People all thought that the Vote Fairy was making an April fool's joke in this post by proclaiming no one would be getting any more votes.

It turns out - she was just biding her time to catch everyone by surprise. She has eloped with the Tooth Fairy. Unless you didn't use your votes up from yesterday, you will no longer be getting any new votes.

Seriously....

The vote fairy is a cron job that runs at approximately 2:15AM EST every day. DST is observed at 2AM. So when the clock rolled over from 2AM to 3AM, 2:15AM never existed. Running the vote fairy out of turn has been considered a bad idea by tye (according to theorbtwo) as it puts too much of a strain on the server. This is the reason it is run at the odd time that it is.

Votes should return to normal tomorrow.

Thank you - that is all.

L~R

Credits: This post was prompted by theorbtwo. I came in on the tail end of a conversation between rozallin and dws discussing the missing votes, so I can not be credited with having come up with the reason as soley my own idea.

  • Comment on Vote fairy runs away to be with the Tooth Fairy

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Re: Vote fairy runs away to be with the Tooth Fairy
by crenz (Priest) on Apr 06, 2003 at 19:18 UTC

    Frankly speaking, I don't understand your explanation at all. Are you saying that the Perl Monks server clock is set to a local timezone? This would be quite weird, wouldn't it?

    I'm not a professional UNIX sysadmin, but from what I know, server clocks should always be set to GMT. If you use a non-GMT time for cron jobs, web server log files etc., you'll get a lot of weird effects. Think of changing back to standard time -- all cron jobs during that time window would run twice, log files could have duplicate timestamps etc.

    Maybe the gods can shed some light on the issue?

    Update: FYI, I'm on upsilon.pair.com (being #13, one of the earliest pair web servers), and a quick TZ= date shows GMT (I set the timezone in the shell, that's why I need to clear TZ).

[reply]

      It is indeed strange, for all of the reasons you mentioned. Caused some headaches when we first moved to pair, but it's mostly good now. Shrug.

      Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

[reply]
      from what I know, server clocks should always be set to GMT.

      You are correct, however people don't always follow best practices.

[reply]
Re: Vote fairy runs away to be with the Tooth Fairy
by Vote Fairy (Sexton) on Apr 07, 2003 at 14:05 UTC

    I've done what?!???

    First, I'm a he.

    Second, Tooth Fairy is a she.

    Third, we didn't elope. Yeah we used to date but I broke up with her a long time ago. We're actually becoming pretty good friends now.

    Fourth, if I decide to take a day off, it should be my business. You know between me and my boss. If my boss decides that you can go a day without votes, so be it! If he decides that you need your votes, then he can do something about it.

    You don't need to go around starting rumors. Sheesh!

[reply]
Re: Vote fairy runs away to be with the Tooth Fairy
by dga (Hermit) on Apr 07, 2003 at 15:07 UTC

    Running this at 03:15 would fix this effect completely.

[reply]

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