@kaiser world's largest sandbox?

@GhostToast watching YouTube since one hour. World's largest amount of WTFs...

@kaiser migrating from slow hostgator reseller (no root access) account to liquid web VPS. half of it is painfully slow. other half is miraculously fast.

hosting email for clients is worst thing one can do with their life

hehe... yeah, avoid that. and make 110% sure you do. just "no part of the service range".

so, marching band or dancing, without music or rhythm. wow. that's what happens when you suck all the soul out of something

heh

in high school we had to read all the depressing books like that

everything was such a wasteland or tragedy

about having to kill one's own dog, etc

yeah, we had that one too. where's happy? where's sex? where's ... oh, wait. school.

and finally all this was called classic literature. so glad that I found out that there're comics and sci-fi books :)

you think english literature is depressing? it has nothing on classic russian literature. that stuff is hundred percent outright NEUROTIC.

lolz

why did the dude killed grandma with an axe? discuss for infinity.

i wonder what country produces the most psychopaths / serial killers / murders per capita, and if it is a result of the awful books taught in school

nah, blame video games

I started reading the atomic vulcano congodola (or something like that) from russian(?) authors. sci fi book from the 50ties about venus, but still ... a bit strange.

@GhostToast Honduras... I doubt they even have school books. Or schools.

Convicted serial killers by country < USA needed separate page, so...

well, those are the ones who were found. I'd bet a bag full of money that the worst serial killers live either in Somalia, Kongo, Honduras or Mexico.

they just aren't sentenced.

Completely switching topics:

I've been at the OpenGovernmentData-Vienna developer feedback table today. Lasted two hours. There have been 7 officers from different departments of the city, everyone responsible for some datasets + one coordinator. And we've been 4 1/2 developers. All of us just wanted to note minor stuff about the whole system, but rant about the traffic data. And exactly those people hadn't been there.

And all the "I have a job for life with a more than just nice salary"-department leaders there were discussing crap for more than two hours. Still it somehow was funny.

Most hilarious thing was that one guy (the coordinator) was telling us that the service servers have an uptime of 99.85%. Then another dev pulled out his web-app: Monitoring the official nodes since more than a year and being able to proof that they don't even nearly reach that.

@Rarst that's not per capita. Just saying.

Most of our prison system is at 200% capacity though... You guys have privatized prisons? The idea is just whack...

lol, article about ukrainian prisons is starred as high quality at russian wikipedia

nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

that can't be right or complete

rescuing email off this hostgator server feels like restoring a PC after a malware invasion

@GhostToast Certainly missing a handful, lol

anyone here ever apply for a job at automattic before?

@GhostToast No but if you want me to phone Matt and put in a good word for you just say so...

@userabuser you're kidding, right?

anyone know a good php HTML to pdf converter which can parse css. Looking at couple of free libraries now..

DOMPDF

@Sisir DOMPDF is probably the most advanced PHP library in this field and I've tried several. There is a little learning curve and you may find yourself dealing with troubleshooting invalid html but its a good lib for creating PDFs from existing page markup or feeding markup structure to with business logic/variable data.

@userabuser DOMPDF looks good. I will be creating PDF invoices from in house html/css representation so no invalid html, thanks :)

@GhostToast I don't know Matt, but if I am able to get through to him on the phone, surely he would appreciate my efforts and listen to what I have to say, albeit about you, lol. Anyway... are you considering applying? Yesterday you said you had two jobs, I thought you worked for one firm only?

@Sisir Cool, DOMPDF is a suitable choice then. I use it for the same purpose, invoices with tabular data. There is also TCPDF and I think FPDF but DOMPDF is slightly more advanced.

I was looking at priceXML and almost fall off my chair :) I am all in for spending money if a product is good. but that's just too insane!

crazy, seems you have to manually convert...

sorry no they have php api too

But you'd have to pass in the file contents, usually a URL to generate from, doesn't seem to have interface for passing in string representation... anyway crazy price, you can get this all for free and more

What the hell is this? WordPress Metadata UI API

@toscho this looks exactly like what I've mentioned a couple times before, an attempt at developing one consistent api that allows you to declare forms in any context, metaboxes, setting pages, options, front end fields in themes.

