A general update on life, the universe, and everything

Post by **StarFyre** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 12:51 pm

AKA: What I've been up to lately, and why I've not been on.

So work finished, school's back in session, and my posted 3-weeks-to-freedom came and went.

Well, when I got back, the first week or so was spent with a headache from hell that wouldn't go away no matter what I took. Joe (fiance) had a bit of class hell that he took care of by dropping some classes and picking up different, less hellish ones. Other random small things occurred that are not memory worthy.

A while after that I completely lost my phone for about three days. And I mean, completely lost. As in, we turned the house upside down, I dumped my backpack out multiple times, etcetc. Only for Joe to find my phone in my backpack while pulling my computer out. Black holes. Bleh.

Then Joe's sister was getting a bunch of bull from SIUE (sister campus to the campus Joe and I are at) about financial aid because the award letter she was given included a Plus Loan (a loan that only parents can fill out and sign) and she accepted it without realizing. So Joe and I had to help her navigate the SIU financial aid system (not for the weak of heart, I'll tell you that much.) Taking care of that was a bit of a headache for us, simply because the financial aid office at SIU seems to rejoice in confusing the frack out of everyone and everything, including their workers.

The next big issue is the car. On Tuesday I took it in to fix an issue that we thought was linked at a belt failing. Well, a belt had failed, true, but the true cause was the compressor finally gave up the ghost. According to dad, it was a salvaged part (not remanufactured, just salvaged) that was put in over 4 years ago, so it lasted pretty long. So the compressor needs to be replaced, along with its associated lines, and it was discovered that, after 17 years, two of the engine mounts are finally starting to give. So those need to be replaced sometime soon-ish, though they're not critical because it's a slow failure process and the engine isn't moving more than a half centimeter or so at the moment.

The proposed bill for engine mounts and compressor system, including tax and labor, is $1000. We can afford it. We know we can afford it, because we ran the numbers three times, each time putting more and more worse-case scenarios in (everything from having to replace a computer to having a relatively major hospital bill appear for one or both of us, which is unlikely unless we get hit by a car or break a limb somehow, since we do take care of ourselves.) That doesn't make the decision any easier, especially with the offer that my dad made me last night, which would be for him to drive down and trade the Sable for the Taurus (I do have reservations about the Sable though. Call me wierd, but the Sable and the Taurus may be practically the same car, but the Sable feels like a wallowing beast to me, compared to the Taurus). My dad also mentioned the point of no return (the point reached when a car is no longer worth the upkeep), and suggested that maybe the Taurus had reached that point.

What we decided was that the point of no return was when another massive failure occurred that involves parts not likely to last over a year and a half (basically near total system failure), costing around $1000 or more in parts and labor, OR when the engine and/or transmission goes. If either of those situations occur, the Taurus has reached it's point of no return.

So, I think we're confident saying that we'll get the car repaired tomorrow. I trust the mechanics that will be working on it. I'm going to talk with my father again tonight after classes and tell him the decision, and what our limits on the Taurus are. I hope it goes well...

So that's my minor hell that I've been through. And why I'm still not going to be on that often. Hell, I haven't even LOOKED at art or drawing since I posted the message in the absence forum.

Sigh.

Talk to you all later.

Post by **Dray** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 2:03 pm

boo, ridiculous business!

D: Hope things get worked out for you!

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 2:39 pm

Yeeyikes. o.o

Well, hang in there, at least you're handling pretty well.

lol backpack of holding

Post by **StarFyre** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 4:42 pm

So apparently my dad has a magic wand of "Make Everything Better."

He can do the engine mounts himself. He has the engine lift, the know how, and access to the parts. Cutting THAT out of the work to be done on it tomorrow means that about half of that bill will be ignored, dropping $1000 down to only around $500 or so.

That, and in the eventual case when the engine dies, he can get a replacement engine for between $400-500 and do the replacement himself. (Compare: Typical engine replacement costs around $1600 for the part itself. Labor for DOING the replacement comes to another $1600 or more, depending upon how much the place decides to rip you off. Plus tax. This is why Joe and I said that the engine dying would be a point of no return. It's a flipping 17 year old car. Not worth over $3200.)

And seriously, I wish I could make my backpack act as a bag of holding at will =P But those Use Magic Item skill rolls are a bit too high for me, I keep botching them. A bag of holding would be infinitely useful at times.

