64 posts tagged “computing”

Key to the calendar. Yellow: days when Vox worked normally. Pink: days when the compose screen took minutes or hours to load. Red: days when Vox would not allow me to compose at all.

I’m sure most of you will agree that putting up with a compose screen that will not load for hours or days since October 28 is being pretty patient.
   In that time, Daisy and Six Apart have been great at trying to help me troubleshoot why this is happening. They have confirmed that there is something wrong and that, even at Six Apart HQ in California, they cannot get the compose screen to come up when logged on as me.
   A number of solutions have been proposed, but despite carrying them out, the loading delay remains intolerably long.
   It’s as though the Six Apart servers (after becoming self-aware!) know it’s me and fail to serve the compose page. No code is downloaded.
   I remain convinced that whatever is happening to me is connected to what happened to Patricia (who has only made 50-odd posts on Vox, but has exactly the same symptoms) and Ninja (who can no longer compose with this site without switching to Internet Explorer—Vox is the only site which he has to make a browser switch for). I also believe the bug is connected to the one that locked out all the Australians I knew on this service in August 2009.
   We also have the mysterious period between November 16 and 18 when the site operated normally, and the compose screen came up on demand. What happened on those three days? I had more tags in my account than when the site first blocked me from composing, and possibly more neighbours. Yet for those days, everything was normal here.
   I have never suggested seriously that the block was malicious (though it was fun to entertain some outlandish theories), but it does seem to be rather coincidental that I come across bugs on Vox, Blogger, Facebook and other services continually. Many have been documented on this blog. I just never thought that among the last regular blog posts, the bugs I write about would be Vox’s.
   One day I am sure they will find the error, or there will be a new version of Vox which remedies it. The underlying code is updated a lot more frequently with incremental improvements than Team Vox will have us know. Until then, I will check in here periodically—to read your posts, delete spammers, and administer the many groups that I run—but we will have to say farewell to my regular updates. I will also click on ‘Create’ from time to time to see if the bug has been fixed, and, if the site ever lets me, post the odd private neighbourhood or friends-only entry.
   Finally, you could say, my disappointment outweighed my patience. As some of you read in a private post yesterday, this is a good time to move on.
   Vox is, after all, still in beta, if its terms and conditions (revised a few months ago) are to be believed, so there’s no point my getting mad about this. It is what I signed up for in 2006 when I began as a Vox beta tester. Three years on, it appears I was still in the same boat, but with a less reliable site.
   Thank you for all your friendships over the last three years. I have enjoyed it and everything this blog has offered. You can still find me on Facebook (a site with far worse issues than Vox ever had), Tumblr and at my main blog, where I am already ramping up the posting I do. I have a campaign site for the 2010 mayoral election here in Wellington, and will offer occasional commentary at Lucire’s web edition. If the Vox cravings get too much, I might enter the odd thing at lucire.vox.com, but even that account began to fail a few days ago.
   This is not a total farewell. In the words of Gen Douglas MacArthur, ‘I shall return.’

Statistics: I have stripped out 6 kbyte worth of tags from the 260 kbyte I had yesterday afternoon. The file is now c. 254 kbyte. Pretty sucky for nearly four hours’ work, but we are talking about undoing three years of blogging here.
   I can’t say I’ve noticed major improvements to Vox’s compose screen coming up. I suppose one could say this now takes minutes rather than hours or days, and it sometimes comes up without a refresh (if you give it a quarter- or half-hour).
   Back to work.

The compose window is still taking around a quarter-hour to open, but I am happy with Daisy’s explanation. I believe I am back to the quantity of tags that I was at before the problems began, and have been deleting a lot from the videos—since almost all of the YouTube ones are incorrect. (Either the person on YouTube entered them incorrectly, or YouTube does not allow phrases as tags. Hence there are a lot of tags here with words such as the and of.)
   Even after the trimming I have done (which has taken some two hours today), we are still looking at a Javascript script of nearly 260 kbyte. That’s hefty, no matter how you look at it.
   I am not sure if that answers Patricia’s problem, and it doesn’t answer the trouble I began experiencing on my other blog last night, but it is a clue.
   There must be some related issues (server load, sploggers, etc.) but intuitively, the tag explanation sounds correct.
   The Javascript is also executed reasonably early on the compose page, so if it fails to load, then the rest of the compose screen will not come up.
   I am no expert, but Vox will need to look at this in an upcoming update. Maybe the script could be executed later. Or, for heavy users, perhaps take away the tag auto-complete feature. I usually type so quickly that I do not benefit from the feature anyway: when it shows up, I have already finished typing the tag.
   I’ll continue to delete some more tags, but I think my Vox blog will soon be back.

A minute to load this second compose window after a 12-hour block. Oh well, have some photos.

   From left to right: an old Hillman Minx in town, another red-light runner, and a giant strawberry.

