Zombie Oppo Update

[FTTOHG]

I made another update to jimisaherb.com - there are a little over 400,000 posts there now encompassing the full time span of Kinja 1.0 Opposite Lock. @Jb-boin and Nanttene got something like 470,000 in their count. I didn't count reposts or cross-posts. I don't know if that was the difference or if there was an error in how I parsed the feeds. I also only grabbed 100 replies from each post because the way Kinja works it is a fair amount more code to grab the replies past #100. In any case, Kinja has shut down the feeds so this is what I have now. I think we got most of it.

Right now all of the images are still being hosted by Kinja. I have no idea if/when they will get deleted. My thinking based on what I have seen is that they probably won't delete the images any time soon (the images aren't associated with the poster or Oppo so they'd need a script to crawl through all of Oppo and pick out the images). But I can't guarantee it. So if you want a copy of anything you find here please archive it now. I'm planning to see if I can make reduced-size/quality image archive but my initial attempts are running slowly and still taking up a lot of disk space so it may or may not happen. I might give up or the images might get deleted.

I don't really know what's next for this archive. Work has gotten pretty busy. (Here is a scary thought for those of you in the US (including myself) - I am managing $5+ million of your tax dollars this year.) So I don't know how much more time I'll have to play with this before (if ever?) the images go poof. I would like to fix some of the broken embeds and formatting, detect links to other posts and make them link to the archive rather than dead end at Kinja, and maybe bring back a more Kinja-style feed view. But we'll see. Maybe over Christmas. The host is paid for 2 years so I hope to keep it online through then at minimum even if it just lives in this state. Anyway - hope at least some of you can have some fun with this.

[WhoIsTheLeader]

The formatting work you've done is absolutely amazing. It's in a very readable and easily scrollable form.

Of course there isn't a good search function right now and you can't search by profile, but you've got a working title system. That would make JB Boin's archive much easier to search if it had a title like that.

http://jimisaherb.com/

But you have to copy the link address rather than the URL, which is unusual.

http://jimisaherb.com/uploader/new/2020/1/1840696049.html

[jminer]

This is truly excellent work! If you ever need to move the host we can handle it here.

As a recent departee of a quasi-governmental financial institution I wish you luck. It's good folks like you that keep things running, the folks at the top don't matter nearly as much as you do. Keep up the good work.

[FTTOHG]

@whoistheleader I’d love to do a search but that is beyond my skill level at the moment. Might be fun to learn but also a pain - I’m not using a database just individual files for each post. Not quite sure what’s up with the URL. I did make a mess of things on the server side when I was scrambling to set it up though. Add cleaning up the organization to my list.

@jminer thanks for the offer. Here would be a good home I think but doesn’t need to be for a while. Let’s focus on making sure this place keeps running as awesome as it has. And yeah big federal projects are weird. All the real action happens at the level I’m at. There are managers above me that make more and are responsible for more but only make big picture questions and allocating money in $100k chunks. I’m down here losing sleep over whether to spend $300k on a backup piece of hardware in case the main single point of failure goes down and sets us back months or using that money to pay the burdened salary of a young engineer. While also having to put in purchase requests for crap as small as pens and notepads. It’s... a weird job. I do try to remind myself often where the money comes from be a good steward of it. I think most of my coworkers do as well. And I think what we do is of great benefit to the nation.

[jminer]

The one thing that always killed me was the procurement contracts we would get stuck with. Something got put out to bid and there was some strange and specific requirement which meant we didn’t get enough bids and ended up with a terrible option. We’d buy enterprise compute hardware at like 50-100% more than it would cost through normal channels and only 1 company was allowed to service it, and they were terrible. This wasn’t always the case though, most people tried very hard to ensure things were to our benefit.

Like you I’m very proud of my time spent in the service of the government. I did almost 6 years, but was starting to feel institutionalized and if I didn’t leave soon I’d never leave. So I got a new job.

I was lucky enough to work for a branch where I was neither a govt employee or contractor so both my pay and benefits were good.

Good luck and keep up the good work!

PS - my vote is usually for resiliency, make sure a single point of failure is very unlikely to fail or make it not a single point failure. We ran backups on everything from switches to cores, to routers, to uplinks all the way back to battery backup, backed up by a generator, backed up by 2 separate feeds of street power. It’s expensive, but needed in our role.

[jminer]

Oh also - I could never PM one of these projects like it sounds you do. I’m a lead engineer - I’ll tell you what I need to get it done and you tell me when you need it done by. That takes serious skills I just don’t have to keep track of all the moving parts in giant projects like this.

[Chariotoflove]

@fttohg Buddy, I’m feeling the pressure on my work load just doing this curating gig. What you are doing is truly heroic in comparison. What a monumental effort. This will be a fantastic archive for posterity, whether is gets hosted here or elsewhere. Thank you.

On the other hand, I’m wondering how many shitposts people were relieved to leave behind when they thought they were gone for ever.

[FTTOHG]

@jminer yeah i lean very much toward eliminating any single point of failure and fortunately the managers have my back on that. I have a request for a $246k piece of hardware going for signatures now because our only one is out of service for a month+ for calibration at the moment. That hardware is from a big company and is being routed through a woman-owned small business. I know it adds to the cost but I do think most times there is a net benefit to it. You are right that there are cases when it is super painful and you see firsthand how the gov’t procurement process is seen as a grift by a lot of the general public.

I’m a federal contractor and the pay and benefits are both nothing to complain about. The crazy thing is I’m a lead engineer myself and also a de facto PM for my project. The project falls under a larger program with our PM overseen by an FPO. But both the PM and my direct management basically put me in charge so I have to do schedules, forecasts, financial spreadsheets and all that in addition to planning and executing the technical work with the other engineers and techs on my team. It’s been chaos getting up to speed but I think I’m finally there now going into year 3 of this.

[FTTOHG]

@chariotoflove thanks! And thank you for helping curate this place. Amazing that there was a place to move right over to with so many familiar faces and it keeps getting better. Fortunately I find it fun not heroic work or anything like that but yeah some of this formatting stuff has kept me from getting to bed til 2 AM. And yeah there’s a lot of stuff that was written as throwaway. Heck I even found a few of mine where I couldn’t believe I made such a useless post. But there was too much good that people put real time into to not save.

[Chariotoflove]

@fttohg you’re right. It’s fun to browse through.

[FTTOHG]

@chariotoflove I keep finding cool things I wasn’t around for when they happened live and clicking the star forgetting that it obviously doesn’t work.

[pip bip]

@fttohg well done.

[Shop-Teacher]

@fttohg Wow! This is awesome. Good work!

[Zaphod's Heart of Gold]

I'm glad my houselopnik thread wasn't lost to history....need to go back and personally archive posts just so I know what I did.

Speaking of, I need to give an updated...

[BicycleBuck]

@fttohg I am so thankful that you took on this work. I managed to archive my posts, but I couldn't get beyond the first few comments. Now I have some time to pull down a little bit more.

Great Work!