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Sorry folks, I've been very busy lately and I just noticed the mysql database was badly corrupted on Sept. 6th, 2009. The database is updated daily, but all the backups on Sept. 6th and after are unusable. I think the only post lost was Tom Rokicki's.

I try my best to make sure everything is working but this one slipped through the cracks. Somehow the mysql database ballooned in size to over 2 gigabytes. After that happened the subsequent databases were not backed up correctly.

It would be a good idea for any posts to be buffered in some way before uploading to the forum, especially long ones.

Any inappropriate link (i.e. not math and/or puzzle related) will be deleted. I'd like to keep the forum completely free of ads with the sole exception of ads for books about puzzles, or at least limited to materials appropriate for the site.

For newbies or younger readers:

If you find some of the posts are too difficult to understand please go ahead and ask questions! The people here are willing to help explain things.

Mark

Folks, I'm in the middle of fighting with the drupal database. While trying to add the ability to contact the admin I managed to mess up the database in some way. As a result I'm reverting the database back to 5 am this morning and anything added after that won't show up.

I'm going to add in the ability for anonymous users to read all the posts and comments but they won't be able to post. A new drupal is in the cards but the problem is transferring all the info from the old drupal to the new is rather difficult.

I'm going to try to add in the lost posts later tonight. Sorry for the trouble everyone, but I'm still learning the idiosyncrasies of drupal. Turning on the menu module was the cause of the trouble and I won't be touching that particular part again :-/

Hello.

A quick introduction: I'm Robert Smith, I'm 18, and I live in the US. I used to be quite into speedcubing, starting around 2003, but I have since moved into the more "theoretical" aspects of the cube. I also like mathematics, and, fortunately, programming. Anyway, that's that.

I have been writing a "general puzzle solver," whose goal is to be able to solve any (permutation) puzzle with (almost) any method. Quite quickly, we see there are definitely limits to this (e.g., we couldn't solve any scrambled 10x10x10 cube in a single phase). But, if some certain requirements are met, solving any puzzle should be an ability with this program.

Did another long overdue upgrade with apache and php. There's tons of new exploits so it has to be done. We were down for about an hour. Looks like everything still works :)

Mark

Hello, I am Peter Jung, a physicist from Cologne University.

Only a couple of days ago I got very much interested in the Cube. At wikipedia I found a note that the diameter of the Cube group is not yet known, and a link to this site.

Great work!

Sniffing into the problem, it seems to be quite complex. But some ideas that came to me these days I could not find. That's the purpose of this visit: To ask whether attempts have been made along these lines of thought, and if so, what is the outcome. And if not, I would like to contribute some analysis.

Your sysadmin was rather adventurous last night. Both Apache and php were upgraded. One of more interesting things admins see is clever hacking attempts. Someone managed to get an executable into the /tmp directory of the server via wget. The program then proceeded to spawn copies of itself in memory. I'm pretty sure it was an attack on drupal so a drupal upgrade may be in the cards. How they managed to run wget on my machine without a login I don't understand. I'll be watching the processes on the server closely...

Let me know if anything is broken.

The router for the server was acting up and I had to reflash it. Please let me know if there are any other problems. admin mail

Google canned search" Many on the links from earlier posts are no longer active.