| LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares! |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|01:53 pm] |
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
- In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
- 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
- The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
- 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)!
- 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
- 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!
- We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
- When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
- RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
- An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
- The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers
LiveJournal Cares
We’re pleased to introduce you to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 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!
( Read more... )
Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! |
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| Of Events, Videos, And A Clarification |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|04:42 pm] |
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http://gothic-charm-school.com/charm/?p=334 This is a rather quick update this time, Snarklings. An upcoming event, a new video, and a clarification about one of the clothing stores mentioned in the previous update.
Firstly, an event! If you find yourself in the Seattle area on Sunday, November 15th, then you absolutely must scamper down to the Elliot Bay Book [...] |
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| Twilight -Chapter 10 Part 1 |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|10:41 pm] |
I'm finally back with more. All I can offer by way of an excuse is that I really do not like Twilight. And also TAFE.
So, since Arty and Butler went down so well last time, they're back this week!
Cass: Wow, you broke their brains already? Normally, it takes a couple of chapters before they're actually willing to dish on a chapter with you.
EmeryBoard: Aurum potestas est, my dear Cassandra.
Cass: What?
Artemis: A tonne of gold. A metric tonne.
Cass: Can you actually do that?
EmeryBoard: And then Holly decided that it was only right to pay Artemis the gold she'd promised him, and after many dangerous adventures, deposited half a metric tonne of gold in his main bank vault, the other half to be received after services rendered.
Artemis: *checks bank balance*
Butler: *restrains patience*
Artemis: That will do admirably for starters. Now, let us begin.
( Chapter 10, Part 1 )
Okay, the update will hopefully be coming sooner, but no promises. I usually break them anyway. But I will try.
Edward-O-Meter: 041
Chapter 10, Part 2 |
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| Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|02:00 pm] |
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. |
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| This Is Turning Into A Theme.... |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|07:51 am] |
A Little More Time has won the Quicksilver Quill award for Best Post Hogwarts story at Mugglenet Fanfiction! The judge's comments were "-This is a mind-blowing, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride of a story filled with twists, turns, and dozens of dreaded but very exciting cliffhangers...Time travel is always tricky, but Pallas has pulled off Teddy's mission to rescue his parents in a very believable, well-explained, and entertaining way...the characterization is vivid and very in character."
This makes me happy, especially since I didn't even know I was up for anything! If it wasn't for the vile, unshakable, will-not-die or even die-down cold from hell I've had since Saturday, this would have been a rather spiffy week... |
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| Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (4)... |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|07:27 am] |
In a comment, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) maeveenroute asked two questions. First, this one:
"What feature would (or did, in your story) make rests qualitatively different?"
Here's an edited excerpt from "Honor Is Golden" [Analog, May 2004] where Oka -- one of the two USCOL linguists sent to analyze the Goldens' language -- is explaining things to the U.S. Senate, in a hearing:
=====
The Senator closest to her frowned, and rubbed at his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t get it, Professor,” he said, sounding cross. “All those sounds you’re talking about -- dishes breaking, cats meowing, and so on -- we have those sounds on Earth, right? But we know they’re just noises. How come it doesn’t work that way in -- what did you call it? Oh, yeah -- in Moth. How come it doesn’t work that way in Moth? How could it not work that way? I can’t imagine such a thing!”
“That’s exactly the point,” Oka said. “Human beings are hard-wired for human languages. We’re designed neurologically to recognize only certain things and combinations of things as languages, and we’re not able to imagine anything else qualifying. We have a whole universe of sounds around us, just as you say. The first thing we do, faced with all that data, is divide sounds into language and non-language. The next thing we do is divide the sounds that are language into vowels and consonants, and we can’t imagine there being something else that would be part of language. For the Goldens there is something else... that’s part of language in the same way that vowels and consonants are. There may be only one of those alien language-parts or there may be more than one; we have no way of knowing. ... Whatever they are, our brains are able to make the right division between language and nonlanguage -- presumably the reason we can do that much is because Moth is humanoid -- but that’s as far as we can go. Faced with all the sounds that are language on Golden, we can identify the vowels and the consonants, but we’re hopelessly lost with the others. Our brains keep trying, but they can’t do it, they just flounder around. Fortunately, I finally realized that that didn’t matter.”
A Senator leaned forward and opened his mouth to speak, but Oka raised her hand to stop him.
“Hang on just one minute, please, Senator,” she said. “I’m almost finished. ... You know how in music, when part of the melody is a silence of a certain size and shape, you use a symbol called a ‘rest’ to write that down? I was looking at a piece of music all full of rests, and I suddenly realized that we could handle the sequences of Moth that way. The other parts of the words are unquestionably stable, it’s only those non-vowel/non-consonant segments that human beings perceive as sometimes one thing, sometimes another. So I had the computer replace every last damned one of the mystery sounds with a pound sign -- there wasn’t a rest symbol on my keyboard -- and transcribe all the rest. ...”
“But if you do it that way,” asked the Senator she had put on hold before, “then how can you pronounce the words?”
“We can’t,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ll never be able to speak Moth -- it has sounds in it that aren’t possible as part of language for human beings, and we’ll never be able to learn them. But we can use the language to communicate, all the same. You wear your computer, you see, in the usual way, and the computer transcribes Moth as it’s spoken and prints it out for you. ... The same way native speakers of English can easily read written English that has misspellings in it or has coffee spilled on it, native speakers of Moth can read their own language even when it’s full of rests -- full of pound signs. It’s not elegant, and it’s not perfect, but it works.”
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The second question from maeveenroute was:
"What was the reviewer's problem with your rest phoneme? I mean, I just raised a point of clarification, but I can't think of anything serious enough to merit mention in a review, much less any kind of slamming."
I don't know the answer to that question because what the reviewer said was just "And Elgin's solution is rests! Well..... duh!" I'm an old lady, but I do know what that means. I'm sorry I can't give you a link to the review; it didn't strike me as something I needed to keep track of. |
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