@userabuser but the architecture is broken already

@toscho in what sense?

models and view mixed up, no interface, not separate meta model

isnt that what they are trying to solve?

doesn’t look like they are trying

i dont see clearly what their proposed architecture is though

I have a long post about this stuff in my queue. maybe I should take the time to finish that

So do I! If you post, I'll certainly chime in with discussion. A topic I am very interested in.

I saw a pseudocode example that looked horrendous and internally inconsistent, assumed it was someone spewing their brains contents with no disregard

github.com/ericandrewlewis/wordpress-metadata-ui-api/issues/2

@TomJNowell this github.com/ericandrewlewis/wordpress-metadata-ui-api/blob/…?

@userabuser i work at a firm and also freelance many evenings. i have put myself on automattic's radar and hope to hear from them

wordpress.stackexchange.com/election/3#post-129864

Here we go: my self nomination. Feels very strange to write about myself (and only point out the positive sides).

@kaiser flag history is private

@Rarst oh... damn.

Thanks for pointing that out.

what's up with google links?

he's tracking us!

Links are too long and there're limited chars allowed. So this was the only way to fit the links in there.

@kaiser is secret NSA/Google employee and working his way to the top!

You'll have to choose: Google or NSA. Don't think they are that close together.

some broken... re-check links in incognito tab

@Rarst incognito?

whatever it's called in your browser

ah, ok. thanks.

private / etc. logged out

@kaiser @Rarst "porn mode" perhaps

hehe... that might've explained it much better ;)

@Rarst Thanks, fixed.

uhm i got a question. if there's only 3 spots available, and 3 or less candidates, they don't automatically get filled, right?

cause. it's kind of like there's only 1 candidate right now.

not 2.

@s_ha_dum will surely nominate himself. And @ChipBennett should do the same. Then we got @TomJNowell @anu @userabuser @Wyck ... enough people fully capable of fulfilling the role of a moderator. And those are only those who participate in chat as well.

I started writing a nomination thing but didnt finish

sure, but no one has rushed the gates. Chip said he didn't think it was a good idea for himself

@kaiser we have some good potential mods here, good group of people

absolutely

@GhostToast I wish you all the best then mate, keep us posted on how you go!

@userabuser thanks

Btw, why do you want to work for Automattic?

installing skype :P

You want to be designated Skype installer at Automattic?

:D

no. want to keep my current job though

right

@kaiser i'm 'ghosttoast99'

think i found you

skype updating..

@GhostToast sent invite

my nomination has been entered

@kaiser I could nominate myself, but I'll be completely up-front about what my approach as moderator would be. I just think I'm better suited as part of the community-moderation team, where a spectrum of POVs is more effective. (For example: close votes on questions)

don't forget to tune in to the official coverage of this election: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/12465/wordpress-2014-election

You just don't want to get punched when you have the feeling that a harsh comment would fit better ;)

@kaiser who, me? Nah. I've got thick skin. Problem is: I fear I'd have too-heavy a hand as a moderator.

My English :P ... that's exactly what I wanted to say.

A future with @ChipBennett as moderator?

I wonder if @Chris_O or @brasofilo or @StephenHarris will nominate themselves. Again capable people. Same goes for @chrisguitarguy @t31os @G.M. or the @TheDeadMedic ...

@GhostToast I guess he's not Texan

do we have a British moderator currently?

Germany, Ukraine, Israel and U.S. IIRC

hehe... Isreal would've been a much better name for that country.

@all I've a question, it seems like I'm blocked from the stack-network, can't access it - at all - from my home, even after getting a new IP by reconnecting my internet connection. Going in over a proxy - now - works just fine. My account is just fine too and I'm certain I haven't done anything wrong. So, does anyone have experience with that? Or whom should I contact to resolve the problem?

@ialocin your ISP or network provider would be my first guess. what DNS are you using? does your router have any kind of firewall that might automatically block some things?

@GhostToast Ok, that's what I was thinking anyway, but thanks. Regarding the latter, no, or to be exact, yes, but I've configured that all by myself, so that's not it for sure. I guess I make a quick phone call to my provider now..

hello all

hi

We've got a WP question over at GD. It's not really a good fit for our site, would anyone mind checking if it would work over here?

@JohnB looking at it now.

@JohnB nah. just shut it down/close it. it's overall a bad question and primarily a "do this job for me" request.

