Well, Viewzi made the news tonight… the 10:00 CBS local evening news to be exact. My part even made the cut. It was about 45 seconds on the 7:30 sister-station news (channel 21), and then a full 2 minutes (with two “coming up” teasers!) on the 10:00 on the Dallas CBS affiliate, channel 11. It repeated at 12:30. Very cool.

And we got hammered.

Within 15 minutes of the story on the 10:00, we had received several hundred new user accounts, and the queue manager for the screen capture subsystem was smoking. Almost literally. It never crashed, but it bogged down quite a bit and is still working out from under the deluge.

I’m in the middle of rewriting the queue manager (the part of the code that delegates screen capture tasks to the many servers we have capturing website images), but I haven’t finished it yet and rolled it into production. So, we’re still running on the old code, which is having a hard time keeping up. I think the architectural changes I’ve made to the system will allow it to scale much more gracefully, but right now it’s kinda falling on it’s face.

The rest of the system has held up beautifully, though. For a little while there we were executing almost 35,000 SQL queries a minute, and the database server hardly broke a sweat. The rest of the architecture is sound. But screen capturing is a nasty business. Once we roll out the new code, we should be able to literally have hundreds of screen capture servers running to keep up with the load.

The feedback has been very good, overwhelmingly positive, and we’re still seeing new users sign up at a faster clip than we have since we went on the air about 5 weeks ago. It’s pretty exciting, and crazy at the same time. I just hope I have a little more time to work the kinks out before we hit the national news.

OK, this is hideous.

I can’t believe an agency was paid close to $1M to design that.

ugh.

Ouch. FoxNews.com just implemented a redesign and boy, something’s broken. I found the “story” talking about their “totally new, crisp” format and found an e-mail address at the bottom for feedback. Here’s the $0.02 that I sent in:

I just flipped over to foxnews.com this morning and was a little shocked to see the new design… it literally looks like the stylesheet didn’t come down with the content. I had to refresh a couple of times to be sure. There are serious rendering issues (both with the home page and story pages) in browsers other than IE/Win (Firefox on both PC/Mac as well as Safari on Mac), many links do not work (over half the main menu bar, besides rendering half-wrapped, doesn’t allow clicks), text is cut off in strange places, etc. Overall, the site design looks incomplete and unfinished, not to mention untested in anything other than IE/Win. Even on that single platform the design doesn’t look complete, making the user think the whole page hasn’t loaded.

I’m sure you have statistics that indicate that the majority of your readership use IE/Win still, but other, much more standards compliant browsers are increasing in popularity, and with IE7 is released, this design will probably be broken there as well. The prior foxnews.com design was very consistent across browsers and platforms. This one looks rushed into production.

“totally new”? yes. “crisp”? not so much.

Please reconsider.

Yours,
Steve DeVoll
Plano, TX

As I told them, I did try the new design in a number of browsers both on Mac and PC. Internet Explorer 6 for Windows was the only browser that came close to rendering a complete design, or at least what I can infer they were going for. The rest were jumbled, had cut off or overlapping areas, or parts of the page that just didn’t work.

Completely unacceptable in this day and age for a major website to not even come close to rendering properly in Firefox, much less other CSS2 compliant browsers.

Of course, part of the problem can probably be attributed to the massive amounts of doubleclick supplied advertising on the site. It’s hard to say where the site ends and the advertising picks up… it’s all squashed together.

Ugh.

You’ve got to be kidding me:

A Pennsylvania woman who was struck by a train has sued the rail company — for failing to warn her that trains travel on railroad tracks.

Patricia M. Frankhouser filed suit on Nov. 4 seeking damages in excess of $30,000 from Norfolk Southern Corp. (search), according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Last January, Frankhouser was hit by a train as she walked along railroad tracks in her hometown of Jeannette, Pa., a southeastern suburb of Pittsburgh.

Amazingly, she came away from the encounter with only a broken finger, some cuts and, according to the lawsuit, “pain.”

Apparently, however, the incident was traumatic enough for her to hire a lawyer.

“Defendant’s failure to warn plaintiff of the potential dangers negligently provided plaintiff with the belief she was safe in walking near the train tracks,” Frankhouser’s suit asserts.

geez.

This is awesome. From USA Today:

BOSTON (AP) — Republicans think they’ve found the ideal person to explain in detail the Democratic presidential candidate’s evolving position on the war in Iraq — John Kerry himself.

Using video clips of Kerry discussing Iraq on various talk shows, the Republican National Committee has put together an 11-minute video that traces how Kerry struggled with the issue of Iraq through 2003 and early 2004 as he competed for — and finally won — the Democratic presidential nomination.

