[plans] [newbie] [help] [hours] [phone] [groups] [css] [rideboard] [books] [jobs]
Thanks to everyone who has been reporting bugs with Plans v2.5. There are still a couple problems that we're aware of.
In the meantime, if you're having trouble logging into public plans (like [chicago] or [rideboard]) and you're having trouble, here's the easy fix.
1. Log in with the username and password.
2. When you are given the error message reenter "www.grinnellplans.com" into your browser. When the new page loads, you should be logged in to the public plan.
If you find other problems, please send us an email at grinnellplans@gmail.com, or, better yet, post it on the Plans Bug Tracker on Google Code.
Thanks for your patience. Hopefully we'll get these few kinks ironed out in the next week or so.
Saturday September 27, 2008. 9:18 PM
Things might have been broken for a couple of minutes a time tody. That's because we did a few intense changes in the source code today. Things should be stable now. If you noticed anything weird, let us know.
-[athanasa]
Wednesday September 10, 2008. 11:24 PM
On behalf of [athanasa]:
"Between 18:30 and 21:28 on September 10, 2008 you might have noticed
that Plans was extremely slow and occasionally web requests would time
out. This was because of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack
on the Plans server. Specifically, the response time of the server
went up to 221ms from the usual 0.61ms (measured from a router close
to the server).
At this point of time I will not release any information. I am
investigating the issue as time permits and should it be applicable I
will be submitting a report to the relevant authorities.
Even though I received pages (text messages) alerting me of the issue,
I was too busy working out/learning how to climb to notice my
screaming phone, therefore the ``long response time''."
- [oneileri]
Thursday July 2, 2008. 11:32AM
Please take some polls.
~[wellons]
Sunday June 8, 2008. 9:00AM
The Plans admins would like to welcome Alex Exarhos '10 as our newest administrator.
We also would like to thank Megan Goering '08 for her help with Plans over the past three years, as she steps down from being a Plans administrator.
We'd like to take this moment now, too, especially in the wake of certain changes in Plans (see previous post), to clarify the roles of the people involved with Plans.
The administrators exist to communicate with you, the Plans users. We answer questions, reset passwords, create accounts, manage secrets and post here to let you know what's going on with Plans. We also work with programmers to help improve Plans (we're ideas people).
The administrators are:
Mark Root-Wiley [rootwile] '09
Alex Exarhos [exarhosa] '10
Sidonie Straughn-Morse [straughn] '08
Eryn O'Neil [oneileri] '07
You can always reach us at grinnellplans@gmail.com.
We also have several people working on the Plans as programmers. They do pretty much everything the administrators don't (or can't), including creating new features, fixing bugs, resetting public plans that have been hacked, etc. Our primary programmer, who answers your most technical emails, is Jonathan Wellons [wellons] '04.
Lastly, but far from leastly, we have a server administrator. Theocharis Ian Athanasakis [athanasa] '09 hosts Plans on his own server, at his own expense. He is not involved with decisions concerning changes in Plans, creation or deletion of Plans, etc., but he is certainly an integral part in keeping Plans alive and well.
With administrative transparency,
Your Plans Admins
[straughn] [oneileri] [rootwile] [exarhosa]
Monday June 2, 2008. 12:27 PM
A message about this weekend's downtime from [athanasa]:
"Dear Planers,
On Saturday, May 31, 2008, at 5:45pm a power transformer caught fire
causing an explosion with severe consequences in the data center that
the Plans server resides. The data center technicians had to disable
any generators and backup power sources while the fire department was
gathering evidence to determine the cause of the fire and the
explosion. During that time, about 9,000 servers were without power.
No server (including ours) was harmed during the explosion--they were
just left without power for about 3 days. I apologize for the
extensive downtime but the circumstances were excruciating and beyond
my control.
At this time, secondary to cost considerations I am not considering
setting up a redundancy server (a secondary Plans server in a
secondary location for cases like this one). You can read the
continuous updates by the data center technicians at
http://service-update.theplanet.com/.
Your non-evil internet service provider,
[athanasa]"
Hey students and recent grads: Final grades are up on Pioneerweb. Enjoy!
-[straughn]
Thursday May 1, 2008. 4:22 PM
Dear Plans users,
Last Sunday, the hard drive in the server hosting Plans filled to capacity, taking the server offline. This cascaded into other problems which are not only difficult to fix, but must be fixed in person. As most of the work on the Plans server is done over the internet this left us unable to quickly rectify things, and Plans was down for several days.
