Older News - April-June 2003

Unintended Side-effects

I made a typo in a configuration file while updating some more information this afternoon. The result? The Web server was offline for... 30-40 minutes at least.

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A few changes

We had some more problems with the counter a few days ago. I decided not to try to fix it, since it seems to be caused by a conflict between the graphics library and a web server module.

Instead, I installed a new counter program that doesn't exhibit this problem.

The forums and news page were down for about 10 minutes this morning while I upgraded the database server software to a newer version. The new version includes a database cache, which should help things operate a little quicker... we eke out more performance wherever we can.

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Some oddness this morning

For no apparent reason, PHP started throwing fits this morning. It knocked the entire website offline... but *only* the ones bound to this servers first IP address. I upgraded PHP to the latest version and that seems to have fixed the problem.

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Financial Situation: Good

VGMusic is doing well after the end of the First Quarter (Jan-Mar) 2003. (Yes, I'm a little slow in putting this together ... :-P) Our cash flow ended last year strong due to a big advertising intake, and the past quarter was typically a little bit in the red. However, this is not a concern since our cash reserves are still in pretty good shape. That chart is a little misleading, since I was nearly broke through much of 2002. So the money on record didn't actually exist, hence our need to do the fundraising last year. The good news is that since I have my new job, I have ensured that dollar-for-dollar of VGMusic's cash reserve now actually is available, separate from my own finances. Things are looking up. Thanks to everyone for their overwhelming support! This message brought to you in the spirit of open disclosure of finances. Always demand to see the "books" when you make a donation to an organization.

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VGMusic Counters

For some reason, the script that normally draws the counter on the left column is working intermitantly. It seems that it sometimes is killing off Apache processes when it runs.

I'll be investigating this to find out why it's doing this, but for now, it's been replaced by a text counter that runs off of the same data file.

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Spirit of Gamer: Next Generation Beep - Game Music e-Zine

The time has finally arrived! Finally, there is a magazine dedicated to the sole purpose of game music. Carl Larson and his team of editors and writers have put together an excellent online magazine for game music fans everywhere.
Sprit of Gamer features loads of information on new CDs, including translations of liner notes, reviews, upcoming concerts, music samples, and many more articles. Produced by game music fans for game music fans, this new online magazine will, for sure, be an excellent read. Best of all, this magazine is provided to everyone and anyone, free of charge. Only one request, *SHARE* the PDF e-zine with all your friends and spread the word!

Spirit of Gamer: Next Generation Beep

• Vol. 1 March '03 - Download Server: 1 | 2
• Vol. 2 April '03 - Download Server: 1 | 2
  

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Some staff changes

We've made the following staff changes over the past few weeks:

We are welcoming in Justin (The Sorcerer) as a new member of the update staff. He is replacing Mj, who has left our staff due to time constraints.

Lee (The Jade Emperor) has also left our site, due to a lack of computer availability. Susan (Suds) took over as QC Coordinator for him near the end of March.

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Tuesday's downtime

The server went down Tuesday morning at around 5:45am. Apparently, the OS's virtual memory manager died, taking the rest of the system with it.

Here's the problem: neither Mike nor myself were around to fix it.

Mike logged on first at 9pm, at which time he had the data center reboot the machine.

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Up and Down

For those of you who visit this site around 5am EDT, you may have noticed that the site wasn't available. I'm recompiling some of the services on the server, and apparently the web server didn't like something I did. Since I want to add the functionality that I'm looking at, the site may go up and down a few more times before I'm finished.

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Grandia Xtreme Signed OST Giveaway Winner

Congrats to Martin of Quebec, Canada. He is the winner of our latest giveaway! Many thanks to CocoeBiz and Noriyuki Iwadare for their sponsorship!

Edit: The link to the CocoeBiz site was wrong, but it's fixed now.

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Another year, another April Fools Day

Mike wasn't really arrested, even though this page (which replaced the main page) says he was. If this looks familiar, that's because it's a parody of the iSONEWS page or you may have seen a similar parody over at Zophar's Domain. Apparently SwampGas thought it was funny enough that he used it to replace the fake 404 error Zophar's Domain had at midnight.

Even though that trick was good, the other trick was pretty funny as well. We changed the forums so that there was only a Plastic Canvas and Cross-Stitch board. Not only that, but everyone (except Administrators and Moderators) showed up as golden_sun. To make it look better, we also made all users invisible to the Who's Online screen.

One user asked me if we had an archive of the old April Fools tricks we've pulled. I thought it was a great idea, so you will probably see one appearing on the News Archives page later on.

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