Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or... Back in a moment. Thank you Santa.
Tuesday, October 30
Living Up To Their Name
Power is out at one of our new datacenters - ReliableSite in New Jersey.
The servers, however, are still up. They switched over to generator power without so much as a hiccup.
Which is how things are supposed to work, but there's a world of difference between the best-laid plans and a real live hurricane. So well done ReliableSite!
1
They can still run out of diesel fuel or get submerged in the flood, once the surge starts rolling back.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, October 30 2012 02:53 PM (RqRa5)
2
True. If they eventually have to shut down following a storm of this size, I'd understand that.
For the new server rollout I've gone for four small servers to replace our current one large server. (Total cost is about the same, and total capacity is much greater, yay technology!) Two are in New Jersey, and the other two in Dallas, with backups between the two sites. So if something like this happens once we're live on the new hardware, in theory I'll be able to just switch over to the other location.
Assuming DNS behaves itself, no major internet links are down, the backups and database replication are all up to date, and so on...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 30 2012 03:34 PM (PiXy!)
3
They report they have three days of fuel on-site. That should be enough - by then, either power or fuel should be available.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 30 2012 04:26 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Old Grouch at Wednesday, October 31 2012 04:37 AM (3kTEs)
5
This most recent spammer has also nailed Wonderduck and Brickmuppet.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, October 31 2012 06:24 AM (+rSRq)
6
Gotta love the old, let's put the backup generators in the basement, meme. What could possibly go wrong with that?
PS. Commenting still has the problem of losing (note to programmers the world over, it's not spelled <i>loosing</i>) name/mail form fields on preview (for me at least, using Chrome).
Posted by: Tombei The Mist at Wednesday, October 31 2012 06:58 AM (hGCqM)
1
The box in the first vid, I've seen on...ugh, I can't believe I can't think of the domain at the moment, geeksomething.com. I'm sure you know it.
The last one is even funnier than bowlercoasting, which, for those who haven't seen it, is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQrC_C6SexI.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 27 2012 04:24 PM (WQ6Vb)
2
Hey Pixy, I always forget you have a blog! I love the drifting video. I think I has that guy last time I took the Green Line in Boston.
Posted by: Truman North at Sunday, October 28 2012 12:21 AM (I2LwF)
So, we can expected a Kickstarter drive for a Master of Magic-style fantasy turn-based strategy game for the PC appear any minute now....
.............<crickets>.......
....Is this thing on?
Oddly enough, there is a Kickstarter drive from a developer in Poland aiming to make a sci-fi turn-based strategy game for the PC a la Master of Orion 2. It sounds promising but the lack of actual game development experience among the team is not a good sign.
Oh yeah, and the new XCOM is a good, but sadly not great, game.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, October 19 2012 01:23 PM (pYv3v)
Unfortunately, the new SimCity looks really good. I say unfortunately, because it's an EA title, and I harbour a deep disliking for EA for many, many reasons, Dragon Age 2 not the least of them. SimCity itself requires an internet connection on all the time to play, even though it's intrinsically a single-player game.
The game itself, however, looks like it's coming along nicely.
1
It's nice that you don't have to run pipes and wires any longer. That was always a pain, and didn't really add to the game.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, October 05 2012 03:56 AM (+rSRq)
2
I have mixed feelings about that - I want the simulation to be as detailed and realistic as possible - but on the whole I think it's a valid abstraction. Pipes and wires generally run alongside or under roads anyway. If it means that we can finally get curved roads, I'm for it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 05 2012 04:05 AM (PiXy!)
