Archive for October, 2007

Outages

October 24th, 2007 by Owen Jacobson

It never rains, does it? The world has to find some way to add that extra little something to any mishap to turn it into a minor disaster.

The machine hosting this site was offline due to lightning-induced damage to precisely one component: the hard drive holding the /var partition. The rest of the machine was completely unaffected, which is at best highly suspicious and at worst a sign that we’re cursed.

My post about backups seems like rather heavy-handed foreshadowing, now.

We almost have a new dev server…

October 9th, 2007 by Leigh Honeywell

It’s merrily chugging through an install of Ubuntu Server 7.04 (the beta of 7.10 is dying over some libncurses issue), at the moment. Hopefully, it’ll detect the NIC I added after it didn’t detect the built-in PCI-E one.

Meet the machine:

  • 1.8 gHz Pentium Dual Core - a good price-performance tradeoff for what we’re doing with it, and it has more cache than the other budget contenders.
  • Asus P5KPL-VM - comes with everything up to and including the kitchen sink. Too bad the gig LAN isn’t supported. It also has only one IDE channel—which is one more than some of the new Dell business machines I’ve been working with lately.
  • 2GB DDR2-800 - I got the Kingston ValueRAM because the fellow at my friendly cheapo computer shop said that there was a timing issue with the cheaper (but shinier) OCZ stuff. I took him on his word.
  • 320gb of Seagate SATA. Jiggabytes per dollar: Excessive. Cache: 16 mb.
  • Case/PSU are an unused Antec Sonata (mmmm), courtesy of Boyfriend.
  • Everything else is inconsequential.

So, for well under $400 CAD we have a totally sweet dev machine with a public IP (TekSavvy rocks) and seriously excessive storage. Life is good.

If only the install would finish so I can get along with granting Owen ssh access :)

-Leigh

Time Warp

October 4th, 2007 by Owen Jacobson

On the advice of the inestimable jwz, I spent today automating backups to an external drive from the source control system. I figure that that machine will eat its own drives sooner or later, and losing several months’ work would be extremely unpleasant.

The prototype registration frontend is coming along well. Certain people are trying (fairly successfully) to convince me that outsourcing registration and billing is a wise idea; having looked at the fundamental complexity of billing, I’m inclined to agree. Nevertheless we still need a way to create accounts during development and testing that’s more advanced than “INSERT INTO users …”.

Development’s slowed down a bit while I muse over the pieces I need for one of the harder problems. It turns out that allowing something that seemed harmless has compounded the difficulty elsewhere. Dastardly things, these computers, always full of traps for the unwary.

Beginning At The End

October 1st, 2007 by Owen Jacobson

The lovely people on the internet solved my cafe-finding problem for me, so today was the first day spent coding at The End. Not entirely coincidentally, today was spent getting some of the more useful client-facing services talking to the login system. I learned two new and important things:

  1. Lattes make great breakfast.
  2. A certain middleware vendor’s documentation tells vicious lies.

I’m fairly accustomed to third-party software being erratically documented and somewhat creative in its interpretation of specs, but this is a whole new level of incompetence. Not all is lost, thankfully, since I already had another approach running, but the feature I wanted to use would really have improved testability. As it is, in order to get the same level of test coverage and confidence I’ll end up writing about three times as much code.

Black cat not happy.

With that wonder out of the way, though, things went reasonably well. The prototype server I’ve been hacking at is now at least vaguely aware of whether or not the client has logged in and willing to shout mean things at clients that haven’t. All in all, a fairly productive day.

So much to do, so few of us to do it

October 1st, 2007 by Owen Jacobson

Making games, like any other worthwhile task, is a phenomenal amount of work. Fortunately, there’s more than one of us working here. We are, in no particular order:

  • Owen Jacobson, lead shouting vagrant
  • Leigh Honeywell, spooky oracle
  • Jeremy Wilson, cackling madman