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Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2018-10-09 15:07:44.000

Why, right here, of course.

The dates show that I haven’t posted on my blog since October 2016, and here we are in October 2018. Well, what has happened since then?

In the rest of the world, rather a lot. Much of it pretty terrible.

But in my own personal world, there haven’t been too many changes. I’ve started and abandoned tons of new projects, but I haven’t told the world about them.

Right now I’m working on a redesign of both newlisponrockets.com and jeremyreimer.com, and a brand new site that I plan to launch to promote my next novel (my fifth, if anyone is counting!)

I’ll keep you up to date on my progress for these new sites. And I promise, the next update won’t be two years later. :)

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-03-24 19:49:51.000

An update for me.

Twenty years have passed. I no longer care for the platform wars which mostly died after Apple wisely dumped the PowerPC. That was itself about fifteen years ago, though I can still hear the echos of the pin drop heard in the Battlefront the day of the Announcement.

I think it was good for Apple in more ways than one. The great bulk of Apple RDF was tied into selling people a tale of stuff they knew nothing about, which is processor architecture. I think it dispelled some of the air of arrogance and made the platform more approachable. How many times have we heard it said that it wasn't the computer, it was the fanbois that made the Macintosh insufferable?

Operating system reliability/responsiveness/usefulness is something people can see for themselves, but to go on about the elegance of an ISA as if it were anything but a means to an end was perverse to say the least.

That said, I don't like the direction Windows has gone. It fails a s a file browser, I think. I miss the "My Computer" icon and the very exposed way the Control Panel used to operate.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-03-25 02:46:28.000

I no longer really do technical support. more into operations and escalations, etc. Tech support gives me PTSD, man.,

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-04-27 21:50:10.000

Hey AYB!!! Great to hear from you . I feel like you're the last person (other than me) to post on OSY. :(

I too think that the age of platform wars is basically over, and that the purpose of OSY isn't really necessary any more, but I am still going to keep it around just for nostalgia's sake. I might drop the old OSY 2.0 and 1.0 stuff though. I'll keep a personal copy, but I feel it's just too old and outdated for anyone else to care about.

I really hope that some day if my novel writing (or other non-fiction writing) takes off then maybe this forum might pick up again, but I'm not sure. Forums in general are sort of passe. Everyone uses either Reddit or Twitter or Facebook. It's kind of sad because people owned their forums, but now these massive companies own everyone's posts and relationships. :(

Sorry to be such a bummer!

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-04-28 00:26:47.000

Yeah, there’s more to life than maintaining old BB material.

Actually, I think you would be hard pressed to find something less worthwhile than maintaining a forum that itself existed as a meta-space that just went into happy-crazy land. I’ve never done hard drugs, but its hard to expect anyone to possibly believe that going over OSY 1.0.

I haven’t seen the Battlefront more than a handful of times this past decade. Nothing really interesting there. Phone wars? No thanks! I’m happy with an iPhone 4. I need mail, facebook, ebay, Youtube, streaming and banking apps. I don't really care if I'm doing it on a four year old screen.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-04-28 03:09:54.000

Actually, I'm going over old posts at OSY 1.0 and having a blast doing it.

I was pretty good at posting stupid things.

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-04-29 12:55:06.000

I'm really on the fence about OSY 1.0 and 2.0.

The 1.0 posts I can transfer over really easily because I already built the module to read and parse the old Ikonboard flat files. But to get OSY 2.0 running on my new server means setting up PHPBB and copying over the MySQL database and I just wonder what the point of it is.

But then again, I did spend a lot of time keeping up that old forum and there were a lot of posts in it. I suppose the Internet Archive has saved most of it, but is it worth saving for any other reason?

It feels like digital hoarding, but is that even a real thing, given that these things can be saved while taking up no physical space? And what about the few moments in OSY 2.0 that I really treasured, like the thread about my wedding?

I have to think about it some more.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-04-29 17:34:22.000

I've been going through some of OSY and OSY2.0

There is nothing so delightfully dumb on the Interwebs. Keep the Smam!