@kaiser ok, that's what I was afraid of. Thanks for checking!

n/p you're welcome

it's truly just a CSS topic

@kaiser I can't be a mod because A. I don't have any time anymore and B. I don't trust myself

:/

haven't been active lately, don't have any squares to spare

viewing an intranet site through Citrix RDP Viewer, on Internet Explorer 8. Yuck. It's like a bad photocopy of a photograph taken of a playbill printed by hand in the 1800s. It looks like a candidate for recaptcha.

@ialocin What operating system are you running? If you have the tracert utility, you can check the route between your NIC and the stackexchange.com domain. If you need more information, a more thorough (and complex) tool for troubleshooting networks is Wireshark

But you should be able to identify a point of failure with tracert alone

Also, ping stackexchange.com and makes sure your DNS is actually resolving it to an IP address (and that you don't loose packets)

@GhostToast Heh. I've recently started using Splashtop for my own personal RD stuff. It's actually fast enough to play XCOM: EU over the network on my kindle fire without any noticeable lag or quality degradation. Their Tech support sucks though (Me: "I had to use compatibility mode for XP SP3 to install your software on Windows 8.1" Tech Sup: "As far as we know there's no reason that should happen. Glad you got it working.")

^ despite that there are many accounts describing the symptoms I experienced across the net.

i have splashtop, but rarely used it. this is for a hospital client. not sure they'll just let me install Splashtop on it :)

Yeah, likewise for my place of work - just vanilla Windows RDP and the occasional VNC Viewer

@JohnB as-written it is a Theme-shopping question, which is explicitly out-of-scope for WPSE. But in general: a WordPress Theme can be any arbitrary HTML/CSS markup, and HTML/CSS markup as-described in the question is not specific to WordPress, even if it were to exist in the context of WordPress. As such, the question would still be out of scope for WPSE, and better answered at StackOverflow (as a general HTML/CSS question).

@ChipBennett good to know, thanks for clarifying

in a comment I pointed him to SO for CSS help, but gave you guys a plug in case he has any other WP questions in the future

I found this statement on github: "If you would like free support for History.js, then post your question on Stackoverflow and be sure to use the history.js tag when asking your question."

@JohnB we appreciate the footwork

likewise!

@JohnB thanks for checking first. Hopefully it will spare the OP (and us) the frustration of seeing the question moved from one SE site, to another, and then to another.

indeed

@boscho Thanks. I'm using linux - solely. Pinging or resolving DNS doesn't work, not 100% sure at the moment about the traceroute output. I've to take a closer look later, but it might be some dns resolving problem at the home network.

@ialocin try an alternate DNS if you can, such as Google: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

@ialocin fo sho! You can also try substituting Google's DNS servers in your NIC configuration - addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

oh

damnit.

kekekek

the destruction of net neutrality could see us having more issues like this in future :(

@GhostToast :/

we'll always have the darknet

not that that's really a consolation.

very very slow darknet :)

"Oh we're sorry. That site is part of our premium internet service package. It's only $199 a month for the first 6 months. Or you can bundle it with 1,200 channels and in-home phone service for only $299 a month for the first 12 months!"

@GhostToast @boscho Thanks again, I have to go for now, I'll figure it out later.

@boscho @Rarst sounds like something out of Neuromancer (free to read online here, btw)

@Rarst :( . So basically I just have to move into the server farm that hosts my favorite websites, really. Think I could fry an egg on a rack server?

@GhostToast Bookmarked - will be revisiting that tonight :)

lol they look drunk

They're just gorgeous! :)

Switching topic - something more "official":

also love the boxes being thrown at the large model

@kaiser "Well you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm a generation > 900, no time to talk."

^ from a friend of a FB friend.

totally stealing that

@kaiser well this rectifies an issue you mentioned to me today!

@boscho haha

@Rarst are you hosting with pagely now?

lolwut? SiteGround

saw your tweet about that pagely dude

thought maybe you were connected as a consumer

retweet. that was good post on VC stuff, but as far as hosting is concerned I think dude is out of touch.

see Dear theme designers: Consider yourselves on notice

ha^

I thought you said out of douche

@Wyck ironically, that's what the entire article is about

@GhostToast heh

@Rarst What's this daniel fellow ranting about in the comments? I haven't dug through the internals of Backupbuddy, but I thought it ran as a cron job - why would it eat up resources on every page load?

wp-cron runs everywhere by default. I think you have to set a real server-side cron job to avoid that

I have no remote idea. BackupBuddy is tad unbalanced. it's good for some stuff, terrible for another. I used it extensively at work and paid for my copy for two years, then dropped.

