4.2 Trillion Unread

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24 Oct 2004

Perusing my Bloglines subscriptions early this morning, I discovered that the Industry Standard feed apparently had more than 4 ~~trillion~~ billion unread items. I don’t have that sort of time.

Feed with 4.2 trillion unread items

I clicked the feed, fully expecting the resulting enormous page to eat up all my RAM and force a reboot. But instead I was greeted with the information that there were no items left to be read in that feed. Apparently some sort of temporary Bloglines meltdown.

Ted Hussey
October 24, 2004 6:12 AM

Yaaaa! I’m the first! Your blog is one of the ones I read on a daily basis. It’s always filled with good stuff. I’ve used some of your plugings on my blog. Like Tony used to say… “They’re GGGGGGGGREAT! Thanks, Ted

Manda
October 24, 2004 8:03 AM

I had something like that happen with the Movable Type news blog once, although I think in that case it did try to load all of those entries.

Clay
October 24, 2004 3:07 PM

Actually, I think Tony stills says that. No, you’re right. I saw a commercial the other day with a “We are the Champions” ripoff. “Mighty, mighty tigers” or something like that.

Michael Moncur
October 24, 2004 9:15 PM

Same thing happened here (different feed, similar large number, same actual number (0) of unread items.)

Odd.

jaronson
October 26, 2004 4:50 AM

That number above is only 4.2 billion…still a BIG number, though.

Freyr
October 29, 2004 1:40 PM

Clearly a bug, that number is only 1224 short from 2^32 (4.294.967.296), which is the maximum value for an unsigned 32 bit number. Something did x = -1224 and then displayed its unsigned equalient.

Jeramey Jannene
November 21, 2004 7:19 PM

And I thought I was lazy, the highest any of my unread feeds have ever gone is 200.

Roel
December 2, 2004 12:13 PM

@Jeramy Jannene: 200 is the maximum amount of posts Bloglines will retain for you. Per feed, that is.

Jeramey Jannene
December 4, 2004 10:30 AM

Ah, thanks Roel.

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