Doug's Home On The Web "Now monochrome monitor compatible!"

As folks noticed on Thursday morning when we opened hotels, the website displayed errors for 5-10 minutes starting at 9 AM EST due to the rush of traffic that came in.  This was due to a few factors, which I'd like to go into in technical detail below.

First, some raw stats:

Peak bandwidth: approx 3.6 Megabits/sec

Peak connections: 1,060 concurrent connections

Number of users logged into the site: 100+

Here are some graphs that show just how big those numbers are, compared to normal traffic levels:

For those who saw last year's post about the load on the webserver when we opened up hotels, this year's traffic was about twice what last year's traffic was.  I didn't see that coming.

As is plainly visible in the traffic graph, the machine that this website runs on is capabale of much higher bandwidth throughput.  So, what happened?

In a word: caching.  Or rather, the lack thereof in certain cases.

This year's Anthrocon went pretty well for me, at least from a staff/Operations standpoint! This being our 6th year in Pittsburgh, things went pretty well. Equipment arrived when it was supposed to, nothing went horribly wrong or got broken, and set up and teardown went fairly well. In that aspect, the con was somewhat "boring" for me, which is actually fantastic.

During my slow days (Friday and Saturday), I actually got to spend some time out enjoying the con, dropped in on a couple of panels, and got some facetime with some folks. My socializing was to such an extent that I didn't even drink all that much, which my wallet had no issues with.

Total stats for this year's Anthrocon were 4,400 furries from 39 countries, 854 fursuits in the fursuit parade, and $11,522 raised for The Toonseum.

Here's a picture of the Toonseum folks (except for the chef, which was Chiaroscuro):

There's not much else for me to add, because the con was more of the same awesomeness that I'm used to experiencing.

Naturally, I have many more photos than are show on in this post The full collection can be found here, with my "main" pictures found here.

Enjoy!

I had a pretty awesome Memorial Day weekend last weekend. I went up to my parents' place for the first time since Christmas. They're fine, the cat is stupid fine, and the rest of my family is fine.

I've been wearing my knee braces whenever I walk around, just like my doctor told me to, and they've gotten much much better. I have an MRI scheduled for this coming Wednesday, so we can see what precisely is going on inside the knee. Still, I can walk for considerable distances and feel well enough to do my normal thing at Anthrocon at this point.

(PROTIP: Want to get the smell out of neoprene knee braces? Soak in 1 cup vinegar and 1 cup hot water for an hour. That kills the fungus.)

Speaking of Anthrocon, I spent yesterday working with registration laptops, giving funny looks to MSIE 8, and testing all of our badge printers. Everything still works, and I feel more confident about onsite registration this year (not that last year didn't go fine) because my code has remained largely unchanged since last year, and I made more documentation for troubleshooting purposes, should anything go wrong.

While visiting my parents, I took a trip to the old neighborhood where I grew up, walked around, and took many pictures. Once again, the UV filter on my camera did its job.

And here's the whole set, browseable in Flash:

Enjoy!

So the user Jalterixnar on the Anthrocon forums was nice enough to create a commercial for Anthrocon 2010 and post it on YouTube:

That is amazingly cool, and the tool used to create it was at http://www.youtube.com/searchstories. I've been playing with it on my own, and it's quite neat, as it allows different kinds of searches to be performed, as well as choosing different music.

I'm unclear whether this was just a "toy" that Google created, or whether they plan on using it to revolutionize the advertising industry, but it certainly is a great step in that direction.

Wow, it's been awhile since I've written here. Real life has had me very busy lately. I've done some neat things though, and I hope to post more about them soon.

The first neat thing I did recently was to roll out some badly needed updates for the user pages on anthrocon.org.

Before, I merely used the default pages that Drupal provided. The problem was that the pages looked a little... bland. Among other things, there were no icons for the various social networking services, and that just wouldn't do. So I read up on how to customize the user profile layout in Drupal and spent a couple of evenings writing some PHP code and making use of Drupal's theming functions.

Here are the old and the new pages side by side. Click on either to get a full page in a separate window.

Old and busted:		New hotness:

The upside of this effort is that when I'm ready to upgrade the Save Ardmore Coalition site to Drupal 6, I can pretty much just copy over my user templates on a wholesale basis, and save myself from having to redo all that work. :-)

Looking back after this morning's stampede, I thought I'd share with folks how the webserver held up, since I know I am not the only geek out there. And, truth be told, I was a bit nervous myself, since I wasn't quite sure just how much traffic we would get and if the webserver would survive, or turn into a smoking crater.

Well, here's what we got:

The first hump is a manual backup I did last night. The second is the automatic backup that runs every morning, where the database and files are rsynced to a machine at another data center. The third hump at 9 AM was when we opened hotel reservations. 1.4 Megabits/sec doesn't look too bad, until you look at:

The 336 simultaneous connections a second was far more interesting. That's about 16 times the normal number of connections to the webserver.

