Missing Comments

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 13, 2014

Filed under: Notices 38 comments

I meant to post a heads-up about this, but it totally slipped my mind. Sometime in the last 12 hours, this website was moved to new hardware. While the IP change sorted out, some of us were seeing the site on the new hardware and some of us on the old. So, there were effectively two copies of this site in existence, and which one you saw depended on whether or not your DNS server was aware of the change.

Thus, some comments were left on the old machine and are now lost forever. Sorry for the confusion. Since you’re seeing this post, then the problem is solved for you and no further comments should go missing.

If it makes you feel any better, this new hardware is really nice. I don’t know how it is for people visiting the front page, but on the backend it always took me about 10 seconds to load up the comments queue. That’s now down to one second.

So that’s cool.

Anyway, carry on. And just so this post doesn’t go to waste: Anything you’d like me to talk about in my weekly column? I have the next couple of weeks planned out, but it never hurts to have a sense of what people want to talk about.

Onward.

EDIT: The comment editing plugin is enabled again on a trial basis. We’ll see if it misbehaves this time.

 


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38 thoughts on “Missing Comments

  1. Chuk says:

    Maybe it’s just me seeing the new hardware? There are no other comments here.

  2. Jans says:

    I’m very glad Darth Vader isn’t my father.

  3. TouToTheHouYo says:

    You could always discuss the mathematics of wonton burrito meals.

  4. Paul Spooner says:

    Does the new hardware have any effect on the comment caching delay?

    You could always talk about Good Robot! It wouldn’t hurt to get some public interest started in advance of the release*.

    * There WILL be a release… right?

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      “Does the new hardware have any effect on the comment caching delay?”

      Seeing how it said 22 on the main page,and 18 when I opened this one,Id say no.

    2. Humanoid says:

      I did some timing yesterday and at its worst the delay was upwards of twenty minutes (and 11 comments if I remember right, 25 vs 36). That comment was eaten and therefore on the old server, however, so I’ll keep an eye on it today to see if it even gets close.

      1. Humanoid says:

        So yeah, it’s easily blown past the previous record. Half an hour plus and it hasn’t refreshed the cached page (using the Skyrim EP5 post as a measure).

        Tested on three different browsers on two different Internet connections, so I trust it’s not me.

  5. Wulfgar says:

    You could write something about AMD Mantle.

  6. Lord_Bryon says:

    so that explains the weird php error I encountered the other day

  7. lucky7 says:

    That explains it!

    1. lucky7 says:

      And I’d like to hear more on the game design side of Good Robot.

      1. Zagzag says:

        Seconded.

  8. Abnaxis says:

    …checks…

    Yay! My comment didn’t get eaten!

  9. BrokenLute says:

    Very good news indeed, for those of us that, on top of having to jump through quite a few routers to get to this site, also battled with a somewhat sluggish response. The improvement is noticeable.

  10. kikito says:

    I think it’s time you talk about procedurally generated stuff on that column of yours.

    I know you have talked a lot about it here in the blog, especially from the programming point of view – that’s what got me here in the first place. But I don’t think you have talked about it in your column. Maybe concentrating a bit more on the game design/production and less on the programming itself.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Go the next step… write a program to procedurally generate a new column every week. See how many weeks it goes before people notice.

      1. GreyCap says:

        I don’t think you meant it that way, but your comment comes across as a bit unkind regarding the quality of his column. . .

        Although, I like the idea of modern art being dismissed not with “Pfft! My five-year-old daughter could paint better!” but with “Pfft! My RNG could design better!”

        1. TMTVL says:

          Or you could take it as meaning “Shamus, you’re such a good programmer, you could create a program to write your columns almost as good as you could write them yourself.”

          And there’s of course a difference between procedural generation and actual randomization, but if you’ve read the programming posts, you already know that.

        2. Paul Spooner says:

          I like to think of it as highly complimentary of the quality of his procedural programming.

  11. ET says:

    Since you’re on new hardware, which is noticeably faster, will you be re-enabling and/or testing stuff that was disabled due to bad performance before?
    The only one I’m aware of, is the comment-editing module, which you had to disable due to it bringing the website to a snail’s crawl.

  12. Tizzy says:

    You talked about the pros and cons of early access as seen from the consumer pov. Any chance of a column about what you perceive the pros and cons be on the dev side?

    1. Jack Kucan says:

      This would be interesting to read about. :)

      Edit: I see editing is back. :)

    2. swenson says:

      Ooh, that’d be interesting. Gaming from the developer perspective in general would be interesting, I think. It’s not a perspective that we see all that often. (outside of this blog, of course :))

  13. Dave B. says:

    This might be outside the scope of Experienced Points, but I’d still like to read your opinion on functional programming. You mentioned it before, but had just started Good Robot. With the project now on hold, it might be a good time to revisit the topic.