Plans has since been moved to a server graciously hosted by Theocharis Ian [athanasa]kis '09, thanks to the efforts of [athanasa] and [wellons]. Unfortunately, the backup we had to restore from is about ten days old, and any updates, Notes posts, autoread settings, or preferences that have been changed since then have been (temporarily) lost. In about a week, we will have a mechanism for people who would like to recover the contents of their plan at the time the server went down. We regret having to roll back so many days, but we had to weigh the data loss against having the site down for days or even weeks more. Some features-- chat, Planlove v2 stats, and bug reporting-- are still unavailable, but all other features should be working. If you notice anything else that's strange, please contact us at grinnellplans@gmail.com.
We sincerely apologize to the Plans community for the downtime. We are working to ensure that Plans stays up as consistently as possible and have high hopes that this server move will bring us towards that goal. Many of you offered help and money to get Plans back on its feet, and we will post on the front page if we find ways that those offers can be utilized. Finally, anyone on Facebook should join the GrinnellPlans group. Check it out for status updates during any future outages (hopefully, there won't be any!) and to bond over the lack of Plans.
Eryn / [oneileri]
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:21 PM
Plans is looking for its next administrator! All will be considered but we're especially looking for a freshman or sophomore.
If you're interested, email grinnellplans@gmail.com with a couple paragraphs describing why you want to be an admin and one great idea for Plans's future by next Wednesday, April 23. Alternately, you will be made default Plans god if you can find the magic plastic ball hidden in a bush on campus*.
If you have any questions before submitting, drop us an email.
--[rootwile]
*not true
Hey everyone!
Thanks to those of you who liked our little April Fools' prank. Apologies to those who didn't.
Special apologies to those who clicked "change plan" while the font of their plan was flipped, and whose plans seem permanently upside-down. If you find yourself in this situation, here's what you can do:
Copy & paste your updates from yesterday and this morning into another document. Then drop us an email at grinnellplans@gmail.com--be sure to let us know you've already saved your recent updates and you're ready to have your plan reset. We'll reset your plan from the Monday night backup, and then you can paste your more recent updates back into your plan.
Our sincere apologies for your frustration. I wish you all a very happy April!
--[straughn]
We updated secrets early! We hope this makes everyone so happy!!
PS, hope everyone has had a fantastic break.
<3 [goeringm] [straughn]
I've finally gone and done it -- Grinnell Bloggers. If you're not already in the blogroll and would like to be added or if you are and want to be removed, send an email to grinnellbloggers@gmail.com. For all of you who don't blog, but who have Etsy or CafePress stores, I want those too! If you want to help out or have suggestions, let me know!
~ [bown], via [wellons]
Monday February 18, 2008. 8:38 PM
The log of the Plans development meeting can be found at http://www.math.grin.edu/~lyonavra/plans/dev_mtg_17Feb.txt.
Remember, development conversation will be ongoing at the GrinnellPlans Development Google Group. Go ahead and join if that's your bag.
- [oneileri]
Sunday February 10, 2008. 11:24 AM
A reminder: This meeting is today.
Some people on campus will be meeting in the MathLAN; otherwise, you can still get to the virtual meeting through the information below.
Attention, anyone interested in Plans code and/or development!
There will be an online meeting next Sunday at 12 noon CST for anyone interested in the direction of future development on Plans. We'll be working off of the agenda here (subject to change), and the meeting is open to all.
Time: 12:00 noon Central Time, Sunday Feb 17
Who: Admins, users, alums, students, programmers
What: Discussion of where to go with Plans development
Place: IRC irc.freenode.net, #grinnellplans
(You can access IRC via this link: http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~youngian/cgiirc-0.5.9/irc.cgi. Otherwise, you can download mIRC and do it the old fashioned way.)
Anyone who wants to continue being part of this process can join the GrinnellPlans Development Google Group.
Hope to see you Sunday,
[oneileri]
Monday, January 21, 2008. 4:47 PM
Plansland,
It is with great excitement that we release to you, class-year plans. We hope that these plans will help classes stay in touch and coordinate reunions and whatever other class-specific functions arise in the future. We look forward to watching the use of these plans evolve but expect that they may serve as directories of people from each class, class event calendars, a forum for questions and answers related to a specific class, and any other information that is relevant on to a certain year of Grinnell alumni. We especially hope that class officers will use these plans to their full advantage!
