Server Migration

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Spidweb

We're about to pull the trigger on switching our URL to http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php
This means the forums will be down for a few days (1 to 3) as the DNS servers adjust. It also means any links to the old ironycentral posts will no longer function. I predict a lot of headaches. But here's hoping it means better performance down the line.

Brace for impact, hope for swift recovery, and we'll all see one another again on the other side.

—Alorael, who isn't sure exactly when the Great Change will occur. Expect it when it will be most surprising.

[Rowen]

Is this just a move off of irony central then?

[A less presumptuous name.]

Is this more than a change in URL? Are we moving to a totally new server? And is the rest of Irony Central moving with us?

[Milla]

*Holds onto one's legs*

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Master1

Is this more than a change in URL? Are we moving to a totally new server? And is the rest of Irony Central moving with us?

Yes, yes, no.

Dikiyoba has Tylenol standing by.

[keira]

Huh.

[Acky]

Will Jeff still be using UBB?

[Randomizer]

UBBThreads will still be there, God help us. This will break all the links within the board so there will be massive dislocation when we return for Strategy Centrals.

[Acky]

Would you like someone to back up all the links?

[The Mystic]

We're moving? Already?

 

*looks around* Wow, my stuff got scattered quite a bit in the past year or three since the last move. I guess I'd better gather everything back together and pack.

[keira]

If I may offer up a very simple php script from when I moved from forums.calref.co.cc to calref.co.cc:

 

Code:

<?phpheader('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');header('Location: http://calref.co.cc'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);?>

Simply change calref.co.cc to spiderwebforums.com, make it the ErrorDocument 404 for ironycentral.com/forum, and pop it in. Works perfectly.

[Balladeer]

The timing of this headache is suspicious.

 

But internal links should be changed easily enough with a program like Windows Grep. Once I found the program, changing the internal links for TrueSite went pretty smoothly.

[Xelgion]

I bet the move will happen on the 1st.

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Xelgion

I bet the move will happen on the 1st.

I think so. That's why this isn't an announcement or a sticky.

[Dintiradan]

Quote:

If I may offer up a very simple php script from when I moved from forums.calref.co.cc to calref.co.cc:

Code:

<?phpheader('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');header('Location: http://calref.co.cc'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);?>

Simply change calref.co.cc to spiderwebforums.com, make it the ErrorDocument 404 for ironycentral.com/forum, and pop it in. Works perfectly.

I'm guessing that he's keeping the other Irony Central material on the domain, so the redirect should only happen when accessing something under /forum/. Otherwise the default 404 should be served.

[keira]

Hence putting it (and the .htaccess) in /forum.

[Dintiradan]

Ah, missed that part, sorry.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: VCH

Originally Posted By: Xelgion

I bet the move will happen on the 1st.

I think so. That's why this isn't an announcement or a sticky.

That would explain why the announcement can't be found on the Spiderweb homepage.

[Ephesos]

It's real. This is straight from the mod board.

 

Also, it would be an exceptionally lame prank.

[Rowen]

Originally Posted By: Ephesos

It's real. This is straight from the mod board.

Also, it would be an exceptionally lame prank.

That seems to imply that there are pranks that aren't lame.

[Alorael at Large]

Pranks that actually happen, as opposed to pranks that only rumor their own occurrence.

 

—Alorael, who should have attempted to convince Spiderweb that nothing untoward was going to happen on April 1.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Ephesos

Also, it would be an exceptionally lame prank.

Fortunately for me, the move won't be a problem, prank or no; I don't link directly to the forums.

[Ephesos]

Well, a lot of us do... like the aforementioned strategy compendiums.

 

Anyway, see you all on the other side, assuming it goes off as planned.

[Dantius]

Am I the only one who gets an IP address in the URL instead of www.ironycentral.com?

[Nioca]

That's probably the alternate server.

 

(And yes)

[Kelandon]

AAAHHH MASS PANIC RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE

 

(Just trying to fit in.)

[Enraged Slith]

It's all those animated avatars' fault. Especially Salmon's.

[Student of Trinity]

During the migration a few people will probably be accidentally banned.