So, what were the effects? Let's look at MySQL first:

Wow, this took a long time to write. :-) It was something I had been procrastinating on for awhile, mostly on account of me not uploading my pictures. Now that all of my pictures are up on Flickr, I can get down to writing about the con.

Anthrocon 2009 started for me on the Tuesday evening before the con. I met up with Whitefeet, Ethan Staghorne, and Pinky in Philadelphia. I picked up a rental car, and we headed out to Pittsburgh. Ethan brought along an iTrip and we took turns listening to each others' iPods.

Wednesday was a pretty calm day for me. I got Ops set up and running, and then got the Registration computers set up later in the evening. This year was a change, as I was tasked with writing the convention's registration software. So I made sure I had extra time to get everything set up and tested well in advance.

Come Thursday, I was starting to get the pre-launch jitters. People were lining up for onsite registrations, and I wanted to be sure that my software would work properly. Nik Vulper even remarked to me once that I had my "game face" on. When Registration did finally open around 3, I was please to see that my code did actually run properly. Other than making periodic backups and checking that the slave database server was staying in sync, I didn't have any serious work to do in Registration the rest of the weekend.

On Friday, I danced a bit in DJ Protocollie's dance that night, then swung by my room. I found waiting for me a 10-pack of small bottles of different Swedish liquors, courtesy of Ethan, and a printing out drinking songs to sing with them. Ethan explained that you were supposed to sing between shots. I just stared at incomprehensible Swedish between shots. (Swedish is almost as difficult to understand as Danish is, I might add :-)

Saturday was the quietst day for Con Ops. I spent a fair amount of time out and about the con that day. It was also the day we held the fursuiter parade, where a total of 640 fursuiters marched in it. I remember when the number was announced over the radio, I had to ask that it be repeated, because I wasn't sure I heard it right the first time.

Sunday was the "let's wrap things up day". Registration and Ops were winding down. All I had to do in reg was run final stats, make a final backup of the data, and pack up the computers. The total number of attendees at Anthrocon 2009? 3,776 attendees

Looking back after the con, there were a number of things that made it really fun:

I haven't written much here besides Anthrocon stuff lately, and that is due to most of the non-$DAYJOB stuff I've been doing was in fact Anthrocon stuff. I got code complete with my registration system code late on Friday evening. And seeing things like this always brings a smile to my face:

The more observant folks will notice a change in naming conventions for my classes. That came at a point when I realized, both on a hobbyist and professional level, that more and more code was being written in CamelCase/StudlyCaps, and I had a much easier time writing and reading code like that. Maybe one day I'll redo the classes that are not capitalized, but it's more important to have a product that's finished and operational than it is to constantly be tinkering with it. :-)

Back at FCN, I got a conbadge drawn by Rukis:

I'd say that's the most "realistic" character art I've had drawn to date. I certainly like it!

I got a not-so-pleasant surprise the other day from PhillyCarShare. Seems they decided to shut down all of their pods in the Main Line. No warning, no notice, and oh--they're still taking my money every month. Fraud concerns aside, that suddenly left me with no reliable method of transportation to Dr. K, my Primary Care Provider. Oops. That left me scrambling to find another Physician. I finally got to see Dr. W today who is A) Openly Gay, and B) Poked fun at the medical student in the room. I can live with that!

As for PhillyCarShare, I went ahead and registered PhillyCarShareSucks.com. I haven't done anything with the domain yet, but I think I may put some content on there sooner or later.

Also, Dr. W told me to start taking "Glucosamine/Chondroitin/MSM". Did I just turn 90 all of a sudden?

The real reason I went to see Dr. W, though, was because of a minor but persistent pain in my right foot, behind the big toe. It feels like a muscle cramp, but ice isn't helping it much. I was sent for an x-ray today, to rule out a stress fracture in my foot. We'll see if that ends up being the case or not. At least the pain isn't debilitating. It'd be nice to get lots of mileage at Anthrocon, however.

And in case folks haven't seen it yet, here is Anthrocon's latest promotional video:

Wow. What a blast.

3,390 members. And 453 fursuits in our fursuit parade.

Simply astonishing.

I'd like to thank my hard working Operations Staff for helping make it happen, as well as the Dorsai Irregulars for doing their thing. I'd also like to thank our hard working volunteers who came by to help us set up and tear down. You guys rock, and are one of the reasons why Anthrocon Operations went so well this year.

I'll post a full report later, but for now I'm going to read through the post-con surveys.

Oh, you didn't fill one out?

http://www.anthrocon.org/survey

Please tell us what you liked, and what we can do to improve. Thanks!