#SmamPreservationACTof2019

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-04-30 11:42:36.000

All right! I will keep it then. Actually I can just FTP the files over and then all I have to do is migrate the database, which shouldn't be too much of a problem (hopefully!)

I've also been having fun going through and reading some of the old smam. We were all so much younger then!

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-05-01 15:59:55.000

Thank you!

:unf:

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-06-07 15:16:27.000

Well, I managed to migrate the entire OSY 2.0 forum, but it wasn’t easy!

Backing up the database (a single MySQL command) and copying over the files via FTP was straightforward enough. But there were tons of error messages and many posts were completely blank! Oh no!

Turns out that the version of PHPBB I was running (3.0.5) was incompatible with the latest PHP7. I tried downgrading to PHP5, but that just made things worse??? I had to nuke PHP5 from orbit, just to be sure. The real fix would be upgrading PHPBB to the latest version, 3.2.7. I figured, hey, how hard could that be? And it’s always a good idea to be on the latest version, in case some new security hole is discovered in an old PHPBB and the script kiddies start nuking old sites.

But YOU CAN’T UPGRADE straight from PHPBB 3.0.5 to 3.2.7. It blows everything up. There are database upgrade scripts that simply don’t work if you have an older version.

I ended up having to do the following, based on the testimony of another user who went through this hell:

- upgrade PHPBB 3.0.5 to 3.0.14
- upgrade 3.0.14 to 3.1.12
- upgrade 3.1.12 to 3.2.7

This involved three separate upgrades, each of which involved deleting and replacing most of the files via FTP and running a database upgrade script, then deleting the /install/ directory.

Anyway, in the end it worked, although the board looks somewhat different now. A weird bonus is that it formats and flows properly on mobile devices, something the Ars forums can never do because they forked an old PHPBB 3.0.x version years ago and can never merge it back because oh my god I would not want to do that work on a forum the size of Ars, like, ever. You could not pay me enough.

Anyway, I plan to migrate jeremyreimer.com to my new server early next week, either Monday or Tuesday evening. Hopefully there will be no downtime as I’ll keep the old server up during the time it will take to update everyone’s DNS caches. You may have to log in again.

But the smam will survive forever! Muahahahaha!

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-06-07 15:17:18.000

Update: Server is migrated! Still working on some teething issues with MySQL memory usage. Everything is faster though!

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2019-06-08 02:02:47.000

Yay, it looks way different.

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-06-08 02:26:37.000

Yes, I migrated the whole board database from my old Monarch web framework to my newLISP on Rockets one. I wrote Monarch first, as an experiment, and then Rockets was the system that I rewrote to do it "properly". It didn't make sense to keep two different frameworks around, so I've merged them by adding Monarch features to Rockets.

There are still a few tweaks I have to make to the UI to fix little issues. I'll be doing that next week.

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2019-06-13 18:22:36.000

Okay, I've tweaked the UI slightly, and I've added sticky threads to newLISP on Rockets. I put links to OSY 1.0 and 2.0 in the first sticky thread.

History is preserved!

Posts: 6

Posted on: 2019-10-07 20:42:26.000

<message deleted by administrator>

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2020-04-10 21:42:44.000

Is that you Hitscan???

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2020-04-13 17:33:40.000

No, sadly it was a spammer (a human one, since robots still have trouble with my simple captcha) who just picked that avatar at random.

I miss Hitscan!

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2020-04-13 17:44:48.000

Oh wait, the same person posted a sensible post in another thread? I'm confused now.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2020-04-15 18:43:25.000

I miss everybody. I's basically just you, and once in awhile the Mighty AYB...

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2020-04-15 20:53:32.000

I know. I miss everybody too. But forums have died everywhere, not just here. Everyone's on the Twitface all the time now.

I mean, I just posted what might be my last post in the Battlefront.