 

And replaced with bots.

 

A few more, I mean. Not like this hasn't been happening for years.

 

But this time, the bots will be better. Nice, polite bots, that never spam, but post 3 times every day with helpful game tips, enthusiastic game reviews, and uplifting paeans to family values. Stepford posters!

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Am I the only one who gets an IP address in the URL instead of www.ironycentral.com?

No, I started getting the IP address in the URL a few days ago.

And Happy Birthday.

[Alorael at Large]

No, you're not the only one.

 

—Alorael, who has been getting the IP address since yesterday. That's the workaround for DNS funny business.

[Triumph]

I must say I'm rather disappointed. I was hoping for something hilarious when I check the boards today, but instead my April 1st has been ruined by devastating disappointment of the hopes hyped by this thread. Oh woe.

[keira]

At least the forums aren't going to tip over and capsize.

[Triumph]

Originally Posted By: Taslim

At least the forums aren't going to tip over and capsize.

Is that for REAL? He said he worried the ISLAND would tip over and capsize??? I mean, someone didn't make this up for April 1st??? *cough server-move cough* WOW. This...I don't know, it's just too hilariously weird.

[Dantius]

I can no longer access the forums from the Ironycentral URL . Let us have a moment of silence while the band plays

[Triumph]

Huh. So the server move is real, I guess. Very impressive, staging a real server move on April Fools' Day. Downright sneaky, even.

[keira]

Actually, I just found out that guy has brain issues cuz he has hepatitis-c...I feel bad now.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Very impressive, staging a real server move on April Fools' Day. Downright sneaky, even.

I know.

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Originally Posted By: Taslim

At least the forums aren't going to tip over and capsize.

Is that for REAL? He said he worried the ISLAND would tip over and capsize??? I mean, someone didn't make this up for April 1st??? *cough server-move cough* WOW. This...I don't know, it's just too hilariously weird.

This kind of thought is not actually uncommon at all... I recall in the past seeing those surveys that ask basic science questions being given to random people, and this was one of the things an alarming number of people thought was true. I don't recall the exact percentage offhand, but bigger than 1/4 or 1/3 or something.

An alarming number of people also think the Sun moves around the Earth, the Sun us small, and the stars are near the sun.

Every few years you hear about this in the news, actually, as the media rediscovers this via some university's press release that mentions it.

Admittedly, these things aren't necessarily totally obvious, and I remember as a very young kid wondering about all of them, and they were never things discussed in any class or in any of our terrible textbooks. But still, I figured them all out!

[Enraged Slith]

All that says to me is that 1/4 to 1/3 of all people are smartasses, which sounds about right.

[cfgauss]

Having taught intro college classes, I can say that, while true, that is totally orthogonal to this claim.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

An alarming number of people also think the Sun moves around the Earth

If you take the Earth as your frame of reference, it does!

[cfgauss]

Psh! You and your curvilinear coordinate systems! General relativistic epicycles! Bah!

[Alorael at Large]

Sherlock Holmes would approve of such ignorance.

 

—Alorael, who wouldn't want to dispute that the stars are close to the sun. Compared to the distance to, say, the Andromeda Galaxy, most stars are really close.

[cfgauss]

LIES!

 

Distance from Sun to nearest star, d0 ~ 4 ly

Distance from earth to sun, a ~ 1.6x10^-5 ly

Distance from galaxy to andromeda, x ~ 2.5x10^6 ly

 

d0 = 2.5x10^5 a

x = 6.3x10^5 d0

 

So the nearest star is 10^5 "natural solar system units" away, and the nearest galaxy is 10^5 "natural galaxy distance units" away!

[keira]

Header...logo...must be...updated.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

Distance from Sun to nearest star, d0 ~ 4 ly
Distance from earth to sun, a ~ 1.6x10^-5 ly
Distance from galaxy to andromeda, x ~ 2.5x10^6 ly

d0 = 2.5x10^5 a
x = 6.3x10^5 d0

So the nearest star is 10^5 "natural solar system units" away, and the nearest galaxy is 10^5 "natural galaxy distance units" away!

