Scrame

Did a proper factoring out of a group of sites for my webhost (i’ve got about 45 or so, so it could definitely use some organization).

Its not complete, but the last step is just configuring the new path. Right now its just a copy.

Still setting up the DB, ran into the same issue with disk space, had the same workaround. My /home partition is now home to several lib locations which are just served through symlinks. It works. Its still pretty well insulated, and if i redo the root partition, i can just kill the folders at the end.

Interestingly, or not, even after running out of diskspace and dropping the database, mysqld still held on to all the diskspace, and made the client unable to do any basic commands. Restarting the daemon released the filespace.

As we speak, the DB is still unzipping, but I have got the rest of the system up to speed. Still hasn’t finished the primary table. No ETA.

I am trying to continue my django work, but to do that, I need to snap a good version of the database I am working with so that I can build against it properly.

This wasn’t the original idea, but I started digging through the ORM docs and it seemed like they covered most of the issues I was having implementing it, so I decided to start with a simple example before I had to deal with several million nullable foreign keys.

Anyway, I have scrapped out a basic shell for it at work, but generally don;t have enough time to really pursue it as a project, so I figure I need a little bit of extracurricular time to actually make it work (not unlike the python work I was doing ealier trying to write a test server/client, which has now at least been moved partly into production code, and also into a list of tools for making workable command line environments with inflexible servers.

A contact form on an old site I manage for a friend of mine broke. Did some investigative work for it.

I joined the early release of the onlive service.

For those who don’t know, its a service that is trying to be a lightweight gaming system. Instead of buying hardware and running it locally, it renders on its own hardware and streams the video back to you.

What I like: Mostly worked right out of the box. Viewing other peoples games worked well and the basic browsing and interface seemed slick.

What I don’t like: It doesn’t fucking work at all. I could not load a single demo, even picking simple games that shoudln’t be too graphically challenging. I just get disconnect messages doing that, with an error code (a25), which I couldn’t find any reference to. There are no associated troubleshooting or diagnostic. I am not running this on a great computer, but since I can watch other people play, and it seems to understand my controller, I am guessing it is probably the network connection.

But I don’t know. A simple speed test, or maybe a diagnostic (like do I need to open a special port?) would have been helpful. I might give it some futzing around, but probably won’t sink too much more time into it.

The other thing I don’t like: its a rental model. The original pitch would be that it was like a cable channel, and I can just play what I want for a fixed fee, now for each game its 5 bucks to rent for 3 days, which is impractical for me (I rarely get 3 days in a row that I could just sit around playing something), and also impractical for RPG’s or something with a bit more depth.

However, if they can make the service work, its certainly more convenient than gamefly, who just take forever to get you anything, but it doesn’t offer a cheap conversion to “buy”, and I don’t see much in the way of expansion packs here.

Unfortunately, the technology to be able to just play through a service is a good idea, but if it can’t play on an average unloaded internet connection, and doesn’t offer any long-term solutions (unlike steam), or the ability to get a hard copy and play it (like gamefly), I just don’t see the right niche.

Possibly for casual games, but most of what they carry are games that take a lot more hours, like assassins creed 2 and borderlands.

Bleh.