T w e n t y S i d e d
Very strange happenings.
My web host puked itself for six hours today. When my website re-appeared, I found a couple of new comments on my old post about PC Hardware being “Toast”. Some group of hardware fetishists read my post, scrolled past n comments of people who want to buy video cards but got tired of the hassle and confusion and jumped to consoles, and left comments to the effect that videocards are supposed to be complicated and you’re stupid for wanting things to be simple.
This website had become a magnet for ankle-biters of various stripes lately, mostly on age-old posts like that one. I imagine this is due to the increased visibility from all my work at The Escapist. This is a common cycle: I gain popularity, which heats up the conversation, which makes me testy, which then sheds readers due to my not-particularly-entertaining agitation. Eventually we reach some sort of equilibrium again. So, my current readership is always the maximum number of people that my personality can support.
But what was interesting is that the post is question is…
 |
Never seen that error before. Ever. I can’t see the post. I can’t edit the post. Although, I can see it listed on an index page. But this only affects post #1477. Post 1476 and post 1478 are fine and dandy, thinks.
I am mystified on many levels. What is “not acceptable”? How is just ONE php generated page gone wrong? (I’d suspect the SQL data behind it got trashed, but you can still see it listed in the index pages.) How were these other visitors able to leave comments when I can’t even see the post in question? (I might try and recover it via Google cache and re-post it. That will save the post, but break all the permalinks to it, as well as lose all of the original comments.)
Anyway, if you were trying to reach that page, you can’t, and I don’t know why. Sorry.
Strange.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Not so strange.
Now you have to options:
1.- Ask people about this bug (just like in forums)
2.- Ask people about similar or even worst bugs (just like an opinion poll)
I recommend you the second, because no one is going to help you, and the second will do this POST one of the funniest.
P.S.: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.7
No, actually it IS strange. Never happened before = strange, you know?
Actually the option I’m going for right now is “acknowledge the problem exists, and then move on to other more pressing matters.”
I was unable to parse your last sentence.
After a quick google, I’m confused. my best guess is something in the comments disabled the page. can you get to the DB and see what was posted, malicious code maybe?
You got reditted. Maybe your host put in an ad-hoc measure to stop serving that page until things cool down.
And yeah, not sure why the reaction was so much violent disagreement *shrug*
406 is a common problem with WordPress, especially if mod_security in Apache is active (and seeing your server runs on Apache, that chance is pretty high).
Since only this one site is affected, my best guess would be there is a deeper underlying problem hiding below the 406. You might want to try disabling mod_security via .htaccess for the moment (google 406 wordpress mod_security and you get several detailed walkthroughs) and see if you get another error, like a 500. Then a look in your error log (if you have access to it) should give you a good idea where the real problem lies. Otherwise, simply spam your hoster with support requests.
This was especially weird for me, because my power went off here, then it came back on, and I tried to access the internet, and, because your page is my homepage (can’t be arsed to muck with RSS or whatever it is), I thought my internet was down.
But then I went to Google and it was fine. I was confused; “How did my power going out cause only one site to stop appearing, and why was it Shamus’ in particular?”
Turns out it was all just a crazy coincidence.
Sorry, probably our fault. You got reddit’d pretty hard and your blogging software fell over. Google has a cache of the page if you don’t regain access to the post anytime soon.
hey dude, the reason why eleventy billion people visited your site or more specifically that post is because someone posted it on reddit.
here’s the reddit post in question
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7xiub/buying_a_graphics_card_is_a_lot_like_buying_a/
Yay, Accept: header issues! ;-)
As the RFC said (though you may not be able to parse it), that error means the browser is sending a combination of Accept headers (that is, Accept:, Accept-Encoding:, Accept-Charset:, etc.; they’re what let the server send the most appropriate MIME type, charset, etc., to the browser), that the server thinks it can’t honor. (Or the error number is being misappropriated.)
Doing some debugging, if I get rid of all the Accept* headers entirely (via telnet; yes, I can speak HTTP :-P), I still get the error. If I add back a “*/*; q=1.0” Accept: (and/or a valid Accept-Charset:, and/or a valid Accept-Encoding:) header, I still get the error.
HTTP version also doesn’t matter; 0.9, 1.0, and 1.1 all do this. (And it’s surprising that 0.9 is accepted, actually. Irrelevant to this, of course, but surprising.)
Even specifying everything Accept-* that I could find in the RFC (Accept, Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding, and Accept-Language), I get the 406. Even when specifying values for these headers that I know are valid (because they’re used on all your other posts), I get a 406.
I would suspect your webhost. Unless you really do want to ignore it, call up support. :-)
@sporksmith:
The negative responses were a result of what happens when some alpha geeks get elitist attitudes and/or forget how to deal with everyone else, basically.
It’s like I’ve said to my non-geek friends sometimes… the principle behind geek stuff actually usually isn’t that complex… it’s just that geeks have a very bad habit of writing about it solely in Geek with no English translation available.
And thus we have things like the case of the video card issue, where the geeks who make the cards make things too complicated because they don’t know to do otherwise, and the geeks who are elitist types like it that way because the idea of other people being able to understand it easily without spending the same amounts of time and effort they did is threatening to their self-worth.
Which makes things look bad for those of us who try to not be the elitist type of geek.
