Our ISP had scheduled us for another upgrade in the 7pm hour on Friday, which would have been in the middle of either or both of the Yankee-Red Sox game and/or the Dodgers-Padres game.

I managed to talk them out of that idea, and they have offered to do it tonight instead. So sometime tonight, not sure exactly when, we will be down for between one and fifteen minutes.

Update: This is complete.

Our rebootless streak will come to an end early Tuesday morning after 417 days of consecutive running. Our ISP will be implementing an upgrade to the server sometime between 1am and 4am Pacific Time. The server is expected to be down no more than 15 minutes.

I knew I shouldn't have said anything...

Simple question I haven't seen anyone asking:  if the software is capable of detecting unauthorized access to the passport files of Obama, Clinton, and McCain, why doesn't it just block access?

Blocking access should be simpler to program (just throw an error--one line of code) than sending a notification in the background while allowing access to continue.  Right?

I totally shouldn't say anything, because I'm sure I'm jinxing something, but the machine that Baseball Toaster runs on has been running without a single reboot for 366 days now.

Of course, that's just the operating system...I restart the web server software regularly as part of normal maintenance. But what a trooper our little piece of hardware has been!

The server maintenance described below has been completed.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

I need to take down the web server that serves our images for about 15 minutes or so. I will do this at 11pm Pacific. If your browser has our images cached, you might not notice anything; others may find during this period that the pages load slowly or have bad layouts.

In addition, I added a little bug fix:  if you click on a numbered link to a previous comment, and the comment is in a hidden section of the thread, it will now un-hide the section, and move you to the comment.  Thanks to Daniel Zappala for the tip.

There is no "Code of Conduct". In civilized conversations between mature people, codes of conduct are not necessary.

I will not manage people's behavior. I'm a busy man, I have better things to do. If someone fails to behave in a civilized, mature manner, I just delete their accounts. No warnings, no notification. I don't have time for that.

If and when such a deletion happens in error, human beings with a mature and responsible character will figure out the best course of action to correct the problem.

For the truly clueless, I offer this one clue:  if you offend someone--even if you are right, and the offended party is wrong--apologize.  Sincerely, and without sarcasm. 

--Ken Arneson, BaseballToaster.com

I am extremely pleased to announce that Josh Wilker is bringing his wonderful Cardboard Gods blog to Baseball Toaster. It's one of my favorite blogs of any kind.

So don't waste your time here.   Go there.

The first Baseball Toaster blog entry was posted two years ago today.

The bad news: we shall now commence throwing daily temper tantrums because it's just not fair! Also, we will NOT eat those yucky vegetables. No!

The good news: when we're not throwing tantrums, we're awfully cute. And we'll probably be potty trained by this time next year, so that's surely something to look forward to.

So hold on, this might be a rough year. We have some significant growing pains to get through. In a year's time, we might be pushing over 1 million combined blog entries and comments in our system (we just hit 600,000 last night.) So stick with us, it's just a phase. We'll get over it, and then we will surely become a pure delight to have around.

Sorry about the slowness this morning. Our images server (which also serves up our CSS files) was being overwhelmed because ESPN.com linked to a gyroball video that Will Carroll had uploaded on The Juice. Our little web server couldn't handle serving a large file like that to that many people. I'd probably need a whole server farm to serve up video for ESPN.com.

I changed the name of the file, and broke the link. Sorry ESPNers. I uploaded the video to YouTube, and redirected people there.

The software that runs the Toaster is written in a scripting language called Perl. It's my favorite programming language, but I must admit, it does have its downsides. It works great, but the actual coding of it is difficult, as demonstrated here:

Continue reading "Why Fairpole Changes So Slowly"...

Baseballtoaster.com and Toaster.TV will be down for about 10 minutes or so sometime between 12:01AM and 1:00AM on Friday, February 16. Our ISP is upgrading the operating system.

Since our ISP is on the East Coast, I assume they meant 12:01AM ET. Which would mean the downtime window would start at 9:01PM on Thursday, February 15, for those of us in the Pacific Time Zone.