  14. MichaelGC says:

    Aha – I was wondering why the site was down at around 03:00 EST. Everything certainly seems a lot zippier! Yay.

    Hmm, topic, topic. Survival-type games? There seem to be a lot of them about these days, and I believe Shamus is a fan of such things, when done properly. (They’ve never really appealed to me, so it would be interesting to hear from them as does enjoy them about the attractions they hold.)

  15. FTR says:

    Cardhunter

    You should check this game out, I think you’ll really like it’s business model, aesthetic, really everything.

    1. Tom says:

      +1 to this, the game deserves all the publicity it can get

  16. GreyCap says:

    As to the column. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on a game (not out yet) called Tangiers. Kickstarted and developed by Andalusian.

    What interests me is that it’s all supposed to be based on Burroughs and other avant garde surrealism. Are there many indies who choose to work with truly obscure art (retro videogames aren’t the same thing), and what are their prospects?

    Is other art a good place for gaming to seek meaning?

  17. TMTVL says:

    How about Microsoft trying to bribe Machinima content creators? Might be good for a few laughs.

    Joking aside, I’d love to hear you talk about gaming on Linux, though I know it isn’t your main area of interest.

  18. Mechaninja says:

    Candy Crush : /

  19. Mephane says:

    What about that space sim series you started, Shamus? Is that over, or will it continue?

  20. kdansky says:

    Recent games pandering in their core design to make money off microtransactions: Third person shooters are just worse than first person in any regard, but because they show off your character, Warframe and Loadout go for it.

  21. Tom says:

    Hey Shamus,

    as you were programming a game with the idea of maybe realeasing it if you get it finished, you might have done some research on how you would publish such a game. As i am in a comparable situation i’d like to hear your insights on that :)

    That would also give you a new post for the Programming section, which is my favorite, so its a win-win situation ;)

    Greetings from Germany

  22. Jeysie says:

    Oh man, I can finally view the site again without Opera crashing and dying.

    (Seriously, I have no clue why, but for the longest time Opera would roll over and die any time I opened the actual site. I’d have to read everything only in the RSS feed and then open posts in FF if I wanted to look at comments.)

    Also, looking at someone’s mention of Candy Crush… while they were probably joking, do you own a tablet/smartphone, and if so, would you think about discussing mobile games? I’ve played several really interesting mobile games in my time that aren’t just Angry Birds or whichever.

    Edit: Nope, browser death still happening on some posts. Like, this post, fine. The, say, “When is a Game Done?” post, fine. The Empire of Candy post, browser death. Oh well, I give up.

    1. Tried disabling Flash, or clicking on the flash window and opening the configuration and set the hardware acceleration to off?

      If it’s not flash then it could be google adsense, or one of the Twittwer whatever widgets.

      1. Jeysie says:

        I already have Flash turned off here, and Adsense blocked in general. I tried turning off iFrames as well, and that still didn’t help.

        Completely perplexed. The second I visit the page, my CPU runs up like crazy and the browser freezes up.

        Meh, I should bite the bullet and upgrade to Opera 19 anyway, I guess, I just hate that they’re now just a Chrome clone. :/

  23. Shamus you might want to do some tests using http://www.webpagetest.org/ and tools.pingdom.com/

    The former is one I’ve used for years the latter is one I recently noticed.
    For example my own site I was able to optimize thanks to webpagetest and pingdom, I used to have quite a few requests per page, now it’s just three (not including google adsense), the webpage and two images on the main page.

    I did a quick test using pingdom on Twenty Sided Tale main page and there are over a hundred requests, and over 3MB of content. Surely some optimizations must still be possible.

    BTW! Webpagetest’s runs two tests and the refetch test is the most telling for most sites, for example my own site only returns a 304 header (content not changed), many sites tend to ignore caching or always return the full page when this is not needed.
    A blog for example do not need to be instant, a page/entry could be re-cached on the server (I prefer to think of it as pre-rendering and pre-compressing the content).
    Be warned though that optimizing can be very addictive.

    Your dice images (shown next to comments) for example could probably be put in a CSS sprite sheet, a method I’m planning to use in the future remake of my own site.

    That being said, Twenty Sided is pretty fast despite it’s size currently, is the new host using some sort of transparent proxy/caching? (Squid I recall as being one such proxy)

  24. Benjamin says:

    The front page loaded a lot more quickly for me today! Hip hip, huzzah.

    Clearly the next thing you should write is another System Shock fanfic. :3

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