Post by **Dray** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 4:44 pm

WOW! Pays to have blue-collars in the family. XDD

Congrats! :D

Post by **StarFyre** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 5:01 pm

There's mechanics on both sides of the family, actually. And thanks to my dad, _I_ could technically do the work if I had the engine hoist, since I've actually helped him a lot on other cars we own.

It's why I can say without a doubt that I trust the mechanics I'm taking the car to. They're not robbing me blind, the work they do is high quality work, and a woman, sitting by herself in the office while she's waiting for her car to be finished, is neither harassed, belittled, nor ignored. That, and I can walk around back and watch the mechanic actually work on my car, and he'll explain what he's doing and why. Friendly people, yay.

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 5:19 pm

What, are they all gay? o.0 lol

Post by **Dray** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 5:39 pm

That's a very good deal indeed! XD

Astra · Post by **Astra** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:41 am

Wow, looks like you've had a lot of stress lately! I can only try to help with one of your problems, and that's the financial aid one -- the school SHOULDN'T give the parents a loan unless they (the parents) sign a form saying they want it and consenting to a credit check. Otherwise it should just sit there and never disburse and eventually go away. If the school pays through a plus loan without the signature, then as far as I know, that's illegal. But they may do things differently than at my school. Is it a direct lending institution, or did they have to go through a private bank? And I agree, financial aid offices do delight in confusing people. My school kind of has the opposite problem, where it's not well advertised that you need to fill out paperwork for the plus loan, and people get angry because they seem to be under the impression that accepting it is enough. Also, again, I don't know how they do it at your school, but can't you just call the financial aid office and be like "I don't want this loan. Make it go away. Kthx." *scratches head*

Astra · Post by **Astra** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:41 am

kills the double post. Is the forum acting wonky for everyone else too?

Post by **StarFyre** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 9:07 am

Well, what was going on with Rachael's (Joe's sister) financial aid was that the Plus loan had appeared on her award letter, she'd accepted it, then nothing else for the loan got done because none of them realized that it was a PARENT loan.

Where the trouble came is that the loan was for about half her tuition, so the school was going "AHEM, we need money for the second payment of the semester." What else was going on is that SIU (and I don't know whether other schools have this policy) has a policy where, if you don't want ONE loan, it goes "oh, so then you don't need ANY financial aid. YOINK." So the trouble was getting the Plus loan pulled and another loan set in place without hitting that reaction.

And of course for a loan, there needs to be cosigners (especially since Rachael has never taken a loan out before, much less for like.. $14000 at once c.c;; ), and their parents haven't exactly been on the ball either. I think it's mostly taken care of, but I'm not sure. The ball's passed from our court and back into the hands of their parents and Rachael herself.

EDIT: Yes, the board is acting wonky. Not sure what the php is trying to do, but I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be doing that.

Post by **StarFyre** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 9:33 am

Okay, apparently we can't post new topics at the moment. OR, if we CAN, they're not showing up because the page isn't refreshing for some reason. I've already noticed that the front page doesn't seem to be refreshing to reflect any posts made today, maybe new topics not showing up is another result. ALSO, new posts are NOT being marked as such.

So, I'm going to post what should be a new topic here and alter the topic header (or attempt to. EDIT: Cannot alter topic titles. Don't try. It gives an error similar to the first but says that it "Cannot delete word entry" and kicks you back out to the Index) to reflect this.

BEGIN NEW TOPIC:

Okay, I'm not quite sure how the board is set up, BUT, trying to post something yields a general error like this:

Code: Select all

Could not insert new word

DEBUG MODE

INSERT IGNORE INTO phpbb_devsearch_wordlist (word_text, word_common) VALUES ('14000', 0), ('accepted', 0), ('ahem', 0), ('aid', 0), ('another', 0), ('appeared', 0), ('award', 0), ('back', 0), ('ball', 0), ('balls', 0), ('c', 0), ('came', 0), ('care', 0), ('cosigners', 0), ('course', 0), ('court', 0), ('done', 0), ('especially', 0), ('exactly', 0), ('financial', 0), ('getting', 0), ('goes', 0), ('half', 0), ('hands', 0), ('herself', 0), ('hitting', 0), ('joes', 0), ('letter', 0), ('loan', 0), ('money', 0), ('mostly', 0), ('needs', 0), ('one', 0), ('parent', 0), ('parents', 0), ('passed', 0), ('payment', 0), ('place', 0), ('plus', 0), ('policy', 0), ('pulled', 0), ('quot', 0), ('rachael', 0), ('rachaels', 0), ('reaction', 0), ('realized', 0), ('school', 0), ('schools', 0), ('second', 0), ('semester', 0), ('set', 0), ('shed', 0), ('since', 0), ('sister', 0), ('siu', 0), ('sure', 0), ('taken', 0), ('think', 0), ('trouble', 0), ('tuition', 0), ('whether', 0), ('yoink', 0)

