| LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares! |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|01:53 pm] |
Notes augmented
We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!
Product tweaks and bug kill
- In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
- The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
- If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
- If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
- Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)
New FCK fixes rich text editor!
- We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
- When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
- RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
- An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
- The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers
LiveJournal Cares
We’re pleased to introduce you to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.
In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.
Papered in postcards
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.
Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!
Photos of the week
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! |
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| Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|02:00 pm] |
EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.
Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!
Thanks ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!
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On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work. |
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| LiveJournal Major Notes: Spam counter-attack, RSS feeds again, CSI Deadly Intent contest |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|01:15 pm] |
The empire strikes backIn recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.
RSS feeds againIf you're addicted to , ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.
Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!
c_s_i
If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.
Enveloped in postcardsLast week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.
Photos of the weekIf you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
( Read more... ) |
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| Hardware MPEG2 Slice decoding added to unichrome driver. |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|10:24 pm] |
I just pushed out code which adds MPEG2 slice decoding to my graphics driver. It is based on XvMC, but unlike "standard" XvMC implementations, it sends MPEG slices over to the graphics driver over the X protocol.
The base idea is the following: The MPEG engine gets MPEG slices, and outputs to a buffer. This buffer needs to then be displayed by the overlay engine. So, we need to spend most of our time managing the communication and syncing of those engines. We already have the other video engines implemented nicely, so, why not stick the MPEG code next to that and have a nice and clean implementation?
The XvMC protocol, X-wise, is mostly about telling the driver that the MPEG hardware is in use, and subsequently claiming buffers in the framebuffer, managed by the X driver. Everything else is expected to happen in the client library. For what reason, i do not know, but part of it could be that, this way, X is not seen to eat any CPU cycles. In any case, this makes it a very weird protocol, with things spread all over the stack.
Things were made worse with the advent of the XvMC wrapper. Instead of expanding the XvMC protocol slightly to provide the name of the XvMC client library to be loaded, DRI is abused for this purpose. So... a pointless hard dependency on DRI is added, and now, no working DRI means no working XvMC... Curious. Makes the pointless dependency on Shm look harmless.
So what i did now is send all the data over the X protocol, over a tiny X extenstion, so that it could be fed into the hardware and synced inside the X driver. An XvPutImage with a longword buffer containing the mpeg buffer id then makes sure that everything gets displayed correctly. And while the overlay is being set up, the mpeg engine can finish its work, and at the very last minute, the overlay code waits for the mpeg engine to finish, and then the overlay gets told to display the new image.
Other XvMC implementations went and completely reimplemented the overlay in the client library, and even involved 2d acceleration to be able to send mpeg slices to the hw a bit faster. A syncing nightmare. Another advantage is that my implementation can implement the newer mpeg2 engines in just a few hundred highly hardware specific lines.
Of course, sending this data over the X protocol in tiny bits does incur some more cpu cycles, and i also am not feeding mpeg data into the hardware over the command buffers. Because of this, my code uses about 30-35% for a normal DVD (write a comment if you guessed which :)) on a VIA C3 Samuel2 (yes, half speed FPU, not quite PPro compatible) at 600Mhz, while openchrome uses 20-25%, roughly 2/3rds. But the performance of my code is still very good, good enough to not bother with speeding things up just yet.
As usual, it is easy to get this new code. It builds and runs against all Xorg versions that are common, and the debian package build system has also been updated for the xvmc code.
For xine there is one caveat, due to the horrible implementation of video_out_xxmc. We need to fool xine into thinking that we do support subpictures (we don't as it the xxmc way of implementing things didn't even get close to how the hardware implemented it). For that, the following option needs to be set:
Option "XvMCBrokenXine" "True"
in the device section of xorg.conf.
Enjoy! |
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