At this time, we've created plans for all classes starting with the year 2000 and running through 2007, the most-recently graduated class. If there is a need for plans for earlier classes, make sure to email us at grinnellplans@gmail.com. As always, if you have any other questions or comments, feel free to email us.
Like similar public plans, the username and the password are the same.
So, with that, have at it!
[2000alums] [2001alums] [2002alums] [2003alums] [2004alums] [2005alums] [2006alums] [2007alums]
-[plans]
Monday, January 21, 2008. 12:11 AM
The awesome [bishopbr] wanted all current students to know that you have to register on PioneerWeb by today (Monday) at 8am noon. Good luck!
-- [plans]
Tuesday, January 1, 2008. 8:27 PM
Hey current Grinnellians-- grades are up on PioneerWeb.
Happy new year,
- [goeringm]
Wednesday December 12, 2007. 7:13 PM
We apologize for the long downtime today. This was due to the Plans server running out of Hard Drive space.
~[wellons]
Monday, December 10, 2007. 12:27 PM
Who needs straw polls when you have Plans polls?
-[rootwile]
Friday November 30, 2007 (24 days until January 3, 2008). 12:30 PM
(via [wellons] on behalf of [kuobenja])
I have created a proof-of-concept version of Plans (username: test, password: test) that allows many kinds of HTML to be used in Plan content. It uses the TinyMCE interface, which provides word-style buttons for common HTML tags. Feel free to play around with the interface and leave any comments or suggestions. Please however keep in mind that this is a school related project and any additional content needs to remain appropriate.
Friday November 30, 2007. 9:41 AM
Polls are the opiate of the masses.
~[wellons]
Wednesday November 28, 2007. 12:11 PM
Many of you noticed over the last day or so that Plans would sometimes serve you a different page than the one you had clicked (and showed in your URL box). I believe this was caused by a bug in Apache's mod_rewrite module. I had started using a map program to correct some problems with the filesystem about two days ago.
When the web server, Apache, starts up, it starts the map program in the background. Each apache thread communicates with the map program using pipes. When the server received a new request from you, it hands the request off to a child process. The child then looks at the URL you requested, realizes it needs to a translation, gives the URL to the map program, then receives the new URL back (in almost all cases, it is expected to be the same afterwards).
What appears to have gone wrong in this case was that the child processes somehow got out of order when they picked up the remapped URLs. As a result, the pages you were seeing were not random after all, but switched with someone else who was trying to use Plans at the same time. For instance, if you submitted a plan edit and the same time someone else typed "wellons" in the read box and hit "Read", the child apache processes might receive the remapped URLs in a different order than they submitted them.
Your request for edit.php would instead be processed by read.php, which would ignore the plan content you had posted and instead look for a submitted name. Not finding one, it would say, "Must enter a name." Similarly, the other person's read request would be executed by edit.php, which would ignore the "wellons" and instead look for Plan content. Without it, it defaults to assuming the user wants to edit her plan and would present her with the edit pane.
Even requests for images and stylesheets go through this process and could get switched, although I would expect it to be less common because your broswer can cache these. Most of the time your browser would ignore substitutions like text for an image or an image for a stylesheet since they don't make any sense, but you might have seen others such as the tiled background image replaced by the Plans logo, or web page replaced by a stylesheet.
No personal data was compromised because Plans doesn't put anything sensitive in URLs, with one exception. If someone had registered a new plan and clicked the token link in their email and that had been switched with someone else, that someone else would have found himself looking at the "Here's your new password ... " page. Looking at Plans Genesis, this could have happened only to [yurickka], whom I'll email. However, as far as I know, the rest of Plans pages either don't work when submitted data is missing, or default to something innocuous. If you can think of any other examples, please email us at grinnellplans@gmail.com.
I've switched from using a separate map program to using a text list that Apache loads into memory at runtime. Hopefully, this will prevent this problem.
~[wellons]
Wednesday November 28, 2007. 12:15 AM
The post below is a humorous way of saying that we know Plans is being crazy right now, and we're working on it. If you see something crazy, such as getting a page other than the one you were looking for, it can probably be fixed by hitting "refresh". (But please don't hit refresh too much or you'll actually make it worse.)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
- [oneileri]
Tuesday November 27, 2007. 1:40 PM
We wanted to be sure that you have a chance to sample some of the wide variety of different plans and pages on Grinnellplans, so we've added a sweet new feature that once in a while, randomly shows you a different page than the one you clicked on.