Update: Downtime is over.
Time to take cover.
While others just talk and talk,
Somebody's watching where the others don't walk.
Downtime is over!

Frequently asked questions about the Toaster:

What are the comment guidelines on the Toaster?

The general guidelines are here.

Mostly, it means don't insult each other. And if you do, apologize.

Some blogs don't allow cursing and such, others do. If you violate an individual blogs' guidelines, you'll probably be warned. Apologize, and then don't do it again.

How do you make something bold/underline/linked in the comments?

To make something bold, surround it with *asterisks*.

To make something underlined, surround it with _underlines_.

To link to comment 31, surround the link number with brackets, like this: [31].

That's all you can do, for now. You can't link to another site, you can only post the URL. If you want to post a long URL, please use tinyurl.

Can I get the full blog entry in the RSS feed?

At this time, no.

Will you post my article on your site?

You'll have to convince an individual author that it fits on their blog.

Can I put an ad on your site?

Most of us are not in this for the money, and most of us are pretty lazy. If you want an ad on the site as a whole, make an offer to support2007 @baseballtoaster.com. If you want an ad on an individual blog, contact that blog's author.

But make a concrete offer. Don't make us make an offer, don't ask us to contact you if we're interested, because if you leave it up to us, we won't follow up.

Can I get a blog on the Toaster?

We rarely add new blogs. We're not really looking to build a huge blog empire. We're more interested in creating a site where a group of friends get together to write and read each others' stuff.

So, in order to get into our little group, the following helps:

• Be a nice person.
  It's a group of friends. A bad seed can ruin the chemistry of the group, so we're careful about this.

• Be original.
  This means two things: One, don't cover the same topic we're already covering at the Toaster, or if you do, have a unique style or point of view on that topic. Two, don't write the same stuff everybody else is writing.

• Write compellingly.
  Most important of all. We don't want to add a blog for Team X just because we don't have a blog for Team X. We want to add a blog that we would all read anyway, even if we weren't a fan of Team X, just because the writing is that good.
  
  This also means you should have a history of compelling writing. Either on a blog, or in print somewhere. We can't just take your word for it. There has to be a body of work we can judge.

When are we going to get feature X added to the Fairpole software, Ken?

The software has taken a very circuitous route. The software, as originally designed, didn't scale well. I learned from those mistakes, stopped working on the original design, tore it apart, and started rebuilding it in a different way from scratch.

Along the way, I joined a startup company, and we're using the basic original approach of Fairpole to build something quite different. The new product based on Fairpole will be released this winter. Once that new product is stable, we'll probably transfer the Toaster over to the new platform. Not sure when that will be, maybe in the spring.

What do I do if none of these questions are my question?

Send an email to support2007 @baseballtoaster.com.

Some of our writers have been itching to expand their brain dumps beyond baseball into popular entertainment. Hence, we present, Toaster.TV.

I'm paying $32/year for that domain name, might as well use it, eh? Put it out there and see what happens.

Your Baseball Toaster account should work on Toaster.TV, too, but you'll have to log in separately. I could do a fancy-pants redirect-and-set-multiple-cookies trick to avoid the multiple logins, but I have other priorities right now.

It's possible there are some bugs. I didn't test it all that vigorously. If you see any, let me know in the comments below, or email support @ baseballtoaster.com.

Our ISP is upgrading the operating system on our server Thursday morning.

Hopefully, the site will be down for only a few minutes (the ISP says "less than ten"), as the new OS is installed and the machine is rebooted. Our machine is scheduled to be rebooted sometime between 4:15 and 5:30 AM Pacific Time.

I plan to be sleeping during those hours, so if, for some reason, the system fails to come up automatically after the reboot, the downtime might last a little longer, until I decide to drag my weary tail out of bed.

The old body doesn't take to waking up at strange hours anymore. I need my beauty sleep. You'll live.

Thanks for your understanding.

I've completed my site maintenance for this morning. I'll be doing some more tonight after dark.

Thanks for your patience.

Ken