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

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. 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)!
5. 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
6. 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!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to 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!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

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 mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

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.

The empire strikes back

In 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 again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, 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 postcards

Last 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 week

If 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!
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I'm on the floor with the boys in the utility room with about 150 crickets (cockroaches that can jump).

The boys are 'on patrol' in case any crickets jump out and escape: they're new to this and apprehensive... (the boys and the crickets)

Wolf(6) decides he wants to hold one: it crawls up his arm and oh, so nearly up his T-shirt sleeve: but he's lucky. He makes a sudden grab for it as it reaches his shoulder and it jumps onto the floor. The cricket freezes, like, "wow! Where am I now?!", and looks entirely freaked out. The boys have been prepared and know to move slowly: the cricket is safely captured and restored to the community and the boys feel like something big happened.

Caroline appears wanting to get to the washing machine...
"Don't come in, Mum!", says Wolf, "There's loads of buggerization going on!"!!!

Some looks are priceless.

Mantids are cool: it's undeniable: two large compound eyes (that appear to have pupils that always look at you) and three other 'simple' eyes between their little antennae all perched on a head that can rotate almost all the way round; four little fingers around its mouth (maxilla) to stuff food into its six chewing devices, not to mention great hearing (its one of the few insects that can avoid bats by diving out of the way at the last instant). They're also have dog-like and cat-like behaviour (coming towards you when they see you arrive and snuggling up to warm hands). Best of all, they often do their catching and eating performance just as you want to demonstrate it, simply because they only go for moving prey, and if their prey is fruit flies - the flies often don't move until you make them (by moving the vivarium etc.).

So after noticing someone selling some 'rare' Peacock Mantises very cheaply, we ended up buying three and they're awesome!
The puzzle has been the how to feed them!
We bought 'fruit fly culture' and split the flies into several jars with our home-made goo in the bottom: whizzed up orange and banana peel, potato, oats and a sprinkling of activated yeast (and anything else that fitted in the food processor). The flies are 'flightless' but have wings which means they are hilarious to deal with because they still think they can fly, but they actually just fall over... Apparently they naturally live in drains and a part of drain survival appears to be the urge to climb upwards (I guess the ones that didn't climb, drowned). So escapees are easy to catch: just wait and a few minutes later they'll be waiting at the top of the nearest jar/bottle/tap etc. put a hand under them and a finger near enough to trigger their 'flight' reflex and they jump/fall into your hand! Easy to breed too... we now have thousands and only five mantids (we also bought two tiny Congo Mantises).
They lay eggs in the goo which turn into tiny maggots. After a while the maggots climb up looking for a crack to settle in and make a pupa (like a chrysalis), which looks like a hard maggot with two horns (attachment points). If the goo is in a jar, they'll just attach to the sides of the jar, but they love grooves that are about 4mm deep and 1mm wide, so they will line up around a screw-thread if there is any exposed (I tried cutting up loads of straws to make a big surface area over the goo, but they're not that impressed). After a few days the flies emerge from the pupa and start climbing up. A lace curtain square over the neck of the jar keeps things ventilated, but contained. As they hatch, the flies collect on the curtain: I just hold the jar over my main fly container (fly city) and take off the lid: they climb up, jump and land in fly city. The flies in the 'city' are happy with the food and water there and not interested in climbing the plastic sides: they congregate on a cardboard lattice and do whatever fruit flies do... which mostly seems to involve staring a lot.

Once they've out-grown fruit-flies, the mantids eat baby crickets. So I bought some large ones to breed. They arrived as completely revolting 'cockroaches that can jump' and I wasn't impressed. They had all been eating each other: many were limbless, some just heads walking around on the last two legs: yuk. After figuring out how to make them happy, with a three-floor block of flats for them to live in and a variety of food to eat, they've stopped eating each other and started mating a lot. They're 'silent' brown house-crickets and only make a sort of mouse-squeak noise that is almost cute. Cleaning them out is easy now I've learned about their behaviour. I'll explain in depth in case it is useful: if they have cover and something a little scary happens (like the vivarium moving), they freeze; if they have no cover, they scuttle and only if something extremely sudden happens do they jump... so the flats can take up half the tub they're in and go to within an inch of the top. When the lid is taken off, they won't jump out unless something really sudden happens (even knocking the tub isn't sudden enough). Slowly lift out the food and other objects to a new tub, then lift out each floor of the cricket flats in turn and the crickets just freeze and hold on tight! Only the crickets that didn't get lifted out once all the flats are gone go into scuttle-mode and race round the floor, but this doesn't excite the last layer of crickets being carried across. Removing the kitchen towelling carpet is then reasonably easy: put in a bit of egg-carton for the shelter-less crickets to hide under, then lift up the carpet that wasn't under the carton. Move the carton to the bare floor, and remove the rest of the carpet. Wipe the floor clean around the last few crickets with damp toilet paper, then put the bit of egg carton covered in crickets into the other tub. The last few crickets can be tipped up into the other tub as well and this doesn't seem to excite the 'frozen' crickets: they stay frozen and still don't jump out! Lay new kitchen towel (I do a main floor, then four quarters to take out the bulk of the mess in sections), put the food and water in first (a bit of cabbage leaf gives the first few crickets somewhere to hide and prevents chaotic scuttling), then move the carton into the cleaned tub and flick it hard to get the crickets off and finish by carrying back the layers of cricket flats full of scared-stiff crickets. Any left in the bottom can be tipped in as before and you have clean crickets :-)