +0100, Fabien wrote:

> My message was intentionally rude

And that is why you are in fact a jackass.  The only way you know to 
raise an issue is to piss people off.

There is absolutely nothing that pisses me off more than people who think 
a community OWES them something, and when the community doesn't provide 
for those who feel so entitled, they are rude (intentionally or not) in 
order to get attention.

That is the purest definition of trolling.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Mar 2011 19:47:17 +0100, Fabien wrote:
> 
>> My message was intentionally rude
> 
> And that is why you are in fact a jackass.  The only way you know to 
> raise an issue is to piss people off.
> 
> There is absolutely nothing that pisses me off more than people who thi
nk 
> a community OWES them something, and when the community doesn't provide
 
> for those who feel so entitled, they are rude (intentionally or not) in
 
> order to get attention.
> 
> That is the purest definition of trolling.
> 
> Jim
*plonk*

-- 
mailto:jeb### [at] freefr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr

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On Sun, 06 Mar 2011 08:04:20 +0100, Jérôme M. Berger wrote:

>> Jim
> *plonk*

That's supposed to make me feel badly about calling out someone who's 
acting poorly?  Sorry, no dice.

It's one thing to say "hey, this is broken" in a polite way (as Christian 
did), and I can respect that approach.  But for Fabien to come in here 
and act the way he did and not to expect anyone to slap him for behaving 
poorly, sorry, that's not how it works.

(And yes, I do realise that you're calling *me* a troll by 'plonking' me 
- and I honestly have never understood why some people feel it's 
necessary to say that.  I've tried it, and felt stupid when I did it.)

Jim

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"Edouard" <pov### [at] edouardinfo> wrote:

> David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
>
> > I volunteered my time for a period of about a year to re-develop the
> > IRTC site since nobody else was stepping up to the plate.  If I was
> > going to rewrite the site software, it would at least be in a language
> > which I like and understand well.  That's why I chose Smalltalk.  If
> > anyone else volunteers to take over the project and rewrite the code,
> > you can use any language you wish.

David has emailed me, and is going to set me up with the development environment
for website. Once I've got it I'll take a look at how it works, and specifically
investigate the session code to see if we can remove the problem that was
causing the issues.

A public bug tracker might also be a good idea.

Cheers,
Edouard.

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>
> David has emailed me, and is going to set me up with the development environment
> for website. Once I've got it I'll take a look at how it works, and specifically
> investigate the session code to see if we can remove the problem that was
> causing the issues.

Great.

FWIW, I have a thought about these "sessions" problems.
Most parts of the IRTC site (round galleries, results,
homepage) doesn't need sessions, they can be "REST-ful",
and thus being bookmarkable and google-indexable without
further complication.

Submitting and voting, which should count for a small
part of pageviews (and thus memory usage), are the ones
which needs sessions. (and don't need to be bookmarked or
indexed)

 From what has already been said, session management through
URL appears to be a fundamental feature of Seaside.

What about keeping the existing Seaside code for submitting
and voting, and rewrite results, viewing and homepage using
another RESTful framework ?

BTW, I've just seen this on Wikipedia :
<<Compared to other web development frameworks, unspecified old version 
of Seaside is memory intensive. A single session could accumulate 
several hundred kilobytes of RAM. A later release of Seaside (2.8) 
significantly reduces this footprint (e.g. a formerly typical 200 KB 
footprint becomes 50 KB).>>

Fabien.

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