A surprising thing happened tonight: I could no longer get a compose window at my second Vox account.
   I have done some more neighbour removals (after the clue from Kimmie) to see if it made any difference. While that account is working again, I could not relate the glitch to any particular neighbour. In fact, I have the same neighbours I did prior to the glitch occurring there.
   I tried removing a few more here to see if it made any difference to whether a compose screen would appear. In all cases, it did not. If you are a Voxer who was puzzled why I added you to my neighbourhood today, when you know full well I had added you before, it was down to this experiment.
   This compose window took 12 hours to emerge, so the weeding-out of dormant and departed neighbours yesterday has had no real effect on this account. Removing neighbours added in October 2009 also made no difference.
   I am a stubborn fellow, more so when I know that by solving my problem, we potentially solve Patricia’s and Ninja’s, with their composing-blocks of varying degrees here on Vox. Here’s hoping Six Apart is as willing to get to the bottom of this as I am.

I don’t know if we can pronounce Vox fixed, but this is the seventh compose window this morning. It took about a minute to come up.
   I’ve had so many of these temporary successes getting the compose screen, only to find that I am barred from composing for another day afterwards. However, I might have reason to say that the glitches are becoming a thing of the past.
   Earlier today, Kimmie at Six Apart responded to a thread to say that the error was caused by someone I am following. So, I spent this morning removing all dead Vox accounts among my neighbourhood. I then removed those that had not updated since December 2008 (an arbitrary month I chose), with the exception of people I knew. I got several compose windows within minutes, but I still got two of these, which meant the problem did not lie with those accounts:

   Taking Kimmie’s clue about a neighbour who might have caused this, I began removing people I started following in October 2009. There were two gentlemen with photo blogs whom I removed, and since then, the compose window has come up, though not as quickly as I would like. (To those two guys: sorry, it’s nothing personal.)
   I wonder how many hours I have spent on this since October 28, but I think we are finally getting to the bottom of it.
   It’s still a Vox bug, in my opinion—why would the mere act of following someone, which is something that Vox is programmed for, create a problem? The answer of ‘Because it just does’ is not good enough.
   Event A (following certain neighbours) has triggered Event B (“don’t load the compose window for this guy!”) but they haven’t come across why or how the two are linked.
   I’ve told Patricia and Ninja of what the error might be, so hopefully we’ve fixed things not just for me, but two other Voxers.
   And there should now be a record of this bug and its resolution, which is one great thing about the internet.
   Well, let’s hope it was a resolution. If not, then at least we are narrowing down on the cause of the glitch. But I wonder if we would have got this far if I hadn’t pestered Daisy to the extent that I did (poor Daisy!).

Not sure how many hours the compose screen took today, but here it is.

   This post will be non-sensical only because I didn’t want to waste a compose screen, since they are rarities. On left is the football match last night. At the right, mutant strawberries (the DLE envelope is a size guide), also from last night.
   Katie Taylor (the current Miss New Zealand) deleted the pics I took of her—sorry, lads.
   Given what Patricia told me with her issues, I have no confidence the Vox boffins will ever fix their bug. She’s been at them since before September. While Daisy is a huge help and actually cares about Voxers, I wonder if anyone else at Six Apart gives a damn.

Wow, a day to load the compose window. Vox is really dying.
   Folks, I am carrying on Voxing. I had a few days on Tumblr, but it doesn’t have room for comments, nor does it have the privacy settings I want. Other platforms are a bit lacking on that, too. Maybe my habits have adjusted to Vox over the last three years, and I still like it (when it works).
   After discovering that setting up an alias meant that I could blog on demand again, I have set up a new account at lucire.vox.com.
   I explain there that I don’t like setting up noms de plume, so I had to justify it to myself by using it for work (specifically Lucire). And it was better for me to get lucire.vox.com rather than some splogger pinching the name.
   I have “neighboured” many of you (my apologies for any accidental omissions), and hope you can follow me there. I will eventually rejoin a lot of the groups as well.
   I may put my private posts on there for friends and neighbours, which is the principal reason I like Vox.
   I will still keep checking in here, not just because of the spammers who will undoubtedly leave comments, but I believe I can take a Pandora’s box approach to Vox’s failure. One day, this blog will come right. Mind you, Patricia gave up in September when she went through exactly the same scenario as me, and Ninja still has to use Internet Explorer just to use Vox, so maybe I should not hold my breath. Yesterday, Vox began blocking my access to the recent activity page, and I heard from Snowy that that has begun happening to him, too.
   If only everyone was as caring at Vox as Daisy.

Only an hour to get the compose screen loading on Vox today …
   I had another tab open and it took about 10 minutes.
   Nothing much to blog—I am just seeing if Vox has fixed things. Turns out it hasn’t, though I am still wondering why on earth the three people who have been blocked to varying degrees are all oriental. A heck of a coincidence, but what are the odds?
   For your entertainment, a video that Tanya referred to me for all the font geeks out there:

House Industries must be thrilled with the free promo.

I think Vox must be working on the bug preventing me from blogging. I had a brief chat to Daisy (a.k.a. the most caring person at Vox) in the DMs and gave her my password to try out. (I also gave it to a very good friend to see how it would go for him.) The bet was that once logged on as me, one would find it equally difficult and nearly impossible to compose.
   Good news is that this compose window took mere seconds to emerge. Although I still wonder what caused the bug in the first place. A server database getting corrupted? A glitch in the DNS, MX and A records? A disgruntled splogger who I narced on—in which case I have helped Vox plug a vulnerability? And, as before, will I be able to get a new compose window within seconds?
   More soon …