Line : 234
File : functions_search.php

And trying to do a search yields this:

Code: Select all

Could not obtain matched posts list

DEBUG MODE

SQL Error : 145 Table './devia2_database/phpbb_devsearch_wordlist' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

SELECT m.post_id FROM phpbb_devsearch_wordlist w, phpbb_devsearch_wordmatch m WHERE w.word_text LIKE 'starfyre' AND m.word_id = w.word_id AND w.word_common <> 1 

Line : 341
File : search.php

Obviously from the fact that we can post (EDIT: apparently only to existing topics), this has nothing to do with the actually posting and viewing portions of the code (EDIT: this is now questionable), but from what I can tell from the errors, either there's a file or two missing and/or corrupt, or a database table is missing/corrupt (as the search function error actually states that a specific table has crashed).

I'd say to start there, with the two files that are referenced in the errors, and also check the table that's referenced in the second error.

Mmm, corrupted data.

Astra · Post by **Astra** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 10:50 am

Really? They would take away all your financial aid? What a stupid policy. And yeah I hate plus loans. They have shitty rates and shitty policies which is why they're able to offer so much of them without limit, unlike the stafford loans which (at my school at least) are limited to about 5500/year. But I could rant for hours about financial aid policies, so probably best not to get started

And yeah, I work at my school's financial aid office, which is why I know all this random stuff.

Post by **StarFyre** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:52 am

Yep, the school's policy is that if you decline ONE thing, all the rest of it goes bye-bye as well. Because obviously you don't need any of it, since you're declining one thing. That hit one of my friends this year (none of us were aware of this interesting fact until that moment), but luckily it gives you a warning and lets you back out of the choice before it's final.

That's not MUCH of an upside, but at least it doesn't quietly kill all your financial aid and leave it to the bursar to be like "Yo, give us money." (Because bursars obviously talk like bad gangsters.)

Astra · Post by **Astra** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 12:00 pm

Obviously

Those naughty, naughty bursars.

Post by **Dray** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:14 pm

D: I hope that the debug errors get fixed! I'd hate if we lost all of this delicious history!

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:37 pm

I've noticed that a lot of the new members have all been bots. Maybe something plopped malicious code onto the forums?
(haha I typed it as "malicious cod" at first)

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:39 pm

okay, I have no idea what most of this means, but it looks some someone found a fix?
http://forums.theplanet.com/lofiversion ... 85100.html

Post by **StarFyre** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 4:30 pm

To put it into plainspeak (and ignoring the php code that was splashed up there, though that's an option as well).

Go into phpmyadmin (I believe this board has that? It makes it much easier if it does) and from there click on the table "phpbb_devsearch_wordlist", go to the Operations tab, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on "Repair table". (NOTE: the sql documentation recommends making a backup of the database first, just in case something glitches in the repair process).

Basically, that button calls a specific MySQL command that's nearly identical to the php code that was displayed in what it does (it repairs a table), it's just the official sql repair command instead of a php file to be run.

If it all needs to be done in sql, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/ ... table.html there's the Repair documentation on the sql command, or there's always running the php file that the guy posted on that one board.

I don't BELIEVE any unrecoverable data will be important in the long run (and I think anything lost will be regained eventually) - it seems to be the table related specifically to the search function (the word list of words that a search query pokes at to see if such-and-such string appears anywhere or not), not anything else like the post history or the like.

Malicious code from bots is unlikely. From the looks of things, this seems like a fairly typical case of table corruption. Think of it this way: Ever poked at old files, and found that they wouldn't open for some reason? Like a word document or whatever, and Word would spit out a "file corrupt!" error? Same issue. Minor glitches in the recording medium can create corrupt data, or if the host-server partially crashed or glitched or similar. We like to think of data as solid and untouchable, but the cold truth of the matter is this: it's all just 1's and 0's. A TINY change in any piece of the binary string will corrupt data. The position of the change will determine whether it's noticable to the casual observer or not. It's like DNA in that way... think of all the diseases out there that are the result of one or two changes.

