I rolled in from Anthrocon around Midnight on Monday, and slept in yesterday. I then spent the rest of the day hosting staghorne and Joel Fox (both visiting from Sweden), along with doing laundry, chores, catching up on email, etc.

In the evening, I showed them both Final Fantasy: Advent Children, and then we tried the Swedish comedy "Fyra år till" (Four More Years), but ran into problems with region encoding. So we instead settled on watching opinionated reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I haven't yet uploaded my pictures, but here's a teaser pic, taken of me by Randorn:

Anthrocon 2011 is almost upon us! While I'm feeling a lot better than I was this time last year (due in part to my health improving), I still have that pre-con anxiety that I have every year. I suppose I'll get used to it someday.

Anyway, here's what my con schedule is roughly like for this year:

- Tuesday: Arriving around 11 PM. Having a drink at the bar then going to bed.

- Wednesday: Somewhat busy on and off throughout the day until about 9 PM

- Thursday: Busy most of the day, since that's when on-site registration opens. I hope to make it to The Pennsylvania Furries Meetup at 10 PM.

- Friday: While very much on duty, I don't have any specific commitments other than being at opening ceremonies. I plan on attending the Artists and Dealers Reception at 9 PM. I may be walking around in this later in the evening. Draw your own conclusions.

- Saturday: Very much on duty, but no specific commitments. I hope to drop in on some panels.

- Sunday: Teardown starts in the afternoon. I'll be busy with that through about 9 PM.

- Monday: Busy in the morning with post-con meetings. Depart in mid-afternoon.


If anyone would like to do food or drinks (especially drinks!) with me, I'm can totally be talked into that, schedule permitting.


Oh, I don't think I ever mentioned my Anthrocon 2010 pictures that I took last year, so here they are!

I hope to see y'all at this year's Anthrocon!

(X-posted to anthrocon)



Want to win a Supersponsorship for Anthrocon 2011?

Design our 2011 website, and you can!

That's right, we're looking for a talented web designer to create our 2011 website, and we are now taking submissions! The winner, chosen by us, will receive a free Supersponsorship membership for Anthrocon 2011!


"What is the theme?"

The theme for Anthrocon 2011 is "The Anthropomorphic Institute of Magic".


"Sounds great, what do you need from me?"

We will need you to email a mockup of the website design to webmaster@anthrocon.org no later than 11:59 PM, September 25th, 2010.

We will also need a copy of the header graphic, the color scheme you'd like us to use for the text on the site (our stylesheet is right here), a default user icon to replace the current one, and a few membership badges for our fourms: [1] [2]. Additional graphics for use on the website are optional, but strongly encouraged. Graphics for the background are optional.

File attachments are welcome. Designs and graphics may also be uploaded to a site such as Drop.io.


"I'm not a wizard with HTML and CSS!"

That's okay. We are. :-) If you can get us the graphics and styles, we can handle the rest.


"I like Javascript, can I write some?"

You sure can! We use the jQuery Javascript library to power our site, and would be happy to install jQuery UI as well.


"I really don't like the layout of the current Anthrocon website. Can I change it up a little?"

You certainly may! This is your chance to get creative. If you have some ideas for different layouts of the website, we'd love to see them!


"May I submit more than one design?"

Sure. Enter as many different designs as you like.


"I'm not sure my entry was received!"

If you don't hear back from us after getting your entry, feel free to check in with us, or send me a Private Message through Anthrocon's website.


"Is there a fee to enter?"

No. Entry is free.


Legal stuff

You must be the owner of the copyright or the artwork must be in the public domain. Anthrocon asks for non-exclusive rights to publish submitted works for which you own the copyright.


"I have additional questions!"

Feel free to reply to this post, or contact me directly.

The last couple of weeks has been really really busy and really really exciting.

First, I got an MRI on my knee and got the results back. Some good news: the ACL is just fine. That said, the doctors don't yet know what's causing my knee pain, which means I get to see a knee specialist in the future. But between my feeling much better and wearing my knee braces like my doctor told me to, I should have no difficulty making it around Anthrocon.

Earlier this week, I decided to set up an Anthrocon Operations Hotline as a bit of an experiment. To the best of my knowledge, no furry con has done this before, so we'll see how it turns out.

Earlier tonight, I attended a pre-Anthrocon dinner in Ardmore. Got to see some familiar faces, and staghorne got to meet some of the local furries.