…*ahem* </soapbox>
@6
RSS is a automated method of keeping up to date with frequently updated websites. If you have a vaguely recent browser, it should be showing an orange icon in the address bar. Click on that, and you subscribe to the RSS feed, and your browser will tell you when it updates.
It’s win-win, since RSS subscribers use less bandwidth (no CSS files or structural images) than people who periodically ping the site for updates, and the RSS subscribers don’t have to ping the site for updates. I keep track of at least 200 hundred blogs and webcomics, something that I couldn’t possibly do if I didn’t use a RSS reader.
Clearly you forgot to propitiate the computer spirit with offerings of pizza and soda. Bow your head in shame, worthless mortal!
:D
I like the word choice for this error message. I’m imaging the server as a giant finger waving teacher, demanding I think hard about the effort I’m putting into the addresses I type into my browser. Oh and it gives me a week of detention for my sass-talking.
Ah, yes, one of the fine sociological principles of the internet.
There is no topic which won’t cause people to sneer and behave elitist towards people who are in some way “lesser” than they are. Doesn’t seem to matter what the size of the group is, either. Bonus points if you have a group that’s big enough that you start to think you’re in the majority.
There’s always a bigger geek.
I know this is crazy off topic, but I don’t know where else to turn. A USB 2.0 flash memory drive with unique files (ie not saved anywhere else) just “died” The little indicator light doesn’t turn on, none of my computers recognize it. Does anyone out there in Shamus-land know anything I can do to recover these files?
I just wanted to mention that 14=7+7.
It works better if you imagine me saying that in the voice of Eric Cartman.
Like Bryan (#9), I tried the low-level Telnet test on it, and similarly didn’t really get anywhere.
It is quite odd. Normally Accept is used for things like having one URL map to different pages depending on the user’s preferred languages.
Most likely though someone at your webhost has done something to block that particular URL or the content it contains, especially if it was the victim of a redditting :)
If it had been post 1337, it would make sense. Then it’s people taking you down in a ‘humorous’ way. But 1477? No clue.
Regarding the idea that ‘this is supposed to be hard, you’re an idiot for wanting it to be simple.’
I’d love to listen to those people when they complain about the complexity of…oh…taxes, and quote it back at them.
I looked at the linked reddit page. It was like reading a script for the Big Bang Theory. Seriously, I could hear Sheldon reading off how they studied and knew every single graphic card numerical. I am a geek and I thank whoever is in charge of the roster that there are always bigger geeks.
That’s why I use Flash. So I can get even worse bugs, but never a 404 (I just get random security errors instead).
@Tom
If the sticks broke, your pretty much stuffed. Sorry. But if you are lucky its just because of a wonderful windows quirk which i run into on a daily basis at work. Plug it in and head to the control panel. Admin tools, computer management, and in that program, click on disk management (in the left hand pane). You may be able to see your drive there. If you can, then i would bet it has the same letter label as another drive. Change the letter and the drive should work fine.
Good luck.
Actual quote from the comments at reddit:
It’s not too confusing if you stay on top of the hobby. I actually find that doing the research and making performance to cost decisions is sometimes more fun than playing the games you bought the damned thing for.
Shamus, you should sriously consider changing your hobby and in future spending your time researching GPUs instead of gaming. Apparently it’s much more fun. And I can’t wait to read your posts comparing NVidia XPZ 86700 R and NVidia XPZ 86700 TS. Plus imagine all the sexy webcomics to be fashioned from high-res-photos of naked GPUs!
Huckleberry: I think that’s out of the range of “geek” and straight into “dork” territory.
I have similar error all the time, but only on you’re site.
Actually, due to that error I thought you and this site were dead for about year or a half ( or more, it happened some time after you were finished with your comic ).
But I never deleted you site from my webcomic folder bookmarks which I check every day, all this time… I guess it was some kind some memorial for me for the good times. Imagine my surprise when your site loaded for the first time couple months ago.
Then I spent whole lotta time reading your game reviews and some other old posts.
But this error isn’t gone quite yet, I think it depends on the time of the day ( or mood ) when it happens again, then I have to wait for hours till I can visit this site again.
This is how error in question looks like:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/in4luomnmkz/ScreenShot013.jpg
Oh, and I also tried commenting on gaming in Afghanistan, wrote a pretty big post with bunch of suggestions ( though I didn’t read other posts :P ) but it never got on the comments page, I tried to resending it but I got error saying that I’ve already posted that, I though maybe I have to wait till the post comes on site but it never happened
@Huckleberry – Don’t tell anyone but I kind of think naked hardware is sexy. Not to the point where I lambast people for not wanting to share in my dorkery, but there it is. I wouldn’t care to do it every day but there’s something very exciting (in a purely platonic way) about opening up a box of parts and turning them into a functional system. Then I get it all done, play with the new shiny computer for a while and go back to browsing New Egg for newer, better parts again. Yep, I build a new computer to shop for a new computer. *is ashamed*
@Mari – At least you don’t build a new computer to shop for a new computer to build a new computer to shop for a new computer. That might be pushing it, even with a love of hardware.
Could it have something to do with the themes? That’s a preference-dependent thing. Maybe someone from the reddit decided to be a jerk and insert some code in his comment that he knew would mess up the wordpress theme and confuse the server?