The likely cause of the board screaming in agony is that the header (the part of the table that tells the other parts of the board what the table is, what categories are in the table, etc.. the metadata, basically) is changed just enough that none of the other files or tables recognize the entity anymore. Likely, all the data still exists within it, but nothing can get in or out anymore, because it no longer knows how to talk to other entities.

Xenoqueen · Post by **Xenoqueen** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 5:43 pm

Unfortunately, I have no idea what phpmyadmin or SQL are. When I update the php coding, I do it by manual copy-paste (via FTP) of updated files I get in an update .zip from the phpBB site. There are no other coding/php/etc tools used in that maintenance. :\

Post by **StarFyre** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:25 pm

PHPMyAdmin is a shiny frontend you usually have to get to by going through the control panel for the website. SQL itself is a database language - Structured Query Language. Whether you know it or not, phpBB is running SQL in the background, it's how the collection of tables that phpBB set up actually speaks with the front end that we all see.

But that's neither here nor there. If you don't know those two options, then we'll just do it this way.

Modified slightly from the board that Mud posted (to take into account the specific table name that needs repairing).

www.silveredmagic.com/downloads/fix.rar

Download that and drop the file fix.php into the root of the database. After you do that, access the file (the filepath would be something like www.deviant-uprising.com/nexus/fix.php -- dropping that (or whatever the actual path of the file is) into your address bar and loading the page will cause the php to run, causing the sql calls to be made). IF the assumptions made at the beginning of the file are correct, that should attempt to repair the issue.

Either way, post what the results are? Especially if it's an error message. I can determine what's wrong from there, probably, and correct the file.

Xenoqueen · Post by **Xenoqueen** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 5:31 pm

Result:

Code: Select all

Report:
Query 1: Ran successfully

Post by **StarFyre** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 10:43 pm

*Sigh* Well, that shoots that lovely little idea out of the water. I'm, honestly, out of things to suggest at this point. Without being able to poke at the database itself, I can't deduce what's wrong just from these error codes.

.... well, I guess one last stab can be made..

Phe, can you get into the cpanel for deviant-uprising? ( www.deviant-uprising.com/cpanel ) If you can, look around for PhpMyAdmin. Opening that should display at least one database... on the structure tab, when viewing the root of the database so that a bunch of tables are visible, scroll to the bottom of the list of tables, hit check all, then on the dropdown window next to it, select repair table.

Maybe hitting every table with a repair call will work...

EDIT: AHA! Let's try all that with another file since you have FTP access, this one a general AoE REPAIR call instead of a specific one. Go to here: http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/fixing- ... rom-mysql/ then read through the entire page and snag the program he has posted. It looks like he's got all bases covered. Try the general repair-all code first, and if the board keeps spitting the errors, use the suggestion at the bottom of the page, replacing "search words" with "phpbb_devsearch_wordlist"

Post by **Dray** » Sat Sep 13, 2008 10:42 am

O_O Starfyre, you're a blessing to this forum. XD

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Sat Sep 13, 2008 11:37 am

Did it work?

... obviously the only way to check is to... press the button!

Post by **Dray** » Sat Sep 13, 2008 11:52 am

I don't think that Phe's gotten around to trying it, yet! :o

Post by **StarFyre** » Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:08 pm

=P Dray, I'm a Computer Science major. If my teachers have taught me anything (which some of you may question, considering other posts I've made about the quality of my department), it's that I may not (indeed, WILL NOT) know everything, but I damn well know where to look, and have enough knowledge to sort the gems from the dross.

Besides, I may not be around here as often as I'd like, but the Nexus is my home too. I'd like to do what I can to keep it healthy and alive.

Xenoqueen · Post by **Xenoqueen** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 1:52 pm

I followed the site....

I'm not getting error messages...

...anyone else?

Post by **StarFyre** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 2:03 pm

Running a search query doesn't return errors. Lets see if this throws up any errors.

EDIT: And let's try editing.

EDIT2: AND IT WORKS!!

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 4:20 pm

YYEAAAHHHHH!!!

!!!
Good going Starfyre and Phe!