If you’ve got the bandwidth, you’ve got to watch this. If there was any doubt that this guy was a waffler, this will dispel that. Amazing. Once again, there’s no compelling reasons by the left to vote for their guy, only against President Bush. This could well be the most important election of my lifetime.

Well, isn’t this a surprise!

If you’d like to check out an endangered species, don’t bother with a trip to the zoo. Just drop by the newsroom of your favorite newspaper or TV station and ask to see the conservatives.

According to a new survey, only 12 percent of local reporters, editors, and media executives are self-described conservatives, while twice as many call themselves liberal. At national news organizations, the gap is even wider - 7 percent conservative vs. 34 percent liberal.

That gap, which has grown wider in the past decade, does not necessarily prove that America’s mainstream journalism is biased, as conservatives have long complained. But the survey does confirm that US newsrooms do not mirror the political leanings of the nation at large.

…

“We should acknowledge that maybe the biggest problem is that most of us think too much alike and come from the same backgrounds,” says David Yarnold, editor of the opinion pages at The (San Jose) Mercury News. “Find the pro-lifers in a newsroom. That’s harder than finding Waldo.”

“Does not necessarily prove”… well, I supposed it doesn’t necessarily prove it, but if you don’t think the two are linked, you’re living in a fantasy world. Every time I see Peter J. or someone else deliver the news with a sneer, I’m thinking to myself “yup, he’s definitely not biased in the least.”

Still, many Americans say a liberal bias does exist. In a Gallup poll last fall, 45 percent of Americans said the news media are too liberal, while 14 percent said too conservative. (Some 20 percent of Americans now call themselves liberal, versus 33 percent who say they’re conservative.)

I just don’t get those 14% on the left that scream that the media is conservative. I don’t think they know the meaning of the word. Or what’s probably more likely, they’re so far left that the media is on the right to them, even if the media is considerably left of center.

This is just getting out of hand.

Public praise doesn’t come so easily anymore in some Nashville schools.

Parents must sign a permission slip before students can receive academic awards in front of their peers.

At Cumberland Elementary School in Nashville, principal Renita Perkins had to get parental permission to have the names and photos posted of all the students honored for good behavior, reading skills and artwork.

The school district adopted the policy after the parent of an honor student complained that posting the names of award recipients was an invasion of privacy.

Common sense has, once again, left the planet.

So that’s how the left “protects free speech”?

Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean.

…

“I got down low and took his legs out,” said Franken afterwards.

Franken said he’s not backing Dean but merely wanted to protect the right of people to speak freely. “I would have done it if he was a Dean supporter at a Kerry rally,” he said.

So, protecting free speech means physically taking out someone exercising their right to what, speak freely?

“I was a wrestler so I used a wrestling move,” Franken said.

Oh, I get it now.

Astounding. The Associated Press reports:

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways — all at the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, Nashville school system lawyers warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

Some schools have since put a stop to academic pep rallies. Others think they may have to cancel spelling bees. Now, schools across the state may follow Nashville’s lead.

Well, let’s go ahead and get rid of grading, too. Might as well remove all homework, since the public school system to a great degree is a babysitting institution now, anyway.

via ToungeTied.

Words mean things, and apparently that bothers some people in the education establishment in this country. According to this article at washingtonpost.com (via TongueTied), things are getting downright Orwellian (and kids probably aren’t even allowed to read 1984 and Animal Farm in schools these days).

This sanitization of language for euphemistic reasons is ridiculous. Whatever happened to calling a spade a spade? If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, why should it be called anything other than a duck?

Look at some of this:

At many schools, 6-year-olds don’t compare books anymore — they make “text-to-text connections.” Misbehaving students face not detention but the “alternative instruction room,” or “reinforcement room,” or “reflection room.” Children who once read now practice “SSR,” or “sustained silent reading.”

And in Maryland, high schoolers write “extended constructed responses” — the essay, in a simpler time.

Reflection Room? And we wonder why people can’t tell right from wrong in society today.

This student nails it:

Robert Maeder, 17, a senior at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, finds the terms demeaning — especially “learning cottage,” instead of “classroom trailer,” and “assessment” for test.

“It’s like renaming a prison ‘The Happy Fun Place,’ ” Maeder said. “Tests should be called tests. ‘Brief constructed response’ — you just wonder why they don’t say ‘paragraph.’ It doesn’t really serve any purpose renaming them.”

Remember, kids are learning much more than the facts in schools. Oops, sorry, “Social Education, Adjustment and Reflection Facilities.”