@GhostToast wp-cron is spawned, not run. it's not perfect but it's not too bad. unless server config is screwed up worst case it blocks for 1s

well, it checks if a job is in-queue, right? which i guess is lightweight. unless the timer is too aggressive maybe?

each cron job sets some frequency

check overhead is completely insignificant compared to rest of core

hrm.

hmm. i guess a sysadmin told me wrong then. still, it is no substitute for a real cron for the fact it will not run unless a page is actually visited.

of course, on other hand it just works.

"if a cron falls in the forest but nobody visits the website, does it make a sound?"

really they need to iron out blocking kinks and move it the heck from init, there is open ticket about it.

it is rather stupid issue - it's supposed to take 100ms at most, but WP rounds it up to 1s internally

@Rarst what do i do about things like this: wordpress.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/36609

is the suggested edit approved, even though post probably should be destroyed?

@GhostToast yes

Stack Exchange Review System: Cleaning garbage before it gets thrown out!

@GhostToast clean garbage is happy garbage.

best way to find treasure. and magic lamps (genies!)

@GhostToast the question can get useful answers, it has to be cleaned up.

@toscho i understand

i need to start using custom tables in WP. i also need to make a to-do list of things i wish to learn. i better put that on my to-do list as well.

TODO: consider changing username to @goschtoscht

@GhostToast that's kind of awesome

but be warned - @toscho hasn't noted my existence since I changed my name. I have to assume that even now contract killers are en route to Colorado to hunt me down.

worse: lawyers. You know there is a trademark on my name?

haha

@toscho :O

is it international?

worse: bill collectors. You know people are convinced you are @toscho?

muahahaha

@kaiser Please expand the shortened URLs in your nomination.

@toscho as explained: not possible.

character limit

that’s a poor excuse

I've been trying to fix a broken zimbra mailserver for two months since a power outage corrupted the data on a RAID-5 array that had been operating in a degraded state for months before. The ex-network admin proved to be useless and had failed to set up redundancies... I've revamped our backup system, our RAID configurations, got new batteries for our UPS. Running 5 different instances of Zimbra in virtual machines I've been unable to match the configuration close enough to perform a transfer.

@toscho no, it's not. it's actually very simple: a plain link = 100+ chars here on WPSE. and a short link is below 20 chars.

A co-worker just tried visiting the broken server for kicks, and it worked. It just worked. No explanation. FML

and iirc there're 500 allowed chars.

@boscho that sounds awful. also, dealing with email is the worst thing. ever. why not tell everyone you're starting over and to stop being so whiny about it. clean slate!

@kaiser http://meta.wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/894/2012-community-moderator-‌​election/896#896 for example can be shortened to http://meta.wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/896. Other links are similar.

oops

@toscho what would that help me? still too many chars.

@GhostToast right?? Corporate email history is for suckers.

I really have no idea why we host our own mailserver.

@toscho believe me: I'm not happy with the short links either. but the limit is the limit.

@kaiser why can't you be more like @revo and just speak vaguely of numbers without all the links and hard facts?

and feelings. numbers and feelings.

originally I just wanted to shorten the nomination to "because it's me", but I wasn't too confident that this would work out.

@GhostToast as far as I can tell, revo is responsible for WordPress's success as an open source project

@kaiser so you are circumventing the rules in your nomination post? oh, ohh

@boscho also possibly has the most friends. some estimates say it is near "a million billion"

@GhostToast that's more than a million million :O

also more than six.

1 million * 1 billion - Google Search

@toscho toscho!!1!

@GhostToast you could have shortened that...

i guess i have to

it wont pick up the *

@GhostToast wolframalpha.com/input/?i=a+million+billion

1 quadrillion. my new favorite number

later people. time to go home

@GhostToast peace, toast!

twitter.com/Rarst/status/423559960124211200

@Rarst funny you said that , someone just posted one of your things on my local WP facebook group and the first comment was about comic sans

literally the same time you posted that tweet ..

tell them to... DEAL WITH IT

the universe aligns over comic sans

it was default and (intentionally) pain to change

comic sans doesn't bother me I have an open mind

papyrus has been taking a noteworthy jab at comic sans in the last decade or so.

Thats like a Pharaoh jabbing a Clown

hahaha - I was about to say it's the business man's comic sans, but I like where you took it much more.

I like the business men angle as well