That's true, but the alarming thing is that the diameter of the Milky Way is about 100000 LY. This is a much more natural galaxy unit than the few light years between stars; that's like calling ten microns a natural human scale because it's the size of a human cell. So space is actually fairly cosy and neighborly on the galactic scale, with galaxies only a few tens or at most hundred of galaxy-widths apart. What's alarming is the awful vastness between stars, and the enormous distances for which those sparsely scattered stars keep going on, and on, and on, before anything really new happens. The factor of a hundred thousand in scale, between the interstellar and the galactic, has been compared to the similar scale factor between the nuclear and the atomic, as one of the two big jumps in size in the universe over which nothing very important seems to happen.

For an astronomy course I once put it this way. If you consider the sun, to scale, as being the smallest dot you can make with your pen, then you can put that in the corner of a normal piece of paper, and spread the solar system across the rest of the page (with the planets as barely visible pinpricks). If you include the comets and stuff, way out there, then the solar system fits comfortably on a desktop, all controlled by that tiny solar dot in the middle.

Then the nearest other star system is another dot (in fact, three dots close together, for the particular nearest neighbor to our sun), perhaps with page and desktop, something like three miles away. And the galaxy consists of more of these dots and desktop solar systems, every few miles.

So far this is fine; I think I can picture this. It's alarmingly sparse, to think of those few dots and pinpricks miles apart with nothing in between; but I really think I can hold that in my mind. The problem is this: at this scale, the galaxy extends for sixty thousand miles. And I can't possibly picture that, not while keeping track of the mile-wide gaps between the star dots, let alone of the dots themselves.

That's the galactic scale gap, the factor of 100,000 over which nothing much happens except more of the same, and it defies imagination.

As to the sun going around the Earth: of course it does, relative to the Earth. The real breakthrough of Copernicus, with modern hindsight, was not that he finally got it right where Ptolemy was wrong, but simply that he introduced another reference frame, instead of leaving us stuck with the same geocentric one. For describing how the heavens look from Earth the heliocentric frame is not convenient even today, but for figuring out exactly how the planets move, it's much easier — as Kepler found.

I was surprised to realize, after many years in physics, how right the old Ptolemaic theory really was. Since the geocentric perspective was not actually an error at all, the only thing wrong with Ptolemy was that it made the planetary orbits perfectly circular, when in fact they are all slightly elliptical (and very slightly more complicated even than that, because of their gravitational influences on each other). The infamous epicycles were actually very simple: one epicycle, and one deferent, per planet. And with a bit of geometry one can see that this is exactly correct, or would be if the orbits were really circular.

[Alorael at Large]

Copernicus's error was also one of forcing orbits into circles, and while he was able to dispose of deferents and equants, his system required even more epicycles than Ptolemy. He wasn't actually more accurate, he was just closer to describing the actual motion of planets.

 

—Alorael, who assumes that vast cosmic distances are convenient places for dark matter and energy to hide from scientists.

[cfgauss]

Yeah, thinking about all of those scales certainly is odd, which is why I used only the nearest-neighbor scales in my post . But you missed a whole half of the size spectrum! The barely-microscopic, microscopic, molecular, atomic, sub-atomic, and string scales! Those are the really fun, and just as hard to imagine, scales!

 

Although calling the epicycles a model, in a modern sense, is a bit of a stretch. It's really more of a very careful observation than a model, since there was no theoretical backing behind it, and strictly speaking, since the orbits of everything is periodic, it wasn't really predictive either.

 

The biggest benefit of the sun-centered system was that it allowed the Newtonian description to come around and easily provide both a theoretical description and to genuinely predict new things--like the existence of new plants through their gravitational effects! That's the real reason this viewpoint is "correct."

 

If Ptolemy could've predicted the existence of Neptune by looking at Uranus's epicycles.... well, I'd be impressed!

 

And dark energy hides everywhere.

[Dantius]

All this proves is that Kepler is the coolest astronomer everybodys never heard of. Although Brahe's nose would be a pretty close second.

[Ephesos]

...and back to the original topic for a second, yay nothing exploded.