~[wellons]
Monday November 26, 2007. 8:33 PM
I updated the bug link on the left navbar to link directly to the bug list, instead of the sterile login screen.
Saturday November 24, 2007. 10:27 PM
A troll posted numerous bogus notes threads and erased the content of many of the public city plans this afternoon. The offender used the [swap] plan, which was mistakenly left non-write-only. This has been corrected. The extra notes threads have been corrected and the city and other public plans restored to their states when backups were taken last night.
Please let us know at grinnellplans@gmail.com if you notice anything else that seems to have been abused. The troll never "hacked" Plans or had any access to anyone's account or personal data. It was entirely done simply using publicly available information and could have been done by anybody. In fact, this kind of thing happens every few months, and I only mention it because this person was more persistent than usual.
As part of this process, I've developed a program that makes it quite easy to restore a plan from backup. If you ever accidentally delete your own plan content, don't hesitate to ask for it to be recovered.
~[wellons]
Friday November 16, 2007. 12:09 PM
[Carey] wins the prize for posting the first new bug! The prize is one free week of Premium Plans membership, meaning she has access to a selection of animated emoticons to use on her Plan.
~[wellons]
Friday November 16, 2007. 8:55 AM
I've added a new optional link to the Plans sidebar that links to the Bug Database for Plans. It can be used both to report bugs and to request missing features (there isn't really any difference between the two). By default this link will appear in the sidebar links for all users, but it may be turned it off.
The first time you use the Bug database, you can either create an account to view all the existing bugs and their statuses and to submit new ones or you can use a guest account with these credentials:
Username: welllons+plansguest@gmail.com
Password: uoHFDM5YOR
If anyone knows how to configure Bugzilla to permit anonymous access, I'd love to hear it.
~[wellons]
Got dugged
Get Polled
~[wellons]
[bown] writes: I posted on my plan ([bown]) code for a "grinnelligent" button for blogs and webpages. It would be awesome if Grinnell bloggers would put it out there with their other networking buttons. Represent!
You can find the code for the button on This Notes Thread.
~[wellons]
Here is what it looks like:
October 29, 2007.
Dog hunt and teachers.
October 21, 2007.
"Monkeys"
Tuesday October 16, 2007. 11:06 AM
Take the New Polls.
~[wellons].October 8, 2007.
Elephant Repellant
October 3, 2007.
"Gryposaurus"
September 27, 2007.
"Feminists v. Linux geeks in fight to see who can have less sense of humor"
September 22, 2007.
Halo 3 -[blah]
September 22, 2007.
Back to work... -[blah]
September 23, 2007. 11:10 am
Sorry for the secrets hiatus everyone. They're up-to-date now.
-[rootwile]
September 22, 2007.
Is that an iguana in your leg? -[blah]
September 20, 2007.
Fetid meteor -[blah]
September 14, 2007.
Feeding 40k -[blah]
September 13, 2007.
Sibling rivalry -[blah]
September 11, 2007.
Metrification -[blah]
September 10, 2007.
Ships and drain tunnels.
-[blah]
September 7, 2007.
Sleep in. And lower your carbon footprint.
-[blah]
September 6, 2007.
Goats for Boeing.
-[blah]
September 2, 2007.
Ferral cats.
-[blah]
August 31, 2007.
Virgin Chicken.
-[blah]
Thursday, August 30, 2007.
Holy water a terrorist threat.
-[blah]
Wednesday, August 29, 2007.
Mounds of dirt.
-[blah]
Tuesday, August 28, 2007.
'Blasphemous' balls.
-[blah]
Monday, August 27, 2007.
"British man arrested for "stealing" wi fi".
-[blah]
Saturday, August 25, 2007.
The great cosmic nothingness.
-[blah]
Wednesday, August 8, 2007. 1:50 PM
Just in time for the school year, a [jobs] plan has been created. Check it out to post/find hot campus job openings or available positions for people in the "real world."
Also, please note that this has nothing to do with the recent outing of Fake Steve Jobs. Neither the fake nor real Steve have been given plans.
-[rootwile]
Aug 7, 2007
New York blah blah 9-11 9-11 freedom fries liberation whine whine free love I'm right you're wrong.
(See [emmons], [longc], [martinr])
Crazy mainland white yuppies-hillbillies.
