2 hours ago
Angry Robot BooksGith and visitors.
Hi to all the folks popping in from RPGnet to read those interviews with Stross and Cordell. They were both done as a collaborative effort from several folks working on the old planewalkers.com which went silent for quite a while. It was quite fun and both the subjects of the interviews were very nice to particpate.
I’ve got a couple of post ideas, however
With things being the way they have been the last couple of days and my general unease with the sudden downturn in my host, expect a delay and further updates before I make real posts.
Google Reader saves the day.. sort of
Well I went to google reader to see if it would have my old posts still marked as read. You had them all there. So copy and paste repostsw are up. I did lose a few comments, but this is better than nothing. I’ll try to figure out a way to get those comments back if the database restore proves fruitful.
Repost: Amazing what you can do with Statistic Spin
Twitter is what some call a micro blogger. Essentially you get an account, post in a maximum of 140 character “posts” and other twitter subscribers follow your posts. You of course follow your friends, interests, famous people etc. I’ve got an account, couple of friends and web acquaintances are on their and the latest Mars Lander.
If you already knew about Twitter then you must know they have been having lots of problems. Service outages, have been rampant of late. They have basically from what I can tell outgrown the basic infrastructure they went with. They had found a nitch, were quirky enough to sneak up on folks then BLAME, exploded. Another problem they have I think is their general openness of their API. There are “spammers” out there following 17,000 people. No way is that a human on the other end of that twitter account.
Well today was WWDC which is where Apple rolls out the next frenzy of non products that the Apple Geeks freak out over. As expected (even by twitter) it went down.
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
Initially, we turned off some features to shed load as we announced yesterday but we were able to turn them back on during the keynote as Twitter handled the dramatic amount of traffic. About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.
I’m sorry but those numbers are just the downtime for today. Not to mention, saying 4% of the requests telling people to wait for a few minutes was acceptable…. They are fooling themselves. Eventually one of their competitors will step up and be able to handle the load. Folks will jump ship like crazy. Also live software used by hundereds of thousands of people, some of who are watching a very important event ( to them anyway ) is not what I would call a stress TEST.
Yep, nothing to see here :(
Well this weekend my host did something hinky.
It was down, getting database errors. I went in and looked at tables and all the posts I had made over the last few days were missing. WordPress could not log into it, etc. I just got off a chat session with their support and everything “looked fine, I have a code error in my site.” Well a code error would not roll back the database, and now the site is back up and working.
I request a database restore from within the last week or so. Hopefully that will get some of my posts back. Not what I’ll do about the mystery long term, but short term I guess future posts will be created offline and archived first.
Curiosity
Trying to get a feel for who shows up here and reads. If it is not too much trouble how about dropping a comment just to say hello if you com here more than once a year :)
Upgrade to avoid the security flaw
Upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5 last night. All in all it was painless except for my providers weird problems with ftp. All seeemed to transfer over nicely except for my theme, I was using a modded version of an already slightly out of date theme, so I’ll have to work on a new one. Things will be boring for now.
I twittered since someone I knew also signed up. You should be able to find me at Twitter.com/buzzregog
Cold Snap
First cold snap of the year down here in ‘Bama. Made it to 28 degrees which is scares the hell out of these people. WTF, water freezes at 32 !!! I was suprised schools weren’t canceled. Ok, that is a little harsh but the hubub made about cold weather and the evil white stuff gets on the radar is amusing to someone from up north.
School still progresses, getting a little bored with the current one. Looking forward to some new stuff. 2 Dimensional composition is has had its ups and downs.
Playing EQ2 again, gave up on WoW, was just not as deep as EQ2. Found a good guild with some pretty interesting folks. Their raids are level headed mostly. I’m in as just a member so no heavy requirements as far as attendance so school is safe.
Picking on a cripple
I sort of feel like I am about to pick on a cripple, but I can no longer resist the urge. Going to talk about Vangaurd (the cripple)again. More specifically about a blogger who constantly sings the praises of a game the still is not finished, long after its release. Holding true to the legacy of Brad McQuaid and his run on EQ1. Features lauded still not added, features in game borken, content hollow, etc etc. But on to the real reason for the post.
The Blog in question is Journeys with Jaye. Now don’t get me wrong, I read the blog and usually enjoy it, more so when it was a game I had played that was being posted about, but the writing is good and the screen shots pretty. Todays post just really made me cringe a bit, so let the picking begin, so feel free to go read the post and look at the pretty pictures, then come back.
5 cool things about Vanguard ????
1.) The empty feel of the world. Check out all those screen shots, the only living things in them are trees and Jaye. As far as character population, they are down to maybe 2 or 3 servers and those are pretty under populated for the size of the world.
2.) Not quite sure about this flying mount thing. Sounds like they are not really implemented yet, but can’t be clear from the post and I have not logged in since open beta closed, abomination that that was.
3.) Diplomacy. Supposedly this works now and means something. Probably the skill used in keeping the game online.
4.) Perfect game for people who like to wander around endlessly looking for something to do.
5.) Look and feel, lots of browns. All the gear is realistic looking, which in and of itself is not bad, this is probably the only point I can’t really pick on, other than it was the dumbest thing the rabbid dogs at the FoH boards harped on endlessly.
Doom and Gloom
There seems to be a flood of posts about Auto Assault shutting down. This was a game that called itself an MMO but really was not that good or very MMOish. I am not suprised by the flood of posts about it, what I am suprised by is the doom and gloom of some of them. All the chicken littles are making a fuss because this is like the 3rd game that made release that is shutting down. (Amazingly enough Vanguard is not one of them) These people could not have actually played the thing. They moan how it is another example of why Sci Fi games are doomed to fail, never mind Eve Online, which managed to overcome the huge hurdle that helped kill Auto Assault. Your avatar is your ride. in Eve you are your ship essentially. In AA it was your car. People like a body, preferably not made of metal.
But the real reason AA failed, it was just not a good game. Several huge mechanical flaws blew it out of the water for me durring the open beta that told me I would not play it. Biggest was the blowing up buildings and then watching them respawn. I understand the need for it in an MMO but it was just so much harder to buy than respawning monsters and buildings or objects you can’t destroy.
Another big failure of the game was the boilerplating of the fantasy model on the cars. Healer,Tank, Rogue and Mage re-envisioned as cars. BORING on top of bad.
So to all those other bloggers out there that don’t read mine :) STFU, it got what it deserved.