As for my schedule at Anthrocon itself...

Tuesday night is when staghorne and I arrive. If anyone would like to have a couple of drinks at the Westin, let me know.

Wednesday and Thursday are going to have me pretty busy with setup stuff and venue meetings. I won't have much time to hang.

Friday morning will have me busy with Opening Ceremonies in the Spirit of Pittsburgh Ballroom. :-P The rest of the day I hope to have a lighter workload.

Saturday is my least busy day of the con, as there is no setup or teardown work to be done. I may even go to the dance that evening. :-)

Sunday afternoon and evening will be busy for me, between teardown, Closing Ceremonies, and more teardown.

Monday I will depart from the con.

Well, that's about my convention schedule in a nutshell. I hope to see everyone at Anthrocon this year!

So the user Jalterixnar on the Anthrocon forums was nice enough to create a commercial for Anthrocon 2010 and post it on YouTube:



That is amazingly cool, and the tool used to create it was at http://www.youtube.com/searchstories. I've been playing with it on my own, and it's quite neat, as it allows different kinds of searches to be performed, as well as choosing different music.

I'm unclear whether this was just a "toy" that Google created, or whether they plan on using it to revolutionize the advertising industry, but it certainly is a great step in that direction.

Looking back after this morning's stampede, I thought I'd share with folks how the webserver held up, since I know I am not the only geek out there. And, truth be told, I was a bit nervous myself, since I wasn't quite sure just how much traffic we would get and if the webserver would survive, or turn into a smoking crater.

Well, here's what we got:



The first hump is a manual backup I did last night. The second is the automatic backup that runs every morning, where the database and files are rsynced to a machine at another data center. The third hump at 9 AM was when we opened hotel reservations. 1.4 Megabits/sec doesn't look too bad, until you look at:



The 336 simultaneous connections a second was far more interesting. That's about 16 times the normal number of connections to the webserver.

So, what were the effects? Let's look at MySQL first:



There were nearly 1000 queries per second, 500 of which were in the cache. Between that and the other queries which are not hitting the MySQL cache, there's definite room for improvement. But before I look at the RAM situation, let's look at the CPU usage:





One of the cores was close to 100%, but there was virtually no I/O wait. The load average was also good to see--it was actually less than the load during the nightly backups. From a performance standpoint, both of these graphs look very good, as it means the disk was not the bottleneck. But why not? Well, here's the final piece of the puzzle:



The RAM usage is what ties all of the other graphs together. By keeping the memory usage near constant, I was able to avoid hitting swap space, which would have incurred a huge performance penalty and quite possibly a "death spiral".

How did I keep RAM usage so low? Instead of running the Apache webserver, which requires a separate process for each connection, I instead ran the Nginx webserver. Unlike Apache, it uses asynchronous I/O to handle incoming requests. This approach scales much better than Apache, which creates a separate child process for each "listner" and chews up a lot of memory.

For comparison, the number of simultaneous connections peaked at "only" around 100 during last year's convention. We broke the old record by a factor 3.

"And what we have learned?"

Even under the highest load to date, we were in no danger of running out of RAM. This means that I can (and probably should) allocate more memory to MySQL so that more queries are cached and overall performance is increased even more. There are also some more advanced caching modules that I intend to research, to see if we can cache straight off of the filesystem and avoid the database altogether. More on that as it happens.

Please note that hotel reservations for Anthrocon 2010 are not yet available. If you try to contact the hotel for a room right now, they will tell you that the block is "sold out," because that's what the computer screen says. It is not sold out; we have not opened it yet, and will not open it until February. This decision was made based on feedback we received from our members, and applies to all of the hotels which have offered us rooms for next year.

(X-posted to anthrocon)

Outstanding work, Theyain.

I'm home safely from the con, and have today off so I can recover and catch up on errands, do laundry, etc. Maybe I'll be in IM later tonight.

Seems like our brains were completely fried at closing ceremonies and we forgot to mention the post-convention survey. Here it is:



Please tell us what you liked, and what we can do to make next year's Anthrocon even better.

I have a ton of pictures, and more details about the con, which I'll post at some future date.

(X-posted to anthrocon)

Yes, I have a Dolph plushie. It's rather big, about 30 inches.



Now the $700 Billion Question (adjusted for inflation):

[Poll #1421722]