XOXOX, [blah]
Aug 1, 2007
Scheme
XOXOX, [blah]
Aug 1, 2007
Grinnell College as a Safety School
XOXOX, [blah]
Saturday July 21, 2007. 1:20 PM
New to [plans]? Check out [newbie]!
The class of '11 is joining Plans in record numbers, considering it's mid-July. Check Plan Genesis (you can add the link under Preferences) and say hi to a first year or two.
Also, check out Plans on Facebook. Yeah, it's a little weird, but in addition to using the page to let incoming first years know about Plans, we'll (try to remember to) post on there to keep you informed when Plans is down.
- [oneileri]
Thursday July 12, 2007. 1:41 AM
Thanks to [youngian] for submitting a patch to the Plans quicklove page which prevents broken tags from one person's planlove from spilling boldness down the rest of the page.
~[wellons]
Thursday July 5, 2007. 3:44 AM
On some of the interfaces, usernames would not leave your autoread list until one additional page view had taken place. Based on a user suggestion, this long-standing bug has finally been fixed. Please send any comments or feedback to the email address above.
~[wellons]
Saturday June 16, 2007. 8:37 PM
Care about Oreo milkshakes? Yes, you do.
~[wellons]
Friday June 1, 2007. 8:27 PM
Plans had about an hour of intermittent bad DNS resolution because of a registrar transfer. It should be corrected now.
Sorry for the inconvenience,
~[wellons]
Wednesday May 30, 2007. 11:18 AM
Grades are up on Pioneer Web.
-[rootwile]
Wednesday May 16, 2007. 8:06 PM
Dear Plans community,
The administrators would like you to please join us in welcoming Mark Root-Wiley '09 [rootwile] as the newest Plans admin. Hurray!
- [straughn]
PS. Please continue to reach all Plans admins by email at grinnellplans@gmail.com. Thanks!
Saturday May 12, 2007. 10:38 PM
How do you respond to song lyrics?
Sunday May 6, 2007. 5:15 PM
Plans was down this afternoon because of router difficulties in HI. Apologies for the inconvenience.
~[wellons]
While this week may be incredibly stressful, please take a second to remember that people are people, plain and simple. With midsems raging, we all have a tendency to get a little overwhelmed and to forget how much we care about those around us (and how important it is to show it). Take care of you and those around you this week. We can all use a little more love!
- [goeringm]
3-13-07
Plans will be down for maintenance and upgrades for about 4-5 hours.
Edit: Server will be rebooted in a few minutes.
Edit 2: All done. Report any unusual problems to our e-mail address. Gallery and Blogs should now work without problems.
Saturday March 10, 2007. 11:58 PM
What should the default Plans Stylesheet be?
I removed the link to the "blogs". They were apparently added last night and were overwhelming the Plans server when I checked this morning. I killed the link to them with an Apache rewrite rule.
~[wellons]
Friday March 2, 2007. 2:21 AM
Polls about fundamental elements of the universe
~[wellons]
Wednesday February 28, 2007. 5:39 PM
A list of city plans has been added to [groups]. If your city deserves one, too, let us know (grinnellplans@gmail.com).
-[sidonie]
Wednesday February 28, 2007. 12:58 AM
Current students: please note that applications for SGA President & Vice President are available on [sga] and are due to sga1@grinnell.edu by Thursday, March 1 at 5pm.
-[straughn]
Wednesday February 21, 2007. 2:13 AM
Two things:
1. Plans will now automatically break up very long chains of planlove. Formerly, these would force your browser window to be too wide, and make you scroll horizontally.
2. The < strike > tag is enabled.
Please let us know right away if you spot anything funny going on with your plan or edit text.
~[wellons] && [oneileri]
Poll Question: Should the Plans logo link to the home page?
As you may have heard, the server that hosted Plans was broken into by hackers from a Croatian server. This break-in was the reason for the unannounced server switch early Saturday morning. All evidence thus far seems to say that they were not interested in anyone's personal information but rather in using the computing power of the server. However, the possibility certainly exists that the hackers could have gained access to all the usernames and passwords used on Plans, so for the sake of caution I'd like to reiterate that if you use your Plans username and password combination on any other websites, we strongly suggest that you change your password both there and here. You may wish to read up on why and how to choose a strong password before you do.
- [oneileri], 02/11/07, 11:49pm
Saturday February 10, 2007. 8:00 PM
It is recommended that if you use the same username and password combination on Plans as you do elsewhere, that you immediately change your password.
~ [laiu] |
