I told you tentacle movement is really complex » « Why are atheist conversion stories by Christians so damned unconvincing?

She’s persistent, I give her that

Today has been blog maintenance day. I’ve been tidying up some things behind the scenes here at FtB, and I’m also almost done with a chore over on ScienceBlogs. Some of you who’ve been around for a while know that 5 years ago, National Geographic took over the management of Sb (it’s one of the things that prompted Ed Brayton and I to move out, since they were going to have some new policies), and one of the first things they did was update the blogs there to WordPress.

In my case, they botched it. My site was so huge and full of comments that their scripts weren’t able to cope, and while they got my posts updated, mostly, they butchered the comments: an unknown number of comments were outright lost (I estimate somewhere around half a million to a million; don’t be surprised, we’re approaching a million comments on FtB Pharyngula soon), and another 750,000 were erroneously flagged as spam, and hidden away in the spam queue. Easy to handle, right? Just approve all those mistakenly filtered comments, and voila! Done!

Except…I don’t have direct access to the database, so I can’t just charge in and approve all those records through MySQL. No, I have to do it through the WordPress interface, which is limited to doing 250 comments at a time. It’s 3 clicks of the mouse to approve 250 comments, but 750,000 comments? You do the math. So what I do is once or twice a week, I sit down and plod through a thousand or two comments. When I feel like it. It’s really boring, so there are long lapses where I just let it go. But today, I got it down to just 20,000 comments held up, so I was going to power through and get ’em all done at last.

But…boring. Easily distracted.

So anyway, while doing all of that stuff, I ran across this old post of mine that made me chuckle. I’m writing about this woman who has been stalking me for decades. Decades, I tell you! Since 1957! It’s amazing how much similarity there has been in our lives. And then I realized that post was written ten years ago…and she’s still here.

Shhh. She’s in the next room. Don’t make a noise or she might notice. My knee is acting up, or I’d try to sneak out and make a run for it. Maybe you can get away for me and come back with help.

She just went into the kitchen. There are knives there. I’m so afraid.

I told you tentacle movement is really complex » « Why are atheist conversion stories by Christians so damned unconvincing?

Comments

  1. Intaglio says

    Careful you might embarrass your kids by being elders who HOLD HANDS and CANOODLE

    I’ve always wondered, do you need a canoe to canoodle?

    Congratulations on surviving an infestation of girl cooties and double to Mary for surviving being close to a stinky boy.

  2. gazza says

    A story all the more romantic with the hindsight of time. I can think of a similar dozen twists and turns that if they hadn’t gone a certain way then I wouldn’t be with my life partner.
    Sometimes life is crap, but mostly it isn’t when you’re lucky with this sort of outcome…

  3. says

    Haven’t you heard the news? Traditional marriage has been ruined. Sorry.

    Oh, wait, that’s a typo, it said “renewed”! My bad.

  4. says

    Anytime I need to do a task involving repetitiveness (hmm, I need to clean out my email inbox soon…) I just get some music to play and focus on that.

  5. Jacob Sherwood says

    I hope you’re not doing this all by hand. Surely there’s an API to make this easier? If not, it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to screen scrape and let a computer do all the work for you.

  6. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    My stalker is downstairs. We completed today’s exercises, and I’ll feed her dinner later. But I’ll cut the entree ;)

  7. F.O. says

    You could have automated the thing with some browser automation framework, like Selenium or an Electron script.

  9. John Morales says

    The loss of such a large part of that dataset was a disappointing outcome, and it’s creditable you (realistically) ascribe it to incompetence rather than to malice, PZ.

  10. Rob Grigjanis says

    Intaglio @1:

    I’ve always wondered, do you need a canoe to canoodle?

    There’s a joke about canoodling in canoes, American beer, and fucking close to water, but I’ve learned that Americans are very sensitive about that, so I won’t repeat it.

  11. colinday says

    It’s 3 clicks of the mouse to approve 250 comments, but 750,000 comments? You do the math.

    750,000/250 X 3 = 3,000 clicks.

  13. says

    Well, depending on how much you care about it, and how similar the pages are, it is possible to automate that sort of task on a Mac using AppleScript to execute Javascripts in the browser window. For example, the following (really mediocre but working) script will delete 5 screens worth of messages in a mail account on Yahoo mail, when that is open in the frontmost window in Safari:

    with timeout of (3 * days) seconds
    tell application “Safari”
    set y to the id of window 1
    tell tab 1 of window id y
    repeat 5 times
    do JavaScript “var x = document.getElementsByClassName(‘selectmsg’);for(var i=0;i<x.length;i++){(x[i]).checked = true;}document.getElementById('top_delete').click();"
    delay 3
    end repeat
    end tell
    end tell
    end timeout

    (It’s a long time since I put that together; IIRC, the weird “set x to the id of window 1” followed by “tell tab 1 of window id x” forces the script to keep using the same window even if you open new ones while it is running. I sort of remember testing it out and finding that if you just use “tell tab 1 of window 1” and then open a new window while the script is running the script suddenly switches to the new window and fails.)

  14. Intaglio says

    @Rob Grigjanis #10
    I’m about to reveal my age. That joke was originally about lovemaking in a punt and Watney’s Red Barrel

  15. Rich Woods says

    @Intaglio #14:

    Thankfully Watney’s Red Barrel had just about disappeared by the time I could pass for 18, so that might explain why I clearly remember first hearing that joke being told in an Australian accent and it referencing Foster’s.

  16. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    I feel it behoves me to warn you, PZ – cooties, yes, they dissipate over time, but girl germs? They don’t go anywhere, they just get smarter. They find ways to hide from your sight; get close to you. They’re on your scent even now. You need to run!

  17. danjouswoodenhand says

    Do you have any sort of admin privileges on wordpress? If you can install a plug-in, there are some that will bulk delete comments.

  18. wzrd1 says

    In reference to 1993, my company is holding a contest.
    First prize is a week in Philadelphia.
    Second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia.*

    For the record, I grew up in Philadelphia and her suburbs.

    *Thank you, W.C. Fields.

  19. says

    Rob Grigjanis @10
    Intaglio @1:

    I’ve always wondered, do you need a canoe to canoodle?

    There’s a joke about canoodling in canoes, American beer, and fucking close to water, but I’ve learned that Americans are very sensitive about that, so I won’t repeat it.

    Now I’m curious about this joke and need to hear it.

    Or is this a Noodle Incident?

  20. says

    @#19, WMDKitty — Survivor:

    Now I’m curious about this joke and need to hear it.

    Actually, Rob Grigjanis already basically told it. It goes like this:

    “Why is sex in a canoe like American beer?”
    “They’re both fucking close to water.”

    The joke is told by anyone who wants to be condescending about a beverage which they feel is better in their home country because it is stronger. I’d never heard it about beer before, only coffee.