I really miss forums and the fun interaction we had here on OSY. I miss the days of Mordock, the adventures we would go on, I miss Evil Merlin who donated the server that OSY ran on, I miss Dvixen, I miss PaoloM (who went on to work for Wizards of the Coast, so good for him!) I miss Paul Hill, I miss Imitation Gruel, I miss Hitscan, I miss Duffman, I miss Rave, I miss Oscarwilde, I miss all of these lovely people. I miss Robocop Q. Einstein, the first person to ever post at OSY.

We had a good ten year run that then slowly dwindled over another decade. The Internet was different back then. I'd say it was more fun.

Not really sure what the future holds. Everything is so uncertain now.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2020-04-16 20:04:32.000

Great post. Very good.

"I had to clear out my past to make room for my future."

That quote got me thinking. I wanna tell you what I've been going through these past fifteen years.

I too have a lot of old computer stuff, though it's not so much stuff I used and set aside, its stuff I collected after the fact. I've also been collecting GI Joe, spending thousands of dollars on things that hang around my office or hang out of boxes and totes, or take up half the entire middle floor of my basement (USS Flagg). I have taken up instrument repair and have slowly accumulated tools, skills and projects that never seem to get finished.

You see, I didn't have much growing up. We lived next to people who did, so we were able to see how the "other half" (the middle class) lived.

Now I want to get all that stuff that amazed me back then. It has left me with too much stuff I never use, and little precious space..




I think you are doing the right thing.

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2020-04-17 17:55:22.000

Yeah, I went through a phase like that myself. All my friends in high school were from rich families (I went to high school in a rich neighborhood, but I was out-of-district myself) and they always had tons of Transformers toys.

So when I was able to, and once eBay existed, I bought all sorts of stuff that I could never afford back in the day, like the Skull Fighter from Robotech: The Macross Saga, and the complete set of Aerialbots, and Optimus Prime. Of all those toys, I only saved Optimus (because really, he was and is and always will be the best).

The neat thing about doing the Marie Kondo thing is that you whittle down your toys (and everything else) to just the things that really mean something to you, and then you put them on display, so you can see them and appreciate them every day. I had so much stuff that most of it was stuck in a box in the bottom of a closet. There's no point in hanging on to that stuff.

I'm having a slightly harder time letting go of, say, the Battlefront, even after posting my farewell message, and even as its traffic slowly approaches zero, plus or minus Echohead2 doing boring rants praising Microsoft and slamming everyone else. *sigh*

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2020-04-18 13:50:20.000

If you remember, I was into the hardware angle of things. To me, the BF suffered a mortal blow when at 2005 WWWD, Steve Jobs left a decade of PowerPC propaganda in a smoldering ruin.

At that moment, I felt a great disturbance in the RDF, as if millions of people who were overpaying for their computers suddenly cried out in terror as their superiority complex was suddenly silenced.

The rug was pulled out of the platform debate's greatest controversy. Old arguments that could spawn a seventy page thread became instantly indefensible from any angle besides trolling.

At that point the Macintosh became a little better integrated platform that was desperately trying to add right-click functionality without a right mouse button.

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9352

Posted on: 2020-04-20 18:12:01.000

I remember that moment. It was basically the end of non-PC computer hardware.

These days, the Mac folks love to speculate about what an ARM-based Macbook might look like, but even if it happens it won't be some amazing speed jump like going from 680x0 -> PowerPC or going PowerPC -> Intel. It might have slightly better battery life, but that's about it. With Moore's Law slowing down and x86 still at the forefront at the high end, there's nowhere else to go.

All the exciting leaps are happening at the GPU level these days.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2020-04-21 03:37:28.000

I agree.

In a year or so "i" is going to be the Intel iconoclast branding in computing longer than the word "Pentium" was ever relevant. Yes, I know they still throw around the term now and then, but really Intel was rushing to a rebrand as soon Core hit full steam, only calling back to 'Pentium' when they were trying to sell weak chips and the Celeron name had long since soured on the market. Pentium's last hurrah as their flagship in CPUs expired with the end of Netburst.

Arm is not going to displace Intel.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Posts: 10469

Posted on: 2020-04-21 13:38:25.000

I'm actually surprised that ARM was able to find a niche so late into the consumer CPU wars.